3 Common Mistakes New Leaders Should Avoid

This article was written by Luevenia (Vena) Sterling, Esq. , a leadership coach & consultant at LRI who specializes in partnering with women entrepreneurs and their teams to create corporate cultures that produce business results.

As a new leader, leading your team may be one of the hardest endeavors you will ever face. Although it can be hard to openly admit, many new leaders fear making mistakes and are often unprepared to deal with the challenges of leadership.

In my practice as a leadership coach and consultant, I specialize in supporting women entrepreneurs with making the difficult transition from solopreneur to creating high-performing teams that drive business results.

Whether you’re a brand new leader, a leader with a new team, or an entrepreneur building your dream team, a large part of your success and the growth of your company depends on your growth as a leader.?

Here’s my list of 3 common mistakes you should avoid as a new leader. Feel free to examine if you see yourself anywhere in this list, and comment below with any mistakes you would add to the list.

Mistake #1 - Lacking Self-Awareness

As a leader it’s critical that you develop self-awareness and recognize your context around leadership. With any given topic your context, or your way of thinking about something, is the key to unlocking what’s possible.?

What is your relationship to leadership? What bags are you bringing into your role as a leader? Do you love it or do you resist it? How do you manage conflict? Do you face it head on, or do you run and hide hoping it will disappear??

How easily are you triggered by colleagues and the people on your team? Taking it a level deeper, how do you relate to the members on your home team - your spouse and children? Believe it or not, the dynamics of your childhood (what I consider to be your original home team) can play a large part in your attitude towards leadership.?

Children on the playground become adults in the workplace and we bring a lot of the baggage we picked up along the way into our leadership roles. Growing up as the oldest sibling in my family, when something went wrong I was told that as the oldest I was responsible for the literal or figurative messes my sisters and I created.?

In addition, I considered myself to be tough as nails so dealing with all of their emotional breakdowns and human moments along the way was not my idea of a good time!

With this context firmly in place, early in my legal and corporate career I resisted taking on leadership roles, and when I did take them on I struggled with the desire to micromanage and control outcomes. That shifted when I realized how exhausting it was to be the lone wolf and I embarked upon an exciting journey of developing myself as a leader and supporting leaders along their leadership journey.?

When we are upset as leaders we may not realize that triggers are opportunities for us to unpack some of the baggage we inevitably bring into the workplace. When these moments arise, the key is to notice our judgments about ourselves and others so that we can unpack what we want to keep (the values we cherish) and what we want to discard (the limiting thoughts and beliefs that interfere with our ability to lead effectively)..?

Here are a few thoughts on how to enhance your self-awareness as a leader:

• Get Curious: When you find yourself being triggered, notice the judgments you may be having and replace them with curiosity. This will require you to relinquish the right to be right in that moment and approach your conversations from a place of curiosity. The goal is to approach sticky situations with the intention of finding out what is getting in the way of producing your desired results. Is there a value or ideal you treasure that is being triggered? Typically it is our context or habitual ways of thinking that have the biggest impact on our experience of leading a team. Do we view members of our team as a dynamic group with diverse talents, or do we view them as a thorn in our side, as a barrier to our success? Self-awareness is a journey that can be fast-tracked with a meditation or wellness practice, or some other method of cultivating curiosity.
• Commit to Wellness:- Burnout is real and it can creep up on you without noticing it. As a leader it is important that you maintain healthy boundaries and take time off, even if it’s being intentional about creating white space by not scheduling back-to-back meetings for you and your team. It’s hard to be self-aware when we’re running on fumes. If you’re always working with limited bandwidth it’s easy to overlook wellness, but by committing to wellness and sharing your challenges with your team you are modeling self-awareness and showing team members that you are committed to wellness. This can have a huge impact on everyone’s experience as you work together to produce results.

In addition to enhancing self-awareness, it’s also important to have a deeper sense of awareness about the members on your team. Mistake #2 helps us unpack how to get there.

Mistake #2 - Getting Straight to Business?

Getting straight to business can be tempting for so many of us, particularly with the numerous challenges and pressures we face today. The context or mindset behind getting straight to business often looks like, ‘I’m not here to make friends.’ While this is one approach, I often invite new leaders to ask themselves, ‘Who is this human being in front of me?’ ‘What do they value?’ ‘What makes them tick?’?

In today’s climate leaders have to be intentional about creating connection and gaining awareness about members of your team. The pandemic provided many opportunities to see the human side of colleagues that we didn’t have access to previously. We now know about our team members’ spouses, children, cats, dogs, and a variety of other things that are important to them. This is something we can embrace.?

