Five Ways Leaders Lose Their Mojo

How Leaders Can Avoid Being Ineffective

If you look around mediocre leadership is everywhere. It’s quickly evident when you are out shopping or perhaps at your kids school. It’s also in the news, it’s seen in the community, it might even be at your own workplace.

Let’s face it, leadership is a tough job and many people struggle to excel at it.

Mediocre leaders can keep working at it and improve over time. Indeed all leaders can and should work at continually learning and developing. But that growth can get derailed when leaders make truly bad choices. Choices that can spell disaster for their effectiveness, and the organizations success.

How Do You Show?Up?

I had a management coach once who asked me a simple yet profound question, “how do you show up” at work each day. What she meant by that was can your team count on you to consistently make the tough decisions and act upon them knowing they may not be easy or popular with some people.

You see being a great boss isn’t only about making the right decisions and winning that new business or achieving a milestone. It’s also about taking vital actions to preserve organizational integrity and personal values that ineffective leaders fail to take.

And the times when leaders fail to act can be some of the most damaging and even fatal leadership mistakes you can make.

5 Fatal Leadership Mistakes to?Avoid

Since I can remember I have always had a fascination with leadership and great leaders. My work as a consultant has brought me into contact with leaders in many different industries.

One thing that I can say with certainty is that there is no one leadership style which is superior to others. But I have identified several crucial areas in which some leaders are lacking that can spell disaster.

Think of them as “offenses by omission” since they are not technically actions but rather inaction. I will share five of the most common of these with you here.

Each highlights an area where, as a leader, you must take decisive action to maintain the respect of your people. If you do not act you risk undermining what I call leadership “Mojo”.

Mojo is the respect of the people that work for and alongside you. Losing your leadership mojo means that others do not respect your authority or believe in your ability to do the job. This fundamentally undermines your ability to lead and in the majority of cases will eventually prove fatal to your success as a leader.

1. Failure to Address Unethical Behavior

This is first on the list because it is one of the most damaging mistakes you can make. When leaders fail to address unethical behavior, it deeply erodes trust and damages company culture. Ignoring it almost always leads to a toxic environment where such behavior becomes the norm.

Consider a leader becoming aware of a case of sexual harassment within their team. Failing to act?—?specifically, not investigating and terminating an offender?—?not only jeopardizes the safety and morale of the team but also implicitly condones the misconduct, potentially allowing a culture of harassment to take root within the team.

High-value leaders address this and other unethical acts immediately and definitively. There is no room for anything but a zero-tolerance stance to uphold the organization’s integrity and the well-being of its members.

Similarly, if a false claim of sexual misconduct were to be made, while uncommon, it must also be dealt with in a very decisive way to avoid it happening again.

There are a handful of workplace issues that fall into this bucket of unethical behavior. Issues like theft, bullying and some conflict of interest issues require rapid and sure-footed action.

You must take charge of the situation dealing with it swiftly and definitively. This is no time to shy away or let someone else drive the process. Gather the right people together and deal with it now…today. Letting another moment pass with an individual on your team acting in an unethical way once you know it is happening is a monumental leadership error.

2. Ignoring Diversity and Inclusion

A critical leadership oversight that I often observe is the failure to cultivate an organization composed of people from diverse backgrounds.

A particularly glaring example of this mistake is a leadership team comprised solely of individuals from the same racial, gender, educational, and socioeconomic backgrounds who also promote diversity and inclusion while not addressing it in their own ranks.

In the past have found myself pointing this out to executives at organizations who have very well intended, and visible diversity and inclusion initiatives. Yet those same leaders are shocked to hear me say that they will never be successful with inclusion and diversity because seven out of eight members of their own team are white males.

Uniformity on any team inevitably limits that team's ability to make well-reasoned and informed decisions. Why? Because if the members of that team all come with the same background they will end up with the same point of view. They will inevitably overlook solutions and ideas which a more diverse team would develop.

It’s not a criticism of the people on non-diverse teams. It’s an acknowledgment that every market is made up of many different people. Your team should represent your market at large. By not demonsrating the value that having people throughout the organization who hold different points of view, aka diversity, you are making a huge mistake.

Effective leaders fully embrace the inherent advantages of an inclusive work environment. This is based on the principle of truly valuing diversity as a winning strategy.

So before you start putting Diversity and Inclusion slogans on posters in the breakroom or giving it lip service take a look around to see if you have addressed in among company leaders first.

I am talking about really embracing a diverse workforce at every level of the organization and, making it an imperative in every organizational development decision.

Smart leaders engage in active efforts directed toward building teams that reflect a vast tapestry of backgrounds, knowledge, and experiences. These individuals understand the value of diversity transcends mere quotas.

Diversity and inclusion, when wholeheartedly embraced, significantly enriches an organizations intellectual capital, enhances the quality of decision-making and leads to greater success.

3. Not Providing Quality?Feedback

At the heart of effective leadership is the ability to motivate the growth and development on your team. The foundational concept I share with leaders is:

The role of a manager is to achieve results through others.

To achieve through others requires continually developing your team's professional skills. And essential to developing your people means actively engaging in providing them constructive feedback.

