Ineffective leadership is easy to spot – or is it?
Everywhere you look, businesses are struggling to retain and engage employees. From COVID to remote work, people are quick to blame external factors – but what about leadership?
Ineffective leadership is far more common in business than we’d like to admit. Here are four red flags that your leadership may be contributing to these issues and more.
Team Member Expectations Are Unclear
We all want to know whether we’re meeting, exceeding, or falling short of expectations. People naturally crave feedback and want to know where they stand with their leader.
Telling someone that their expectations are “what it says on the job description” is not a good enough answer. Effective leaders give their teams clear, MEASURABLE expectations.
If an organization’s leaders can’t articulate expectations clearly for every member of their team, this is a sign that people are not on the same page. It’s a recipe for confusion, frustration, and sagging performance.
They Still Do Annual Reviews
Giving feedback and reviewing team performance is great – but that should be happening way more often than once a year!
Effective leaders are CONSTANTLY giving their team members feedback. Good team members want to know how they’re doing. This allows them to course correct, improve, and add more value.
They want to know what they’re doing well, AND where they can improve.
Lastly, giving criticism for something that occurred months ago is a surefire way to create resentment.
Very Few People Get Fired
Mishires happen. Performance issues happen.
If you NEVER fire anyone, that means you let people coast at your organization. It means you let toxic team members hang around past their welcome. That affects the rest of the team!
If you don’t have the guts to fire problem players or low-performers, you’re creating a lot of cascading problems at the organization and hurting your high-performers.
The longer you let a bad apple stay on the team, the more you’ll drive away true team players.
Different Leaders Have Wildly Different Views of Success
We all have different ideas of what success looks like. That’s just human nature. However, it does mean that as a leader, you have to communicate with other leaders and agree on a common vision together.
If you want to check how your organization scores here, ask three different managers what they think are the top three values that drive the organization.
Another good question is asking “how do you quantify success?”
If people give wildly different answers, that means they’re not aligned with what’s important to the organization.
Even worse, it means they’re probably not TALKING to each other about what success at the organization looks like!
Every Leader Can Learn and Grow
These red flags can occur at any level of the organization – all the way from the C-suite to ground-floor team leads. The reality is that if you want to drive amazing performance, all of these leaders need to be bringing their A game.
The good news is that none of these challenges are unsolvable. With the right leadership development, you can equip experienced and new leaders alike with the tools to unlock the best performance from their teams.
Click here to learn about how we empower leaders to drive incredible results with our leadership development experiences.