Most people are actually somewhere between being a good leader and a bad leader, with the majority uncertain of the connection between their leadership and performance.

A deeper knowledge of what great leadership is will then enable you to break-through and affect change in the performance of your team, like never before.

Leadership in a group applies to managing people, not to managing things. Leadership denotes the sending of value standard messages that most people then use to manage their team members.

Tangible support

Consists of training, tools, material, parts, discipline, direction, procedures, rules, technical advice, documentation, information, planning, etc.

Intangible support

Consists of feelings like confidence, morale, trust, respect, relatedness (or purpose), autonomy, ownership, engagement and empowerment.
Followers follow the leadership of the boss. This is a Natural Law. The only choice available to a boss is to set the standard team members will follow—be that good, bad, mediocre or somewhere on the spectrum. We want to be in the very good to great range!

Good Leadership

In order to have a well working team all members must treat each other with great respect and care. Everyone knows this. It follows then that good leadership requires treating each one with great respect and care — the better the respect and caring, the better the outcome.

What then characterizes good (or great!) leadership?

1.Listening to all members — addressing their complaints, suggestions and concerns.
2.Coaching people when necessary.
3.Allowing everyone to put in their two cents.
4.Trusting them to do the work.
5.Not giving orders or setting visions, goals and objectives, but instead soliciting this from them so that everyone is fully involved in the team’s success.

Providing direction when needed to ensure that everyone is on the same page (the one they devised). A good leader communicates the vision that was set by all. If it is a vision of little interest, then another one must be found.

Every person wants to be heard and respected. Everyone has something to contribute.

Listening and responding respectfully makes it worthwhile for team members to apply 100% of their brainpower on their work thus unleashing their full potential of creativity, innovation and productivity and making them highly motivated, committed and productive.

All of this gives them very high morale, enables them to take great pride in group activities.

What does that mean for bad leadership?

Bad Leadership

Bad leadership is characterized by attempting to control through orders, policies, rules, goals, targets, reports, visions, bureaucracy, and changes all designed to almost force members deliver what may be considered to be satisfactory .

In this mode, leaders at the top decided on their own what to do, when to do it, and how to do it and listen only perfunctorily, if they listen at all, to what other members in the team have to say.

What characterizes bad leadership?

1.Dishing out orders, policies, rules, goals, targets, reports, visions and changes.
2.Failing to listen or only perfunctorily listening to complaints and suggestions.
3.Exhibiting the “Do as I say, not as I do” mentality.
4.Providing inadequate support.
5.Withholding information.

Us versus them mentality—“Why aren’t they performing better?”— “What’s wrong with that person? Why don’t they know their job? They should know their job.”

These actions or in-actions are bad because they lead members to believe that their leader disrespects them and does not care a whit for them. Bad leadership shuts off the natural creativity within a group and slowly but surely de-motivates and demoralizes them.

With the “I know better than you” and the “be quiet and listen to me” mentality often projected, the majority will act like robots waiting for instructions, even if that is not what was intended.

This may result into the group breaking up.
Most bad leadership is the result of a top-down, command and control style of management, where the member is rarely if ever listened to.

This style is prevalent in the workplace and ignores every employee’s basic need to be heard and to be respected.

This is not the best style to handle people in a group because each individual joined with the purpose to benefit and not to be micro-managed.
The bottom-line is that all leaders lead in either a good direction or a bad direction with a full spectrum existing from exceptionally bad to exceptionally good.

And although this direction may not be understood or consciously chosen, quite fortunately, we are all human and we thus all have the power of choice.

We can consciously choose to adjust our actions to always lead in the good direction to raise our performance and success in managing people.

Categorised in: General

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