Travis Bradberry* lists some mistakes leaders make that over time can sabotage both themselves and the organisations they work for.
Time and again we’ve watched in horror as leaders who lack integrity have destroyed businesses.
The real tragedy happens when regular leaders, who are otherwise great, sabotage themselves, day-after-day, with mistakes that they can’t see but are obvious to everyone else.
In most cases, it’s slight and often unintentional gaps in integrity that hold leaders, their employees, and their organisations back.
Despite their potential, these leaders harm their employees and themselves.
Fred Kiel did the difficult job of quantifying the value of a leader’s integrity for his book, Return On Character, and his findings are fascinating.
Over a seven-year period, Dr Kiel collected data on 84 Chief Executive and compared employee ratings of their behaviour to the performance of the organisations they led.
He found that high-integrity led organisations had employee engagement 26 per cent higher than others.
Dr Kiel describes high-integrity Chief Executives this way:
“They were often humble. They appeared to have very little concern for their career success or their compensation.
“The funny point about that is they all did better than the self-focused Chief Executives with regard to compensation and career success. It’s sort of ironic.”
His data is clear: Organisations perform better under the guidance of high-integrity leadership.
There are integrity traps that have a tendency to catch well-meaning leaders off guard.
By studying these traps, we can all sharpen the saw and keep our leadership integrity at its highest possible level.
Fostering a cult of personality
It’s easy for leaders to get caught up in their own worlds as there are many systems in place that make it all about them.
These leaders identify so strongly with their leadership roles they start thinking: “It’s my world, and we’ll do things my way.”
High-integrity leaders not only welcome questioning and criticism, they insist on it.
Dodging accountability
Politicians are notorious for refusing to be accountable for their mistakes, and business leaders do it too.
Even if only a few people see a leader’s misstep (instead of millions), dodging accountability can be incredibly damaging.
A person who refuses to say “the buck stops here” really isn’t a leader at all.
The very best leaders take the blame but share the credit.
Lacking self-awareness
Many leaders think they have enough emotional intelligence, but when it comes to understanding themselves, they are blind.
It’s not that they’re hypocrites; they just don’t see what everyone else sees.
They might play favourites, be tough to work with, or receive criticism badly.
Forgetting communication is a two-way street
Many leaders think they’re great communicators, not realising that they’re only communicating in one direction.
Some pride themselves on being approachable and easily accessible, yet they don’t really hear the ideas that people share with them.
Some leaders never offer feedback, leaving people wondering if they’re more likely to get promoted or fired.
Succumbing to the tyranny of the urgent
This is what happens when leaders spend their days putting out small fires.
They take care of what’s dancing around in front of their faces and lose focus of what’s truly important — their people.
Your integrity as a leader hinges upon your ability to avoid distractions that prevent you from putting your people first.
Micro-managing
You see this mistake most often with people who have recently worked their way up through the ranks.
They still haven’t made the mental shift from doer to leader.
Without something tangible to point to at the end of the day, they feel unproductive, not realising that productivity means something different for a leader.
As a result, they micro-manage to the point of madness and fall off schedule.
An important part of a leader’s integrity rests in giving people the freedom to do their jobs.
The bad news is that these mistakes are as common as they are damaging.
The good news is that they’re really easy to fix, once you are aware of them.
How else do leaders compromise their integrity?
*Travis Bradberry is the award-winning co-author of the bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and the co-founder of TalentSmart. He can be contacted at talentsmart.com.
This article first appeared at talentsmart.com