Getting straight to business ignores the importance of human connection, and is a costly mistake many new and experienced leaders make. The impact of this mistake is magnified for? virtual team members who may be experiencing isolation due to the loss of informal casual interactions that occur more easily when people are in person.?

Here are a some ideas to help resist the urge to get straight to business:

• Create Check-Ins: Add the human element at the start of meetings by opening with a fun check-in that allows members to connect. If you’re meeting to discuss your new strategy to expand into Italy you might ask about a favorite Italian dish and any backstory about it. It could also be as simple as sharing an ideal getaway. Virtual teams can go into breakout rooms as a time efficient way to create engagement. When you return you could take a few shares from the group and create engagement by having others who resonate with what is being shared type comments into the meeting chat. Team members could volunteer to take turns running this segment of the meeting for an increased level of fun and engagement.
• Practice High-Fives: Reserve meeting time to highlight an organizational value. If you value gratitude or collaboration, you might add an opening segment for team members to publicly acknowledge a colleague who contributed to a project, went above and beyond, or somehow made a difference for them. Acknowledging a behavior encourages it. For promoting innovation you can create psychological safety by having members high-five themselves or members on their respective teams. They can share about an innovative project they tried out and make it safe to fail by disclosing that it didn’t go as planned. Get in the practice of leaving time for you and your team to celebrate innovation and integrate the lessons by looking at what worked, what didn’t work, and what they might do differently going forward to create the desired results.

Getting straight to business can give the impression that you see people as a means to an end and are focused solely on results. Don’t get caught making this mistake, or doing a 180-turn towards Mistake #3.

Mistake #3 - Being Too Nice

Concern about being overly focused on results can have new leaders swing to the other end of the pendulum and make the mistake of being too nice. Creating a dynamic and inclusive team environment must also be balanced with producing results. We are hard-wired to desire acceptance and belonging so feeling this way is natural. As a new leader wanting to be liked can negatively impact your ability to hold people accountable and produce results.??

Being too nice can look like not holding members of your team accountable for promised results and giving team members a pass because it feels easier for you to get it done. This behavior can create a toxic environment, particularly if you or members on your team end up frustrated and resentful about falling behind or giving up personal time to compensate for team members who consistently miss their timelines or agreements.

You might be afraid of losing people on your team if you push too hard by holding them accountable. It’s important to keep in mind that great teams are led by great leaders, not managers. My advice to new leaders is to manage promises, not people.?

As a new leader this can be challenging. Here are some guidelines for managing promises effectively:

• Think Win-Win-Win: A great place to start managing promises is to create an empowering win-win-win context. If you’ve taken on avoiding mistake #2, by not getting straight to business, then you’ll have a good sense of your team members’ values and skills which will allow you to articulate how the work is a win for them, the team, and the organization. This creates buy-in and eliminates any uneasiness new leaders may have about delegating that can result from feeling like you’re asking team members to ‘do you a favor’ or taking the transactional approach of simply delegating work with little to no context. In both instances, you end up leaving the team members out of the winning equation which can quickly lead to disengaged teams and high turnover.
• Make Clear Agreements: In addition to highlighting the win-win-win factor, managing promises gets easier when agreements with members of your team are co-created with clarity around the conditions of satisfaction, by when the work needs to be complete, and any impact for missing the deadline. In many cases we make vague requests and assume that everyone understands the standards that we expect. For example, ‘We need investor packets ASAP for the meeting on Monday,” might look like, ‘We need 10 copies of the packets, double-sided, on bond paper, stapled in the top left corner, and sitting in the conference room by 9am on Monday morning in advance of the investor meeting. Having them ready will help us secure additional funding and if we miss the target we may have to put the project on hold. Can your team handle this?’

You might be wondering if there are limits to holding your team accountable. How do you know when holding someone accountable for results is going too far?? To answer this question I invite you to look at all of the mistakes we’ve looked at in this article. Tend to your leadership context by invoking self-awareness, and get to know the human beings on your team. Think win-win-win and make clear agreements. Wash, rinse, repeat!

As you can see there are no easy answers and all of the mistakes correlate with each other to some extent. Being a leader is indeed a journey and you should not do it alone. Create community in a safe space and seek counsel from other leaders and advisors who are also on their journey.?

Along my personal path and my extensive experience working with leaders, I’ve come to love the wisdom found in the African Proverb that says: “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.”

What mistakes would you add to this list? What mistakes have you learned from as a leader? We welcome your feedback regarding these mistakes in the comments below, or directly at [email protected].

At the Leadership Research Institute, we are committed to transforming leaders to transform the world. If you are interested in learning more about leadership effectiveness, let us know how we can support you and your team.