When a leader hesitates to provide feedback it can substantially limit the teams overall professional development.

Picture a leader who perpetually shies away from delivering critical appraisals of performance, opting instead for vague and poorly timed feedback that lacks personal relevance.

Doing so not only limits growth in individual development but can undermine the team’s overall dynamic and capacity to achieve success.

And it’s not just about addressing deficiencies. Effective leaders understand the importance of delivering positive reinforcement. They strive to establish a culture where positive feedback is consistently the norm and that all employee feedback characterized by its transparency, consistency, timeliness and specificity.

In today’s workplace, most people expect their direct supervisor to engage them in professional development. The way to accomplish this begins and ends through an ongoing dialog of what worked well and what could be better with every person on your team.

Giving frequent feedback leads to professional improvement which will result in more constructive behaviors and less negative ones. By cultivating this type of environment, leaders ensure that their teams not only continuously grow and develop but also increase their positive influence on the organization’s overall success.

4. Neglecting Employee Engagement

An all-too-common leadership shortfall is the failure to engage deeply with team members. Many leaders fear getting too personal with their employees. I used to be one of those managers.

But knowing your people personally is crucial to establishing a trusting relationship with them.

Leaders who sidestep this practice show a lack of emotional intelligence, and an inability to set aside their ego and focus on what motivates their team members personally and professionally.

Imagine a boss who interacts with their team only on a surface level, maintaining a safe but isolatingly professional distance. How does their staff begin to trust them. The consequences of such detachment are significant.

A leader’s lack of knowledge about what intrinsically motivates each team member can result in misaligned goals and a lack of enthusiasm for the mission.

Imagine giving the task of a company-wide presentation to an employee who has repeatedly told you that they have fears around public speaking. Doing so makes you look clueless about who this employee is at the very least. And in a worse case scenario it can appear cruel or vindictive.

The best leaders forge genuine, authentic connections with their team members. They invest time and effort to deeply understand the unique challenges and aspirations that drive them. They know the people closest to them and what challenges might exist on the home front.

By leveraging these insights, they align team members with roles and projects that ignite their passions and play to their strengths, thereby fostering a high-performance culture buoyed by authentic motivation, commitment and respect.

5. Neglecting Professional Development

It’s not uncommon to encounter leaders who have been selected for a leadership role because they have oustanding operational or technical skills.

Yet no thought has been given to developing their leadership abilities.

Often, these individuals are placed into management roles without being given the least bit of knowledge about how to lead a team. They do not foresee the critical transition from successful individual contriubutor in marketing or finance to the role of leading a marketing or accounting team.

They may have high degree of technical knowledge about their functional area but when it comes to leadership and knowing how to organize and motivate a team of people they are starting from zero.

This is an extremely common occurance and still many of these individuals succeed by sheer will. But there’s a better way. Organizations which give prospective leaders learning opportunities formal or informal set those individuals up for success.

More broadly speaking, leaders with a dedication to lifelong learning in the skills of leadership succeed more often and their results are better.

It’s readily apparent when I talk to bosses who do not regularly engage in professional development. When asked why they do something a certain way they give answers like “that’s how I’ve always done it” or “it’s been effective in the past”.

Here’s an important message to anyone who manages people;

Times change and so do people.

A new generation is always around the corner ready to enter the workforce. People who have grown up with different experiences to you, who learned different things at school, who have a different point of view and perhaps hold different values. New methods and strategies for business are developed.

The point is that nothing in the workplace is static. The market and the people who work in it are always changing. You need to keep up with those changes. To not do so will make you look foolish and out of touch. And that can be fatal to your ability to lead.

It doesn’t mean you need to abandon the skills and values that got you to this point in your career. It means you need to keep adding new knowledge and skills so you keep the leading edge in your industry and profession in sight.

All leaders need to engage in continual professional development. This means diving into the leadership literature, attending workshops and courses, and seeking guidance from mentors and coaches. When we fail to do so it quickly becomes apparent among those we lead and they will turn elsewhere to share their ideas. This can be a significant blow to your leadership mojo.

Leadership is not a static achievement but a perpetual journey of improvement. By committing to growing your leadership capabilities consistently, you‘ll find more satisfaction in your work and you’ll be better equipped to lead your team to greater success.

What’s the?Point?

Leadership isn’t just about sitting in an office and giving orders. And becoming a leader doesn’t have to result in a specific title, role, or position on an org chart.

Leadership is something you earn from being in the thick of things, facing adversity, overcoming challenges and succeeding over time. It’s how you show up day after day.

Leaders take action when it’s needed most. Sometimes it means making an unpopular choice that must be made. Or doing that thing that has to be done but which you dread. It’s always about connecting with your people and helping them succeed, leading with care and compassion. ?

Being a leader means getting involved in messy situations, making tough decisions, and standing up for what’s right. When leaders shrink from these situations and turn a blind eye, it hurts the team as much as saying or doing the wrong thing. And there are many times when inaction does far more damage.

The best leaders make a difference by facing problems head-on, staying true to their values, and consistently leading by example. This is how to be a leader of the highest caliber and build a professional reputation that others aspire to.