Tuesday, September 07, 2010
Things Leaders Need to Let Go
Benjamin Franklin said, “You can’t expect an empty bag to stand up straight.” Put another way, leaders cannot expect their team to grow, achieve goals, and improve organization performance without investing the time necessary to develop them into employees of character.
Before you can develop your staff, it’s critical that growth take place in your own life first. Development requires a humble attitude, and your long-term commitment to improvement. Let’s explore some habits and attitudes that need to be cleaned out in order to be a leader others follow.
Behaviors to Let Go
1. Bad Attitudes – The word “attitude” is frowned on in human resource circles. Why? It’s too vague. It does not clearly define a specific behavior. The following bad attitude behaviors are not a definitive list, but a starting point for your own thinking.
• PRIDE. Pride keeps you closed to new truths and unteachable. The opposite of pride is humility. Or, a focus on other people and their development rather than on you.
• BEING JUDGMENTAL. A judgmental attitude tears others down in order to build yourself up. Your goal is to understand, accept, and believe in your team.
• INSENSITIVITY. Hardened leaders can unknowingly hurt people and kill ideas and creativity. The opposite of insensitivity is compassion.
• DISHONESTY. If you deny reality or seek to gain something through being devious, the result is dishonesty. Integrity overcomes dishonesty.
• BEING CONFLICT-RIDDEN. Deliberately creating an “us-versus-them” atmosphere (workers vs. management, management vs. executives, etc). This can lead to an internal war. A great leader creates a high trust, high respect environment which fosters communication where team members can openly disagree with each other. The key is working the group toward effective solutions when disagreements surface.
2. Bad Ideas – There is a misconception that only success is of any value. The truth is that one of the most successful things you can learn is how to recover from failure. Failure is inevitable and how you accept failure and move beyond it creates team resiliency. Remember this:
• Everyone makes mistakes. You and your team will not be the exception.
• Don’t fear failure or over-compensate by creating a culture of blame.
• Small mistakes are great learning opportunities.
• Avoid a “zero defects” mentality when dealing with people. It leads to embarrassment when you fail, makes it difficult to admit failure (your pride kicks in), and leaves a mess to clean up afterwards.
• Seeking 100% perfection and ridiculously high expectations is a guaranteed means of lowering performance. Team members simply cannot keep up.
• Don’t get stuck in the past. Dwelling on past failures creates inertia. Use what you learned from those past failures to invent new and different solutions today.
The idea of “letting go” may appear as counter-intuitive. Yet, if you want to build trust with others, you need to have the ability to let go.
Until next time...Lead like you mean it!
Marjorie