Teams don’t start out bad or ineffective. Because of the habits of leaders, they are taught to be ineffective or move on their own to become ineffective. Absent effective leadership, the team sets its own expectations and sometimes can perform down to meet them.
If your team doesn’t perform well, the result can be simple and devastating: Your customers may “vote with their feet” and walk away.
One of the ways to avoid derailing your team is knowing what habits you need to change or avoid. Here are some of the common ones I have seen.
“To be an effective leader and grow a successful business, you should be aware of those habits that may cause you to derail and de-motivate your team with damaging results for you, them, your customers—and ultimately your company as a whole.”
1. Failure to train properly.
You better make time for training if you expect to have an effective team. Like many managers, you might lack some time-management skills. You incorrectly believe that you only have time to show your employees what to do, how to do it and when to do it. But that’s not enough. You should also be training them on why they do a certain task, who they do it for and where it all fits into the company’s vision. When a team understands the what, the when, the how, along with the why, who they do it for and where it fits in, they have a higher probability of being an engaged team, which ultimately can be good for the company and its customers.
READ MORE: Ask Your Employees to Run Some of Your Meetings
2. Using reports to manage instead of taking action.
I had a former client who punished the entire team when things went wrong with just a few of members of the team. He immediately created new reports (forms) for all to use, to allow him to monitor more activity, as opposed to dealing with only those who caused the problem. In essence, he was fearful of having constructive performance conversations with employees. Rather, he used reports and forms as his shield to protect him from being an effective leader. So, in my opinion, he spent unnecessary time creating more (and unnecessary) forms and binders to put them in and multiple meetings to teach everyone how to complete the new forms. The result was good performers were being taken off the line, away from finding new business, working with their teams and spending time with their clients—to complete forms to show they were doing tasks that they were already doing right.
READ MORE: Earn Your Employees’ Trust by Showing That You Trust Them
3. Punishing one team member for the poor performance of another.
One of the worst team-derailing habits I have seen in a manager is something I describe as “performance punishment.” The concept is simple, but unfortunately, managers don’t realize its devastating effect on their team. Here’s how it often works: The manager wants to get something done, but the employee who would normally handle the task is a consistently poor performer who only does the minimum. Rather than deal with the performance issue, the manager assigns the task to a better performer. The better performer is punished for being a better performer. The poor performer avoids the task and gets to go home at his or her regular time. The better one works late to get the additional work done. The end result, I’ve seen, can be that the better performer eventually resigns, leaving the manager with nothing more than a mediocre team.
To be an effective leader and grow a successful business, you should be aware of those habits that may cause you to derail and de-motivate your team with damaging results for you, them, your customers—and ultimately your company as a whole.
Author: Chris Ruisi
Founder & CEO, The Coach’s Zone
