Business LockerRoom Blog

The No. 1 Indicator of an Ineffective Leader

by Kelly Riggs

Few managers are exemplary leaders.

Proving this takes about 30 seconds (see the end of this post).***

Yes, I know management and leadership are slightly different. We don’t have to have that silly argument. If you are a manager, and people report to you, then you are a leader. Period. You might not be any good at it, but you’re still the “leader.”

Still confused? Look at any college textbook on management and you’ll find that leadership is one of the four key things that “managers” do. It’s intrinsic to management. Companies don’t have leaders that lead, and managers that manage. The managers ARE the leaders. Yes, of course, the CEO is mostly a leader, and, as such, is directly responsible for creating the company vision and inspiring the entire team. However, the average manager is expected to lead a team of people.

But my question is this: Why in the world do companies continue to promote top performers to management, fail to train them, and then COMPLAIN when they fail to perform as expected?

Do YOU think you’re the exception? Consider yourself a great manager? Here are some tell-tale signs that you may be living in a dream world:

• You have an “open door” policy, but employees don’t take advantage of it.
• Your employees consistently score poorly in annual reviews.
• Your team isn’t producing excellent results.
• If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.
• You’re consistently dealing with HR-related issues.
• You never have 1-on-1 meetings with your employees.
• Your team has an absenteeism problem.
• You’ve turned over more than 20% of your people in the past year.
• You have to yell at people to get anything done.
• You’re pretty sure your employees don’t much like you.
• People question your decisions and judgment fairly often.
• You hear yourself say, “It’s hard to find good people.”

All of these issues are so common, it’s a freaking cliché. In fact, you can walk into a company and identify every bad manager in the building in less than an hour.

But the worst – the very worst – offense for a leader is to be someone whose people don’t improve under their leadership. If you’re a leader, and your people don’t improve their skills and develop their potential as a result of working for you, then you have failed as a leader.

In fact, you may think that leadership is about getting results, but it’s not. It’s about getting results THROUGH YOUR PEOPLE. Finding managers who scream and holler and insult and berate their employees is ridiculously easy. They are EVERYWHERE. But finding a leader who trains, coaches, and improves employees is exceedingly rare.

So, the truth is that the most significant reflection of great leadership is people development. And the No. 1 indicator that you’re an ineffective leader is that you don’t develop people.

Heck, even the foundational definition of leadership pertains to the leader’s ability to influence his/her employees. That definition, provided by such luminaries as Maxwell, Blanchard, and Covey is this: “Leadership is influence”. How much influence are you having if your employees don’t develop and improve on your watch??

Why Your Focus Should Be People Development

A company, a department, or a team has to be consistently improving its performance in order to compete in the marketplace. Clearly, capitalism is oriented around free-market competition, and companies that don’t grow, develop, and improve typically get left behind.

Since, contrary to popular opinion, a manager actually CAN’T do it all by himself, he must necessarily rely on “other people” to accomplish the tasks at hand. If employees don’t develop their skills, if they don’t consistently develop and improve, the team will falter and ultimately fail. Or, the competition will go flying by on the wings of innovation and performance that your team never seems to possess.

The great manager, then, understand his/her primary role to be oriented about “people development.” Not managing results. Not solving problems. Not making decisions. Though these things are part of a manager’s responsibilities, people development is what separates the great manager from the pretenders.

You don’t need to look any further than the playing field or the classroom to get my point. Great coaches make their players better. Great teachers make their students better. And, I believe, great managers make their employees better.

From this perspective, it’s easy to look at the symptoms I listed above and see the root cause. Managers who don’t focus on their employees and their development inevitably see their teams under-perform. They miss deadlines, despite increasing overtime.

Unable to elicit the performance they require, those managers turn into jerks – they yell, they blame, they make their employees miserable, and so on. Employees start to miss more work. Turnover increases. And the workplace culture is definitely no fun.

It’s a nasty spiral that is created because we don’t place the proper emphasis on leadership development, particularly at the mid-management level.

Do this: Evaluate yourself as a “people developer.”

What kind of grade would you give yourself?

What kind of grade would your people give you?

———————-

*** About 2-of-3 employees are not engaged or actively disengaged, according to Gallup. And who is responsible for employee engagement? That’s right. Managers.

Managers with poor leadership skills create employee disengagement. Are there other factors? Sure. But, according to the research, when an employee quits a job, 70 percent of the time they quit because of their immediate manager or supervisor.

The other reasons? No career path. No challenge. No purpose. No direction.

Which, by the way, are all leadership issues.

So, connecting the dots, we could easily surmise that roughly 1-in-3 managers is a good leader.

That’s probably generous.

Time. 34 seconds.