Poor Leadership Series: (6 of 6) 7 Deadly Sins

As I was brainstorming how to end the Poor Leadership Series, I read an article on Carly Fiornia. Carly Fiorina was the most powerful businesswoman in the United States at the turn of the millennium. In 1999, she was hired as the CEO of technology giant Hewlett-Packard (HP), becoming the first woman to head a DOW 30 company. She starred in company commercials and joined entertainment stars like Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Sheryl Crow to promote HP products at electronic shows. Her image was everywhere, as she covered business magazines.

Carly had humble beginnings. She entered AT&T as a low-level sales manager and drew the attention of top management. She took on challenging assignments and rose to become president of North American Sales. She was vital in AT&T’s spin-off at Lucent Technologies and was named to head of its sales and marketing group, increasing its stock value dramatically. 1998, she was named Fortune magazine’s most influential female American executive. HP would be insane not to get Carly to be the face of its company. The company offered a compensation package that included $65 million in stock options, a $3 million signing bonus, and a $1 million annual salary with a $3.75 million annual bonus. She also received more than $36,000 for mortgage assistance, a relocation allowance, and a contract that allowed her to use company planes for personal use and encouraged her to do so.

Yet, by the time Carly had become the face of HP, things had changed. Fiornia was a superstar. When she came to HP, she ignored the culture of the organization. She believed what got her to lead AT&T and Lucent would also work for HP. She did not listen to senior executives when it came to acquisitions. She purchased Compaq against their advice, which became a failure, causing HP to lose over $2 billion alone in its first quarter. She bragged about family and culture while laying off?30,000?employees during her tenure. By the time Fiornia left the company, over 100,000 employees were fired.

You could say that Fiornia’s downfall was the sins of leadership.

8. The Leadership Sin of Micromanagement.

With the sin of micromanagement, leaders are insistent upon things getting done their way due to a lack of trust or overconfidence.?

Many leaders read your resume before they hire you. They see your degree and certifications and read your experience and how they leveraged them. So much, in fact, that after you blew them away in the interview, they decided to hire you. Then something happens: They give you a “task” or assign you a big “project,” saying that they trust you, but the one thing they do not give you is the “authority” that comes with ensuring the project is successful. They need every task approved through them and are obsessed with constant updates. Additionally, they need to be copied on every email while only telling you that they believe in being “micro-informed.” Some will even hit you with the famous line, “It’s my name on this, and I need to ensure it is done?right.”

Think about it this way:?

• A?survey?conducted by Trinity Solutions found as many as 79% of people have experienced micromanagement.
• Of the people who reported working for a micromanager, 85% said it had decreased their morale, and 71% said micromanagement interfered with their job performance.
• In fact, the study also found that 36% of employees have changed jobs because of a micromanager, while 69% have considered changing jobs.

When leaders drastically limit their management styles to only controlling, they lose the ability to effectively communicate and manage altogether. Micromanagement also kills trust. Employees will not trust a leader who burdens them with a never-ending scrutiny of their performance. This lack of trust leads to lower productivity and high turnover rates.

7. The Leadership Sin of Jealousy.

“With the sin of envy, the leader is envious of what someone else enjoys. This may cause a leader to “attempt to destroy another’s reputation, or to feel better by lowering the status of another.”

I know what you are thinking: You are thinking that envy only takes place between someone who is higher ranking in the organization than another. Maybe so; however, bosses sometimes envy their employees in many cases.

I remember talking to a friend who worked in a Fortune 500 company. Their boss held a meeting and then informed all of the personnel in the room that he was excited about receiving their Project Management Professional (PMP) certification. All of the employees congratulated their boss on achieving one of their goals. The next day, the individual’s boss was on their LinkedIn page and called them into the office, asking them, “Why didn’t you tell me that you had your PMP certification and other certifications.” The individual stated that it had never come up in conversation. In the following meetings, the boss began to make small comments such as “If anyone has any question on project management, that is the subject matter expert. They have all the answers.”

