5 Negative Beliefs that Will Kill Your Leadership

What do you believe about leadership? Your answers makes a difference every day that you lead your organization. Bill Taylor asked an interesting question in Where Have All the Business Heroes Gone?  . He asked if we would know a corporate hero if we saw one. Small business owners certainly have a relationship with power. Without self-awareness, this relationship with power will kill your leadership.

Five negative beliefs of leaders:

• I’m successful so I don’t need to continue learning. It’s easy to believe that you know it all if you’ve been in business for awhile and have achieved success. After all, you are getting reinforced for your behavior by your customers and experience.

Deadliness factor: The stage is set of stagnation and complacency. When you become complacent with your performance, you don’t see how the business landscape changes and or hear feedback from your customers. Social media has increased opportunities for businesses to interact with customers. Organizations are being encouraged to be more innovative and mashup ideas from other industries or ways of thinking. Your competitors are seeking to increase their market share. When you stop learning, you reduce your company”s ability to adapt and thrive.

• You have a job, you should be happy. This belief probably worked rather well in the Industrial Age or even the Great Depression. Work was treated differently. Society had different norms. The message here is that the worker is simply part of the Machine. 

Deadliness factor: Your employees want work that has purpose and meaning. Small businesses are well-suited to share a value-based mission . My accountant’s mission is to ease the pain of math and money for small business owners.  If someone can’t buy into you organizational mission, they aren’t going to go along and help you weather storms your busines is likely to experience.

• Managers are the ONLY ones who should have information. Leaders who are the only ones with information risk isolation, inadequate data, and encouraging others to hoard information as well.

Deadliness factor: Doling out information in bits and pieces becomes political and petty. Do you want your  people clutching information to their chests as if it’s the Ring in Lord of the Rings? It does make sense to use your judgement when sharing information. However, if you’re not sure how to share important and/or very negative information, get advice from a trusted peer or mentor. If you are in the US, try SCORE. If you are outside the US, look up small business services in your country. (For example, in Ireland, you can find advice at the Dublin City Enterprise  Board)

• Systems are more important than people. Keeping things in order (paperwork, job responsibilities, and procedures) are very important for smooth operations. Policies are written out for all to know expectations and consequences for noncompliance.

Deadliness factor: Systems are designed to serve you and your people. Simply emphasizing compliance to the systems creates the impression that you are rigid and merciless. This adversely affects morale and productivity. I worked for a human service agency that had very strict policies about completing documentation and billing. If anything, no matter how minor, wasn’t filled out properly, it was returned to the clinician and he/she wouldn’t be paid for his/her work. This created feelings of resentment, hardship, helplessness and being ill-used. Keep track of when policies actually interfere and/or create a heartless, robotic environment.

• Tyrants are the best bosses. I have to admit this one gets me on my soapbox pretty quick. I worked for a tyrant early in my career and the organization was extremely dysfunctional. While I agree with some of George Cloutier’s points, there are ways to let people know that you’re in charge without being  so heavy-handed.

Deadliness factor: A tyrannical boss sets the stage for high levels of conflict and politics. Set expectations so accountability is like breathing. Make goals public with a whiteboard or an e-bulletin board. As one small business owner described to me, allow your staff to have leeway to make “below the water” decisions but leave “above the water” decisions for you. You can be decisive and still allow for recommendations and information to be shared with you. You don’t have to walk around like a general saying, “I’m in charge here.”

Your beliefs about leadership are reflected in the culture and efficacy of your business. Develop an awareness of how you view leadership to prevent negative consequences for your company. None of us start out with the intention of building a dysfunctional organization. It starts with you and it is certainly in your hands to make your business a place everyone wants to work.

What negative beliefs do you observe in leaders?

How do you catch yourself when you forget to treat your position of authority with respect?