Have you ever had a lousy boss? Or worked for a company where the senior leadership seemed hopelessly out of touch?
There is nothing more discouraging.
In fact, not surprisingly, survey data consistently shows that the reason people quit their jobs usually has a great deal to do with their immediate manager. What’s more, those who don’t leave because of their immediate manager often move on because they believe that the company there are working for does not have a bright future. They don’t buy into the company vision, or – perhaps worse – perceive that such a vision does not exist.
The costs of this state of affairs are very high and they can be measured in two ways. Gallup indicates that are over 50% of American workers are looking to leave their jobs at any given point in time, which suggests a very high cost from those who have “checked out but not really left yet.” For those who do leave and have highly specialized knowledge, the cost of replacing them has been estimated as about 400% of their annual salary. Why Do Employees Really Quit Their Jobs? Inc Magazine, Sept. 21, 2017
In my career as a full-time manager, there were many times when a very talented employee who I didn’t want to lose resigned. Those were hard nights to sleep, since I was acutely aware of the challenges of truly replacing them, if I even could. But I noticed something fascinating; many of them called me back within a year or two and wanted to come back.
Over time, I developed the following hypothesis – completely based on anecdote and personal experience, rather than empirical data – “when someone really talented leaves, there is at least a 50% chance they will want to return someday. Because, there are an awful lot of lousy leaders out there.”
I’m pretty confident in this hypothesis, since it worked to my advantage many times. Even better, when these folks returned they often came back with a newfound appreciation for working at the place.
I started to wonder why there are so many lousy leaders out there.
I believe there are several reasons.
Lousy Leaders Have Out of Control Egos
Most of us need some level of confidence to get out of bed in the morning believing that we can contribute to the world.
While confidence is a very good thing, high ego is vastly overrated. Nothing is more destructive to building a team than a manager with a high ego. This is someone who needs to be the center of attention, who loves to bring the conversation back to themselves (“enough about you, let’s talk about me”), and who takes particular joy in the being the smartest person in the room. And, if everyone starts to adapt to their style and needs, so much the better.
Big ego sucks the oxygen out of the room and crowds out talent, especially the kind of talent which is highly skilled and thoughtful but introverted. Big ego gets in the way of creating an organization where the “best ideas win no matter who has them,” which in today’s dynamic economy is the kind of organization you want to create. Big ego effectively signals to the talented but lower-ego and less-experienced members of the team to go find another place to work that will be more receptive to their ideas.
Let me go out on a limb and say that in my experience out-of-control-ego is predominately an affliction of men, not women.
Ego leads to arrogance, and in a knowledge-intensive world it’s a small step from arrogance to ignorance.
The first step in avoiding being a lousy leader is to learn to manage your own ego.
Lousy Leaders “Focus on Results”, and Ignore “People Stuff”
Organizations and CEOs love to talk about results, and there is no doubt that both short-term and long-term results are crucially important.
But several problems start when leadership starts to adopt a “results at all costs” mentality. How many salespeople who love to break all the rules and drive everyone internally crazy can your organization tolerate? How many managers who too easily accept the fact that getting short-term results may require running over some people? How many micromanagers whose concept of “getting the job done” does not include building their team?
The answer, in all cases, is that your organization can tolerate less of this than you think. Which I know from painful personal experience.
Everything that you need to get done has a “task” part to it, and a “people-building” part to it. If you accomplish the task but ignore the people-building part, you may get short-term results but you won’t get long-term results. Your talent base will erode over time.
The second step in avoiding being a lousy leader is to pay attention to the people stuff.
Lousy Leaders Don’t Listen
If there is one rule of human communication that I’ve learned in organizations it is this – no one wants to hear what you have to say until you listen to what they have to say. This is true no matter how profound what you have to say turns out to be.
There is a fairly simple approach to learning how to listen deeply. It is to remain silent, listen to what is being said, and – rather than focusing on what you are going to say in response, first respond by summarizing what you just heard. As in, “So, George, here is what I hear you saying …”
This approach is simple but, for many leaders, hard.
This isn’t manipulative, it’s respectful. Adopting this practice not only requires you to learn to genuinely listen, but it also demonstrates to George that you have done so. Plus, it magically buys you time, as you are summarizing what George just said, to figure out how to respond intelligently.
The people working for you don’t always need your decisions to be aligned with what they are recommending; but, to accept your decisions and focus on executing them, they need to believe that they are heard. And they can smoke out insincerity in a nanosecond.
So, the only path is to learn how to genuinely listen.
Lousy Leaders Focus Too Narrowly
Functional silos – we are “just” finance or engineering or sales or HR- are one of the biggest challenges in any sizable organization. The challenge with functional silos is fundamentally that any complex problem worth solving cuts across functions. Which means that the functions inside the organization need to not only be narrowly competent, but also learn how to work together.
The problem often starts when the most “functionally competent” person gets promoted to be the boss. Sports does provide a clear way to think about this; the best player is rarely the best coach.
One of the best things about working in a smaller company early in your career is that it often forces you to work in more than one function, out the sheer necessity to get important things done quickly.
Organizations perform much better when they focus on competing in their external marketplaces, rather than “doing business” with another internal department. Cross-functional competence is a vastly underrated skill is most organizations.
The best leaders are interested in how the whole organization works, not just the function that they are managing right now. They avoid having too narrow of a focus.
Lousy Leaders Fly at Too High of an Elevation
How many times have you worked for someone who didn’t want to get involved in “all the messy details?” Details like how to complete the sale, how to deliver value to the customer, how to launch the new product into the market, and how to build a culture where people want to work. In other words, the details that determine the difference between failure and success.
The best leaders understand the crucial importance of being able to “zoom out” and “zoom in” at the same time. They concern themselves with anything that is an obstacle to success.
Lousy leaders avoid meetings where the details get worked out, in part because they don’t want to expose publicly what they do not understand.
The Path to Becoming a Good Leader
Since the 17thcentury, physicians have been taking an oath that asks them, “First, do no harm.” Perhaps leaders should take a similar oath. When leaders can avoid these pitfalls- and keep their egos under control, pay attention to people issues, listen authentically, focus on the whole business, and care about the details that matter- they can avoid being lousy leaders, which will differentiate them from most other bosses. And then they have a chance to be great leaders.
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