Good and Bad Leadership traits

Driven by experiences in different establishments especially, and most recently, in the pre-university educational field, I finally got around to addressing the issue of inadequate leadership in the workplace.

Put simply, a leader's job is to guide his employees through everyday tasks to reach, what usually is, a short term goal while developing them towards synergy, self reliance and creativity till his leading role rendered obsolete and unnecessary. That's when leaders move on to putting together and leading another team while old team members gain enough experience to become leaders in turn and so on.

Good and bad employees will always trust a good leader because they know that his sound decisions will benefit everyone in the end; however, bad leaders are untrustworthy, whether due to their inability to inspire or an inability to choose the correct path for the organization.

The most obvious and trusted way to measure leadership effectiveness is achievement of preset short medium and long range goals, and the work environment.

How does an employee experience leadership? They experience it through the support provided by management and the quality of this support dictates the quality of the employee's work. The support an employee gets comes in two intertwined forms that we may call: tangible and intangible.

Tangible support usually consists of training, tools, material, parts, discipline, direction, procedures, rules, technical advice, documentation, information and planning.
Intangible support is usually practiced and reflected in: confidence, morale, trust, respect, relatedness (or purpose), autonomy, ownership, engagement and empowerment.

Now we can get more specific in defining good and bad leadership in the workplace.

Good Leadership

Everyone knows that in order to produce the best products and services in the marketplace, all employees must treat their work and their customers with great respect and care. Good leadership requires treating employees (or internal customers) with great respect and care. The better the respect and caring, the better the outcome.

Treat employees as if they are very important and valuable and you will cause them to treat their work, customers, peers and management this way. They will follow your lead.

What then characterizes good (or great!) leadership?

• Listening to your employees including subordinate managers/supervisors and addressing their complaints, suggestions, concerns, and personal issues in the workplace
• Coaching people when necessary to raise them to a higher standard
• Allowing all employees to put in their two cents
• Actually trusting them to do the work their way
• Not giving orders or setting visions, goals and objectives, but instead soliciting this from employees so that everyone is fully involved in how the organization will be successful
• 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 employees 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 their work and then they will literally love to come to work. Good leadership multiplies whatever creativity, innovation and productivity top management has by whatever number of employees they have.

So, what bad leadership?

Bad Leadership

Bad leadership is characterized by attempting to control employees through orders, policies, rules, goals, targets, reports, visions, bureaucracy, and changes all designed to almost force employees to work and to create and deliver what management considers to be satisfactory products and services. In this mode, management on its own decides what to do, when to do it, and how to do it and listens only nonchalantly, if they listen at all, to what employees have to say.

What characterizes bad leadership?

• Dishing out orders, policies, rules, goals, targets, reports, visions and changes to force employees to work the way management believes it should be done.
• Failing to listen or only perfunctorily listening to complaints and suggestions.
• Trying to motivate employees.
• Exhibiting the “Do as I say, not as I do” mentality
• Providing inadequate support
• Withholding information
• Treating employees as if they don’t want to do a better job, don’t care about their work, don’t want to accept responsibility, or don’t really want to work.
• Treating them as if they are lucky to have the job
• Being afraid to discipline and never disciplining anyone
• Staying in your office or in meetings at your level or above
• 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 lead employees to believe that management disrespects them and does not care a whit for them. It also puts employees in the state of having to guess what management wants and management must be right about everything because no one else is allowed to make decisions. Bad leadership shuts off the natural creativity, innovation, and productivity of each employee and slowly but surely demotivates and demoralizes them. With the “I know better than you” and the “be quiet and listen to me” mentality often projected from management, the majority will act like robots waiting for instructions, even if that is not what management intended.