Envy: The distress people feel when others get what they want is universal. In fact,?studies?have shown that more than a third of mid-level bosses experience downward envy. That is, the envy of their employees, especially if those employees show leadership potential, have a close relationship with senior executives, or have a strong friendship network within the company.

Envy damages relationships, disrupts teams, and undermines organizational performance. Most of all, it harms the one who feels it. When you’re obsessed with someone else’s success, your self-respect suffers, and you may neglect or even sabotage your performance and career.

6. The Leadership Sin of Sloth.

For the leader, the sin of sloth is associated with an unwillingness to act. More often, it is an unwillingness to do work the leader considers beneath the dignity of the office.

Sloths are synonymous with deadly sins in theology; sloths are infamous for their laziness and their inability to do any work quickly. Since they were first discovered, they have been sidelined as unimportant animals.

A 2020 study by?Mavenlink?showed that laziness is the top pet peeve in an organization concerning coworkers. Moreover, 45% of all respondents selected “poor management/leadership” as the top productivity killer. Additionally, respondents in the 18 to 24-year-old group (47%) selected “poor management” as the top productivity killer when compared to the 45 to 54-year-old group (46%).

So, what do lazy leaders do?

Dump rather than delegate.

It takes work and intentionality to effectively delegate responsibilities to another person. Training, care, and being continually available are all essential in effective delegation. Dumping responsibilities on someone else requires only laziness. T

Personality instead of preparation.

When prepared, leaders build trust with their team members and stakeholders. If a leader is unprepared, it can send the message that they aren’t invested in the team or the task. Being prepared shows that the leader is competent and capable and that they have the team’s best interests at heart. Trust is essential for any team to function effectively, and it can be challenging to build trust if the leader is not prepared.

No amount of personality will matter when a situation occurs, and the leader failed to plan because they were too busy making friends.

Offer excuses rather than results.

Lazy leaders may have new excuses, but they always have excuses. Someone else is always at fault for the lack of execution or follow-through.

The one thing you will never hear a lazy leader say is: It’s my fault.

Many times, they will act as if they did not know how the situation could have possibly happened, but they also cannot provide any details on how the situation happened in the first place. They cannot offer the steps taken on the project or task because they haven’t been involved in the first place. More than often, you will hear, “Let me go get...” because the person they will go get is the person they put in charge of it.

Keep this in mind, though: Who is holding the title?

5. The Leadership Sin of Bias.

This sin involves allowing your personal thoughts and emotions to cloud your judgment.

Humans?are programmed?to respond positively to people we perceive to be like us and react negatively (consciously or unconsciously) to people we perceive as too different to “fit in” to our social or professional groups. Nobel Prize-winning psychologist?Daniel Kahneman?found that most human decisions are not based on facts or logic. Instead, they are based on biases, beliefs, and intuition.

Acknowledge it and self-educate

To become aware of your unconscious biases, start by educating yourself.

Paying attention to your thoughts and examining your beliefs can help you identify your current assumptions. Ask yourself:

• Do you believe that people will always speak up when they disagree?
• Have you ever believed someone was guilty, and when the facts came back, they were innocent?
• Do you think showing your emotions, or crying at work is a sign of weakness?

The key is to slow down and investigate your beliefs and assumptions so that you can see the other person for who they indeed are. Here are some other questions you can reflect on:

• What?core?beliefs do I hold? How might these beliefs limit or enable me and my colleagues at work?
• How do I react to people from different backgrounds? Do I hold stereotypes or assumptions about a particular individual, group, or organization? Do I?acknowledge?and?leverage?differences in my team as a leader or manager?

When you pay attention to your answers, you’ll find patterns of thinking that will help you become aware of other biases that you may have.

Let people challenge your assumptions.

Our view of ourselves is made up of our life experiences and the lessons we learn along the way. We typically develop unconscious biases due to the things we were taught and the observations we made throughout childhood and adolescence — at home, at school, in conversations with friends, and through the media we consumed (and still do). When someone challenges these long-held beliefs and values, it can be uncomfortable.

