What is one common leadership pitfall and how can a leader best overcome and improve?
To help you best anticipate and deal with pitfalls in your leadership style, we asked CEOs and business leaders this question for their best insights. From resisting micromanaging to developing effective communication with your teams, there are several ways to conduct yourself in order to avoid and even overcome the common leadership pitfalls that you may encounter in running your organization.
Here are 15 common leadership pitfalls these leaders have learned to overcome:
- Resist Micromanaging by Setting Clear Guidelines
- Learn to Adapt to New Technologies
- Continue Improving Yourself to Serve Better
- Address Conflicts Promptly Instead of Avoiding Them
- Be Thoughtful and Not Impulsive
- Communicate Corporate Goals and Progress to Your Teams
- Define and Implement Innovation
- Avoid Detaching From Operations Details of Your Organization
- Keep on Learning to Grow Along With the Business
- Develop a Proactive Instead of a Reactive Mindset
- Build Accountability Through Team Decision-Making
- Set Clear Boundaries to Avoid Getting Overly Friendly
- Learn to Delegate Authority and Responsibility
- Be Conscious of Imposter Syndrome
- Develop Effective Communication With Your Teams
Resist Micromanaging by Setting Clear Guidelines
Micromanaging is a major pitfall many leaders experience. It is based on a lack of trust and feelings of pressure. The easiest way to overcome micromanaging is to communicate expectations and consequences clearly. Set clear guidelines and due dates and then let your staff go. You can check in with them periodically to identify if they need anything from you. Otherwise, leave them alone to do their work.
Diane Helbig, Helbig Enterprises
Learn to Adapt to New Technologies
Leaders who fail to keep up with the latest trends and technology can easily fall behind their competition. One great way to overcome this is to keep an eye out for new products and services that may help your business, and be willing to experiment with them. For example, social media, innovative apps, and virtual reality have all drastically changed the way we connect and communicate with each other. Be willing to embrace these and similarly new tools, even if you don’t fully understand how they work, and you’ll be able to improve your business as a result.
Matthew Ramirez, Paraphrase Tool
Continue Improving Yourself to Serve Better
Leaders should never stop aspiring to grow, improve, or better serve their stakeholders. Sometimes, leaders and CEOs take the position of “having arrived” or succeeded at what they set out to do. Unfortunately, this perspective is ultimately self-serving and does not open up many growth opportunities. Some professionals aspire not to work for anyone else, for example, but let their professional development stop there. Leadership is an evolving, committed practice. With so many others reliant on your capacity to lead, manage, and inspire, it isn’t a job or role to take only to satisfy a narrowly focused benchmark.
Zach Goldstein, Public Rec
Address Conflicts Promptly Instead of Avoiding Them
Avoiding conflict is one of the most common but detrimental leadership pitfalls. As a leader, we often want to be well-liked by our employees and probably enjoy their company. When this is the case, or a leader lacks experience, it can be hard to have professional boundaries. Taking on the persona of a leader and talking to employees about tough subjects doesn’t come easily to most people, which leads to conflict avoidance. The danger is that things can quickly snowball out of control when things aren’t addressed promptly and efficiently. The best way to overcome this is to create boundaries, keep things professional and handle things as soon as they happen. That way, you can avoid any unnecessary drama or issues down the road.
Ann McFerran, Glamnetic
Be Thoughtful and Not Impulsive
Impulsiveness. A leader who reacts to every possible change by making impulsive decisions mid-project can confuse and even demoralize the team. A team follows its leader, so impulsive decision-making sets a chaotic tone. A good leader must be a decision-maker. Potential problems can come up in any project, so the team leader must be able to adjust and correct the problem when necessary while sticking with a thoughtful vision for the task at hand. Leadership must think their decisions through to foster the best in their team.
Stephen Skeel, 7 Wonders
Communicate Corporate Goals and Progress to Your Teams
A common leadership pitfall is failing to share the company vision and goals with employees. The more knowledgeable and clued in teams are to corporate goals, the better they understand how their daily tasks and KPIs relate to those desired results. Failing to communicate the bigger picture inevitably creates a disconnect in teams on the ground. To give employees a sense of ownership where they work, include them in the corporate agenda and memos detailing your business’s overarching vision and progress towards it. Leaders don’t accomplish their goals in a vacuum. Cohesive companies share information strategically to empower one another and stay on the same page.
Justin Soleimani, Tumble
Define and Implement Innovation
Failing to define and implement innovation is a major pitfall of leadership. When a leader does not understand innovation, or they micromanage it, employees’ creativity and output can be stifled. Moreover, innovation is different for every company, and it constantly changes, so leaders always need to stay on top of new advances in their industry. Overcoming failure to define innovation as a leader takes that knowledge, reflecting and looking deeply at one’s organization, and redefining it again and again for oneself.
Kevin Callahan, Flatline Van Co.
