DANGER!
Poor leadership habits will crush your employee's productivity. Poor leadership can quickly lead to a disengaged, unproductive team.
Poor leadership wreaks havoc on employee productivity, leading to disengagement and reduced efficiency. The key is to ensure a unified team effort, addressing challenges collaboratively rather than creating internal conflicts.
In today’s competitive job market, retaining skilled employees is crucial. However, poor management and leadership negatively impact a company’s bottom line through disengagement and decreased productivity.
There are many poor leadership qualities that are detrimental to your team’s success, and that can lead to decreased productivity, but these are four of the worst behaviours:
1. Poor communication 2. Micromanagement 3. Lack of responsibility 4. Cultivating a hostile working environment.
Poor communication
Communication is one of the most important aspects of a manager’s job.
If you can’t communicate with your employees, you’ll never be able to adequately explain what is expected of them.
Poor communication doesn’t only mean struggling to hold conversations, it can also take the form of passive-aggressive communication, spreading negativity, or even something as simple as not listening to, or consulting with your team.
Micromanagement
Micromanagement is the practice of excessively controlling and scrutinizing your employees. This can occur in any profession and creates a toxic working environment. Part of being an effective leader is understanding that other people will not always complete tasks the same way that you do.
Micromanaging employees takes valuable time away from key aspects of your operations and responsibilities. Not only does micromanagement make it harder for you to accomplish other tasks, but it can also breed discontent among employees. Excessive control, criticism and an overbearing and distrustful manager can negatively impact job satisfaction, productivity, and the overall well-being of employees.
Lack of responsibility
There is nothing more admirable than a leader willing to accept responsibility.
If someone on your team had a problem and caused you to miss an important date for your superiors, you should be the one taking the blame. Always passing the blame to the next person creates an anxiety-filled environment and ultimately benefits no one.
Cultivating a hostile working environment
Although not often discussed, a significant percentage of workers would agree that their work environment is toxic.
Cultivating this kind of working environment can involve bullying, harassment, or other aggressive styles of authoritarian management. This management style will not motivate your workers to give their best.
Why are unhappy workers so ineffective?
Although each of these poor leadership qualities is completely different, they each share one important, detrimental quality…they create an…
“US vs. THEM” divide.
- Poor communication leads employees to feel like their opinions aren’t validated, that their voices aren’t heard, and as if no one cares about what they’re doing.
- Micromanagement causes workers to feel like their bosses think they can’t do anything properly. This can lead to employees developing a negative attitude towards company values.
- A management team that doesn’t take responsibility results in employees feeling targeted and often as if they haven’t been given an adequate opportunity to succeed.
- In a hostile working environment, no one can get anything done because they’re anxious about being reprimanded or too stressed about the interpersonal workplace atmosphere.
So although different, each of these habits creates space between management and workers. At the end of the day, workers want to feel valued, heard, and like they’re doing something that matters.
Turning poor leadership habits into strengths!
To be continued…
Click here for Part 2 – Turning poor leadership habits into strengths.