Embrace diverse perspectives.?

Learning to embrace diverse perspectives may feel challenging, but making a conscious effort will help. Change – of any kind – is uncomfortable. The most important thing you can do as a leader is?prepare for that discomfort. Every phase of your leadership journey will require that you take time to introspect and emerge more self-aware. That is what will allow you to grow and flourish.

4. The Leadership Sin of Accountability.

With the sin of accountability, leaders?do not hold themselves and others accountable for their actions.

Balancing accountability with empathy

Some leaders view accountability and empathy as mutually exclusive. They fear that if they show empathy, sympathy, or compassion to people, they’ll be less effective in holding them accountable. Other leaders lean too far the other way, avoiding holding people accountable because they’re concerned about the personal relationship or how the team member will react.

Rewarding poor performers; failing to showcase high performers

There was a leadership?study?accountability spanning multiple years and involving over 40,000 participants across a wide variety of industries and organizations that showed the following:

• 80% of those surveyed say feedback is something that happens to them only when things go wrong or not at all.
• 84% of surveyed cite leaders’ behavior as the most critical factor influencing organizational accountability.
• 93% of those surveyed stated they were never highlighted for the results of their work.

You won’t get much else right if you don’t get accountability right. Accountability encompasses commitments to one another, how they measure and report the progress of the commitments, and how much ownership they take to get things done. Accountability is necessary because it is considered a game-changer in achieving an organization’s key results.

3. The Leadership Sin of Greed.

The sin of greed is a sin of excess. It frequently starts with power. Leaders have power, and unfortunately, having power has a tendency to lead to corruption if the leader isn’t careful.

United States Military Academy (West Point)

A?study?examined the career progression of over ten thousand U.S. Army Officer Military Academy graduates at West Point. They reviewed the officer’s motive to attend the academy and become a leader and their performance as leaders in the years following graduation, including an appraisal of their potential as leaders.

In the U.S. Army, annual performance appraisals identify early promotion potential for that officer to lead at higher levels. The study found that those with internal rationales performed better than those with purely external motives for their service.

The study discovered the following:

• External motives did not make leaders perform better, and the more the individual had additional motivations reduced the selection of the individual to top positions by 20%.
• External motivations, even atop strong internal motivations, were the poison of their selection.

As a leader, this study implies that?how well you lead?will be significantly driven by?why you lead. If you want to be a better leader, do not be distracted by the extrinsic motivations of better pay, title, or promotion. Instead, focus on the intrinsic drivers (such as service to others). Ironically, those leaders who perform better will, by implication, be more likely to be rewarded with pay raises and promotions.

2. The Leadership Sin of Ego

With the sin of ego, they let their sense of being the most intelligent person in the room stop them from taking on constructive feedback. They overestimate their abilities while underestimating the skills, efforts, and people required to achieve a goal.

Expecting Others to Do Things They’re Unwilling to Do

It is entirely acceptable for leaders to expect their workers to do things they can’t do. After all, no one can be an expert at everything. Making such a demand is like saying, “Doing this is beneath me, and so are you.” That type of request is demeaning. And it’s also a great way to exemplify a?lack?of leadership ability. So, if this is one of the qualities of a bad leader you struggle with, it should be rectified immediately.

Forgetting the Importance of Tone and Communication

A study shows that only 13% of U.S.?workers?strongly agree that their organization’s leadership communicates effectively.

It’s not always?what?you say that matters but?how?you say it.

Spotlight

Prideful leaders are incredibly reluctant to share the spotlight. After all, you’ve worked so hard and so long. Why share this moment with anyone? So, if you’re a proud leader, you want the stage as often as it’s available. You want to chair everything and are reluctant to let anyone lead or get credit.

But humble leaders willingly push others into the spotlight. Even when they know that senior leaders will be present. They want their people to be seen. A humble leader actually rejoices in the success of others. A proud leader?resents?the success of others.

