Leadership Basics
Listen More, Talk Less
Here’s the thing, leadership is not rocket-science once you are sure what you are aiming for.
Are you making widgets on an assembly line?
Are you brainstorming innovation?
Are you ensuring ridged compliance in safety or audit situations?
Each of these situations requires a bit of a different touch with leaders. When there is no wiggle room for how a job gets done, an authoritarian approach may be your best choice. When creation is key, a transformational leader may be required. If you are leading a multitude of teams a delegation approach may succeed.
The thread that is common throughout all leadership, no matter the leadership school of thought, is the relationship between leaders and their teams. I have seen some posts on SM and with no verification if they are true, I have opinions. The most upsetting ones discuss time off. Losing a family member and being denied bereavement, getting married and having your honeymoon cancelled or bosses changing and vacation approval being rolled back because the new boss hasn’t approved it. If in any of these situations you think that there is validity in the denial, you are not fit for leadership.
Now I am not talking about someone who’s aunt has died 7 times in the last six months. We have all met those people and that is not in this discussion. And before anyone says Gen Z, this has been a problem since the beginning of time, there is no relation to one generation. (HAHA you see what I did there…never mind.)
I’m talking about good employees that have excelled in your organization leaving because a new boss denied preapproved vacation. The cost of this irrational decision is thousands of dollars in rehire, retrain and recertification costs. I guarantee that it cost more than the temporary pain of some days off. But the biggest cost is the trust in your team to your leader.
Decisions like this destroy the trust that a team places in a leader. The whispers will go on for years after the last decision. It makes good employees look for other jobs, even if they were unaffected by the decision. They no longer have faith in the whole organization. It means that your organization will be left with only employees who can’t get other jobs or employees that decide to just keep their head down and pass time.
It does not leave your organization stronger, more profitable or in a better market position. It leaves your organization as a training ground for new staff that will leave as soon as possible. It leaves your organizations wasting money on training and makes it very easy for competitors to pick up trained staff and disgruntled customers.
Top leaders should be very worried about middle managers that are setting a course of the company by allowing sub par leaders to make decisions that do not make sense.
Supporting leaders while they are learning does not mean backing them regardless of behaviour, it means teaching them how to be better leaders and stopping mistakes before they happen.
Mentor the leaders that your company needs, not just the leader that fits in the seat.
