THE 7 DEADLY SINS OF LEADERSHIP

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1 THE 7 DEADLY SINS OF LEADERSHIP All Too Common Mistakes That You Must Avoid SuccessfulLeadershipSkills.com 302 N. El Camino Real, Suite 102 San Clemente, CA info@successfulleadershipskills.com

2 The 7 Deadly Sins of Leadership Table of Contents 1. Put yourself first your people and the organization someplace lower or non-existent. 2. Be tough with people in public, but a pussycat in private. 3. Treat your people like they are dumb lie, change stories and other misdirections. 4. Keep your Sacred Cows Cows are comfy and will be nice to you maybe. 5. Throw your people under the bus make sure senior management knows that any problems are because of them not because of you, processes, or hurdles. 6. Constantly change strategies and organization charts. 7. Use rumor and innuendo for decision making ignore facts and logic. i

3 The First Deadly Sin: Put Yourself First.Your People and The Organization Lower or Non-existent It happens all too often that leaders abuse their position. They see it as a license to take care of their needs and success before anyone else s. These leaders also put their own success above the organization s. What do they do that you must avoid doing? What do you want to do? They give themselves all of the most exciting and visible assignments. You want to motivate your people with great opportunities and visibility. They spend no time creating opportunities for their people to grow. You want one of your top priorities to be looking for ways to give your people opportunities to stretch. They rarely make a sacrifice to help a colleague if it does not directly benefit them. You want to act like a General Manager who is responsible for the success of the entire organization. You want to help wherever it will value the organization. They badmouth other s business decisions and undermine people s enthusiasm for the work that needs to be done. You want to support decisions by explaining the logic behind them (even if you personally disagree!) and show people what they can do to make the decision a success. 2

4 The Second Deadly Sin: Be Tough With People in Public, But a Pussycat in Private We can t tell you how many times we have seen this: in a team meeting the leader harshly corrects a subordinate. Maybe the person needed the correction, but they are embarrassed and everyone else is uncomfortable and secretly relieved that it wasn t their turn in the barrel. But, after the meeting the subordinate goes into the boss office to talk about what happened and the boss lets them off the hook. They say things like, it really isn t that bad I didn t mean it I guess you are really doing OK. In short they show bluster and over do it when they are not one-on-one with the person they want to correct. But, when they do get face to face they are not brave enough to look the person in the eye and tell them that they have to change, improve, work harder, etc. What you want to do is to be honest, but supportive with your people when other people are present. As a leader your words carry a lot of impact. Be responsible with them. You want to save your toughest criticisms for one-on-one conversations. That is the surefire way to assure that your people have the chance of taking your direction to heart and changing. 3

5 The Third Deadly Sin: Treat Your People Like They are Dumb Lie, Change Stories and Other Misdirections We wish we have not seen this about 5 thousand times, but we won t lie to you, we have. Probably more than that! What these leaders do is in an attempt to avoid dealing with the truth, which is often not pretty; they spin whatever story is easy to pass off at the time. We remember a big merger we were working on. We had led a bunch of focus groups with employees to find out what they were concerned about. Overwhelmingly they told us that they thought senior management was lying to them by telling them there would be no layoffs. It was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that layoffs were necessary. It was all over the business press. If you could read, you knew. We reported this back to the executive team. We ll never forget what happened next. The room was silent. The COO looked around and said; Well expletive! Of course we re lying to them, if we told them the truth they ll give us a hard time. Nobody challenged him. Suffice it to say that the senior team had no credibility and many good employees left in disgust and frustration. The merger failed and both companies eventually went out of business. What you want to do is respect your people s intelligence. Tell the truth even if it s hard. They will respect you for it. 4

6 The Fourth Deadly Sin: Keep Your Sacred Cows Cows are Comfy and Will Be Nice to You Maybe! You know who they are. Everyone knows who they are. But these leaders let them wreak havoc on the team. Sacred Cows say what they want. They do (or don t do!) what they want. And the leader never says a word. This turn a blind eye behavior causes immeasurable damage. In our experience it is common for the good people to say that the only reward around here for being good is that they load more work on you, while so and so (the Sacred Cow) gets away with doing almost nothing. If you do not hold everyone equally accountable, eventually the performance and behavior of the whole team drops to the lowest common denominator. It may seem like the Sacred Cow is being nice to you and is easy to have around, but it is not true. They are the silent killer to high performance. They are hurting you and everyone else around them. What you want to do is talk to them in private about what must change. Hold them equally accountable to the standards you hold everyone else to. Remember that everyone knows that you are not dealing with the Sacred Cow. It is not a secret! Your credibility depends on addressing these situations. 5

7 The Fifth Deadly Sin: Throw Your People Under the Bus Wow, its incredible that some leaders do this but, painfully, they do. When a mistake happens, a deadline is missed, a performance target is undershot, these leaders grasp at the easiest scapegoat their people. So and so did not do what I asked them to They never listen So and so is so disorganized. You ve heard them all. And they are disastrous for a leader s effectiveness. Things are going to go wrong. Business is hard; we all know that. What you want to do when things go wrong, as they inevitably will, is to take personal accountability. As the leader you must take responsibility for everything that goes wrong with your team. Step up and say, I am accountable for that and this is what I am going to do to fix it. This is where the biggest of the big leaders make their bones. They embrace problems and fix them. Business is nothing if not a series of problems to solve. So you want to look at mistakes as an opportunity for greatness! Take personal accountability for the problem and fix it! And then share the praise with your team every time! 6

8 The Sixth Deadly Sin: Constantly Change Strategies and Organization Charts Lots of ineffective leaders change strategies and organizational structures so often that their people s heads spin. Why do leaders to this? Well, if they do it frequently enough they ll never have to be accountable for actually accomplishing anything from the last plan they devised. Here is one of our favorites : Its time to centralize to save money and harvest synergies.. unless you did that last time. Then its time to decentralize to get the resources where the work is and to get closer to the customer. Have you ever experienced that? Odds are you have a lot! We are not saying that the leaders that do this are all trying to avoid accountability although some certainly are. In many cases they do it because they are grasping for the Next Great Idea. They have not done enough good solid planning to know what to do. We dealt with a leader that managed by the American Airlines Magazine idea of the month. He traveled a lot. He read the in-flight magazine and came back from every trip with the next big idea. The organization was whipsawed and never made any real progress. What you want to do is spend quality time with your team to collaborate on a solid plan and organizational structure to execute it. Then stay the course. Sure, you can make course corrections, but give that plan time to work. Stand behind it; take accountability for it. Drive it to success! 7

9 The Seventh Deadly Sin: Use Rumor and Innuendo For Decision Making...Ignore Facts and Logic As a leader you make hundreds of decisions every day. They are your stock in trade. Their quality dictates the level of your success. Considering this, doesn t it make sense to base every decision of real facts and solid logic? It sure does. But Way too many leaders do not do it that way. It is way too common for leaders to make decisions based on the last conversation they had with a colleague. But, then when they have their next conversation and that person s point of view differs from the last point of view they change direction. Is there any real chance that either of those decisions was a good one? We don t think so, either. Another mistake these leaders make is drawing conclusions about people in the organization based on rumors or innuendos they hear about them. This trait is death for a leader. It is always wrong and misleading. What you want to do is draw on facts and logic for every decision. All the time. Do not be swayed by emotion or one person s story or opinion. And never form an opinion about someone based on someone else s opinion. You want to fully engage with your organization. Talk to people with diverse points of view. In particular, seek out people with perspectives that are radically different from your own. This is the way to get as close to the real truth as you possibly can. This approach to decision making will guide you to success every time. 8