1. The Leadership Sin of Pride.

The sin of pride is when leaders believe themselves so special that ordinary rules no longer apply. They fail to adapt due to being too rigid, knowing the world around them is constantly changing (societal and technological), causing employees to stop being innovative and impacting an organization.?

Believing That You Have Arrived

Some bosses only advance their ideas and obstruct those they don’t originate from. If it’s their idea, it has enormous potential, but if it’s someone else’s, they slash it to shreds.

These types of bosses are unreasonable in the way they disagree with or oppose what you suggest. They don’t want to delegate the act of thinking to anyone else on the team. If you dare to suggest an original thought, you’ll feel the tag “Troublemaker” being pinned to your back.

Pride is a severe issue in organizations:

• Only three in 10 U.S.?employees?strongly agree that their opinions seem to count at work.
• 86% of?employees?believe they are not fairly heard at work, affecting their performance predominantly. Also, 74% of employees claim to be more productive when they feel heard.
• Moreover, companies that perform well financially have 88% of?employees?who feel heard compared to 62% of employees who do not feel heard at financially underperforming companies.

Unwillingness to Change

I put this characteristic last because it’s the one that all others hinge on. If any of the above qualities of a lousy leader apply to you, the first thing standing in the way is unwillingness to change. Good leaders must be willing to acknowledge their faults to learn and grow from them. And honestly, the concept is pretty simple. No single leader has all the answers. And to become better, everyone has to embrace change.

"How To Prevent The Deadly Sins"

Becoming a leader for the first time is a highlight of our careers. It shows that we are not only an expert at what we do but also can lead. Sadly, for many, what should be a great moment can become a nightmare as we commit one or more of the seven deadly sins of leadership, which can undermine our credibility and cut short our leadership careers.

So how do we avoid them?

Don’t Need To Have All The Answers

Leadership is about helping our teams achieve the best results possible; it’s about identifying the best solution and then looking to organize our team most effectively to achieve the results. We need to get the best out of our teams, leverage their expertise, and get them to come up with the best possible options. It could be that we will ultimately decide on which option is best, but it’s not our job to come up with that option.

Too Hands On

As leaders, we need to let our teams do their job. It’s not our job to do the work for them. Leadership can be a challenging step, and it’s not always clear what we need to do, and it can be a comfort to step back down and do some of the work, or get too involved in how the work should be done.

We need to tell our teams what we want and leave it up to them to figure out how.?

Taking The Credit

Always put your employees in the spotlight. There is no need for you to take the credit. When your people are successful, then you are successful. Senior leaders in an organization are very aware of your contribution. If they see your team is successful, meeting deadlines, and eclipsing the requirements they provided, they know you are leading your team well.

Influence without Authority

Leadership is not about position; it’s about action and influence. We can’t demand that people do things because we are the boss. It might work for a short while, but it’s not a long-term solution and won’t build respect within the team. Remember, the minute you have to tell anyone your position or title, you and your title no longer mean anything to them.

Micro-Informing

Yes. No matter what you call it, it is still micromanagement. Micromanagement is the worst thing that new leaders can do. It’s not suitable for our teams, as no one likes to work with someone constantly looking over their shoulder and asking if we are finished yet, and it’s not suitable for the leader. It shows a lack of confidence in the team and our leadership ability. We need to give our teams the space to show us what they can do, and we can offer support when needed.

If we can avoid these seven deadly sins of leadership, our teams will appreciate it; it will help to increase their engagement and help us to get the best results from our teams.

Leading By Example

If you are a leader and want to inculcate a particular pattern of behavior in your colleagues/team, you should show a self example. Expecting or demanding a particular behavior that does not match yours is a constant losing strategy, but for a long distance - definitely always. In this case, the effect may be the opposite of what you planned. If your team sees the high quality of your work and your fidelity to the business, then each member will consciously or unconsciously aspire to be like you.?