Leadership plays a key role in how an organization will shape up. The organizational goals flow down from the leadership team itself.
From stating clear directives to handholding their teams towards the achievement of the organizational goals towards ensuring optimal employee engagement, a lot depends on how the management team is geared up.
Leaders are bestowed with a kind of vision that is so very essential for the achievement of business goals and objectives.
While the conventional concept of leadership believes that leaders are born and cannot be made; the modern approach towards leadership is that people can be taught and facilitated to gain leadership skills.
Leadership considers numerous qualities and characteristics like optimism, confidence, ability to think critically and take difficult decisions, empathy, being ethical and honest and most of all, being accountable and taking ownership.
A true leader exercises a lot of influence on his team members, promotes positive employee engagement and they can inspire and motivate an entire group of subordinates and team members.
All organizations need strong and influential leaders:
- 84% of organizations feel that there is going to be a shortfall in leaders in another few years.
- 83% of organizations believe that leaders need to be developed at all levels.
- Only 18% of organizations have leaders who are extremely efficient at achieving the goals of the organization.
- And only 19% of organizations are effectively able to develop leaders.
Research further states that Leadership development is a core focus area for most corporate entities today, but 71% organizations still are of the opinion that they do not have effective leaders in-house to work towards the achievement of the organizational goals.
Since a lot depends on leaders where employee engagement is concerned, there are many instances where they fail because they commit some terrible mistakes.
Here are the most common leadership mistakes that new-age leaders must avoid at all costs for setting up of positive employee engagement.
1. Comparing team members with each other
This is a menace for employee engagement. While it is a natural tendency for human beings to compare one another, doing this, as a leader, and that too on a continuous basis is uncalled for.You are not encouraging healthy competition in your team by doing this – rather by indulging in this you are discouraging individuality and forcing people to copy one another.
In the process, they will lose their distinct personality and try to be someone that they are not.
Not to forget that such type of environment will breed contempt and unhealthy competition in the workplace and rather than encouraging people to work together, this attitude will force them to move away from one another.
In so doing, they will also try to bring each other down and take pleasure in failures rather than collaborating for success.
And while the environment will eventually become toxic and unhealthy, it will also ultimately lead to hurting the self-esteem of individuals.
2. Giving them the silent treatment
Indifference from the leadership can become unbearable for employees and it can become a source of negativity in the office environment.Many leaders take to using silence to show their power but do lots of harm to the concept of employee engagement in the process.
In fact, this indifference is a way to ostracize the team. In some cases, it can take the form of bullying when done on a consistent basis. Such kind of indirect harassment can lead to discouraging people to give their hundred percent to work.
3. Asking for opinions then completely disregarding it
This is a kind of autocratic behavior – where the team manager shows that he is involving everyone in decision-making and sharing of ideas but never pays heed to what is being said.The body language is enough to say it all – he has no intention of listening to what his team has to say or express. This is again detrimental for employee engagement.
Such people will completely disregard what his subordinates have to say – superseding what everyone else says to implement what he has to say. Such a team’s performance will never go beyond average, at any given time.
4. Not giving everyone a chance to speak
Again, autocratic behavior leads to this kind of attitude. A good leader will give equal opportunity to everyone to speak up.He will not have favorites and prejudices. He will have an open educated mind to listen to what others have to say about an issue.
He welcomes opinions and suggestions from everyone without any bias. Such a leader will encourage the development of positive employee engagement in the office environment.
But not many leaders understand this concept and in order to hide their own shortcomings or inadequacies behave just the opposite way.
Leaders need to know the art of generosity – be it in their actions or words - more than anything else.
5. Inconsistent Leadership Involvement
When the team is not too confident or sure of their leader, they are bound to be negatively affected by the behavior. The thing with an inconsistent leader is that you cannot trust him completely.He sometimes seems to be right there – involved and active as others and the next moment seems to be completely distracted and off-track. They have unexpected mannerisms and behavior.
Sometimes they are friendly and the other times the hard taskmaster. As a result, people might ignore most of what such leaders have to say.
Their directions will never be understood by their team members; there will be discontent in the team and most of the productive hours will be spent discussing and criticizing the leader.
There are ways and means for leaders to overcome their shortcomings. Today’s leaders have enough resources to depend upon to sharpen their skills and abilities to lead their teams to success.