Avoid Detaching From Operations Details of Your Organization
One leadership pitfall of some leaders is that they don’t need details about company operations. These are people who have great staff and are used to delegating and trusting their staff to handle everything. That is a good thing except when the leader becomes completely unattached to daily operations. Then, problems can happen that can include the leader becoming disconnected from lower-level employees and their job-related issues, implementing plans upper-level leaders recommend without doing research and due diligence, and some employees thinking they can do illegal things without getting caught.
A leader should still keep specific tabs on operations, know the figures, and understand what is happening even though the daily work is delegated. It’s not a sign of mistrust. It’s just fulfilling responsibility.
Bruce Tasios, Tasios Orthodontics
Keep on Learning to Grow Along With the Business
One thing leaders can sometimes forget is that learning should never end. Whether it is learning soft skills, or skills more specific to their industry role or business, we can sometimes see leaders hit the pitfall of thinking they know everything, and not developing at the same time as the business and wider professional community.
Don’t get me wrong, leaders are highly skilled, and likely know what they are talking about a lot of the time, but it is still important to keep learning and keep up with trends and changes so that they can be the best leader they possibly can. Teams look to them for guidance and advice, so falling behind on knowledge can see the team also do the same. It is no secret that businesses are facing monumental change at the moment, and it is as or more important than ever that leaders know and understand these changes.
Brett Downes, Haro Helpers
Develop a Proactive Instead of a Reactive Mindset
The most common leadership pitfall I see is when managers and executives remain reactive instead of developing a proactive mindset. This is the kind of pitfall that typically affects new managers and leaders who are adjusting to the reality of giving directives instead of taking them. New leaders often don’t know what to do without input, so they spend most of their time reacting to team needs and putting out fires rather than learning to anticipate them and act in advance. The key to overcoming this is confidence, which is built through experience. No one is going to warn you before things go off the rails, so a good leader knows how to be proactive and plan two steps ahead.
Adam Bem, Victoria VR
Build Accountability Through Team Decision-Making
You know that when employees are involved in decision-making they have more ownership in the outcome and are more accountable for the results. To become more skillful and consistent in leading accountable team decision-making with all your work teams:
– Become more skilled at neutralizing how certain team members dominated the process with their own bias resulting in decisions that were off target or premature.
– Systemize a repeatable process that actually simplifies your efforts because decision roll-out isn’t resisted.
All too often groupthink or risky shifts dominate group process decision-making. Avoid these two group dynamic dysfunctions and your team will champion the decisions they co-create.
DIANNE CRAMPTON, TIGERS Success Series
Keep Implementing Effective Feedback Mechanisms
Any business needs to practice feedback. When used effectively, feedback encourages people and teams to develop and improve their work. Unfortunately, a lot of feedback mechanisms are faulty or out of date. Feedback can be used to increase trust, enforce responsibility, settle disputes, and more. However, feedback procedures can turn boring or ineffective. For some firms, formally providing and receiving feedback only once a year won’t cut it, nor will providing and receiving input so regularly that it turns into micromanagement. Feedback works best when it meets the following criteria: is direct, specific, and relevant; is timely; is objective and constructive; is adaptable; is in line with stated expectations; and, last but not least, is ongoing and regular. Building a leadership team might be difficult at times, but when you address these issues and create a team that is fundamentally sound, success occurs. Any team will be more capable of managing all of the challenges that arise.
Raviraj Hegde, Donorbox
Learn to Delegate Authority and Responsibility
One common leadership pitfall is failing to delegate authority and responsibility to others. This can lead to a leader becoming overloaded and overwhelmed, and ultimately not being able to effectively lead their team. To overcome this, leaders need to learn to delegate authority and responsibility to others. This will help to ensure that the leader is not overloaded and can focus on more important tasks. Additionally, it is important for leaders to provide clear instructions and expectations when delegating authority and responsibility. This will help to ensure that those who are delegated are able to effectively carry out their tasks.
Peter Beeda, fhalend
Be Conscious of Imposter Syndrome
The most common leadership pitfall is Imposter Syndrome. The vast majority of leaders will pangs of it from time to time. The important thing is to focus on your strengths, and create a network of people that can and will support you, and look after yourself. No one can be superhuman all the time. Remember to celebrate and share your successes. When in the depths of imposter syndrome, it’s wonderful to be able to go back and read the testimony, quotes, and reminders of those successes.
Charlie Southwell, Let’s Talk Talent
Develop Effective Communication With Your Teams
It’s a case of “every man for himself.” Similar to many other aspects of life and work, this is also true in the realm of communication. Having worked in the corporate world for some time, I know that different team members will have different communication styles, which can be a positive thing if managed well. You need to know your personal communication preferences in order to grasp the group dynamic. You can learn more about the communication styles of your teammates if you take the time to learn more about yourself.
Frederic Linfjärd, Planday