How to differentiate between a great leader and a ‘tagged’ leader?

Whenever we think of a leader, a general idea comes in our minds as someone who can inspire, motivate, guide and influence others towards a goal. In today’s competitive world, leaders’ responsibilities are much higher than ever before as they manage stakeholders/partners/LOBs, define strategies, create roadmaps/guidelines, make decision, understand team sentiments and achieve desired results, and above all, create positive and collaborative environment which helps organization to reach to next level. Many time leaders need to work in collaborative environment (see my blog) and manage conflicts professionally at workplace (see my blog).

However, sadly, there are many leaders who don’t posses significant qualities of a leader - as they are short-sighted, power hungry, disorganized and lack of meticulous knowledge – well, by definition, they are called ‘tagged leader’. 

There are some simple observations that can help you identify those ‘tagged leaders’. Some of their specific characteristics are described here. To be a ‘tagged’ leader, person need not to have ALL of these qualities necessarily, however, every quality in itself describes a ‘tagged’ leader:

• Message forwarder

These leaders just pass messages from their seniors to their subordinate teams without providing proper guidance as how to achieve the desired goals. Leadership in this type, knows what they want, but don’t know how to achieve it /or/ what resources and steps required to achieve it. Leaders possess the mindset that their work is done as soon as they forward the message to their subordinate(s) to execute certain task, and they truly believe that it is now their subordinate's team’s responsibility to accomplish these goals.
 

• Being indecisive

There are numerous examples when higher leadership has to step-in and make decision about certain situation, but even though they seem to understand the criticality of the matter - they will still not make any decision because they are afraid as what if this decision shall prove wrong in the future? What if it is not 100% fool-proof? In these situations, they might decide to not even take decisions and mostly, keep on adding more leaders in the decision making so to be able to spread the decision making and save them from so called wrong decision making.

They are clearly lacking domain knowledge, analytic ability, reasoning ability, ability to evaluate options and decide which option goes well with organizations overall strategy. This is the sign that they don’t believe in their own abilities and hence running away from situations where decision has to be made.

• Not prepared for unexpected

Leaders should expose great knowledge about organization’s strategic goals, how to achieve them and what could possibly go wrong while striving to achieve these defined targets. While leaders try their best to plan and execute things, practically speaking, when things don’t go the happy-path, they do not have options to rectify it (or rather having lack of options or not pro-actively thought through about unexpected).

Another example could be the meetings where leaders just walk-in without fully prepared for the meeting, agenda is not known, not prepared for questions and/or asking more time to come back with answers. You can clearly see that they ain’t even organized; their thoughts are not to-the-point or not aligned with the topic(s) being discussed etc.

• Not aligned with strategic goals

Most (if not all) organization’s main objectives are: Profitability, Growth, holistic performance, Talent retention, being agile so to be able to introduce more services/products quickly (being able to go to market faster) and leading the competition… to name a few.

Leaders do talk about being aligned with higher leadership thoughts, goals and targets but do they do things according to that? Do they have plans as how to go about it? Whether talent pool is happy and are they giving their best? What are the plans to work on new markets to connect more to existing customers/users? Any marketing/sales techniques they are working on (or planning to work on)? Are they making right decisions to enhance growth, customers respect, on-time delivery, being more efficient and stop re-inventing the same? Are they truly agile? Do they have plan A and plan B? And above all – What’s the roadmap to achieve that?

When doing is different than saying – you should know there is a problem.

If your leader doesn’t have answer to the above mentioned questions, it’s an alarming sign that he is not aligned with organizational goals.
 

• Traditional style of management

In today’s fast paced environment, leaders has to get abreast with new innovations, new technology, new tricks, new methodologies, and need to work with global teams and partners. They need to live ‘by-example’ and to do so, leaders has to truly evolve from their traditional style of working.

However, some leaders are very traditional in their mindset (probably without even knowing) as they think of ‘Push’ management style instead of ‘Pull’, they solve the problem but hardly think of pro-active steps to even stop the problem occurrence itself, they only think of short-term goals (even though they talk about long-term goals but still unknowingly only concentrate on short-term goals as it’s easy to show results and easy to plan).

They work on generated demands instead of pro-actively working on opportunities and expanding business growth, they believe in giving more time in the office instead of being smart and completing work quickly, they are autocratic instead of being permissive or consultative, they believe in management by walking about in the office, they want to handle talent by force instead of psychologically winning them … to name a few. 

• They are ego-inflated, disrespectful, conceited and biased

 ‘Good leadership is an exception – not the norm’. Being a leader is one thing and being a ‘good’ leader is another.

Many time leaders are so full of themselves, they posses disruptive behavior and their approach is selfish, they will do anything to keep them at that position or power, they try to make themselves feel more important, not being polite and think that they own their team members, they are the biggest roadblock for progressive work environment, agile culture and they are the ones who are not ready to change (even though they psychologically train themselves to believe otherwise).

These types of leaders have clearly lost the competitive edge and their mindset is not suitable for today’s fast-changing environment.