My Way or the Highway!

We started down this path by looking at some Essential Qualities of Leadership, then we looked at just how critical Leadership in Management really is, and we’ve worked through several Qualities of a Bad Leader - which I believe provide us with great insight on what NOT to do! Let’s look at one final example to close the loop and tie this all together...

While each of the qualities of a bad leader that we’ve looked at to this point can certainly drive a wedge between someone with positional authority and the team they’re responsible for, there’s one thing that I’ve seen serve as that final proverbial nail in the coffin: the my way or the highway approach to basically anything and everything that needs to be done…

One of the tasks I was involved with frequently while I still worked in manufacturing was developing something called “Standardized Work Sheets” for various processes in the facility. Regardless of the name, it’s a fairly common approach used in Lean Manufacturing initiatives. The idea is that there’s one BEST WAY to perform each task. But even then, nothing says that this is the ONLY way to perform the task or that the current best way will necessarily be the best way forever. If someone had a different idea, we would study it for how it impacted safety, quality, and efficiency. If at least one of those three showed improvement and the other two didn’t dip, there was a strong chance that this would become the new best way for performing that task.

With that in mind, have you ever reported to someone who just wasn’t open to the possibility that anything under the sun could be done in a way other than according to their mandate? Yeah, I know that’s a fairly stupid question… We all have! And I’m guessing that your blood pressure just spiked a bit as you pictured that person’s face.

So why in the world would someone take such a stance when it can be so counterproductive to leading a team?

In many cases, I believe it’s really an issue of insecurity. There’s often an unrealistic view that if a subordinate comes up with a better idea or becomes more effective in performing any given task, then their own value is in question. Sometimes the person with authority will absolutely refuse to provide their team members with everything they need in order to learn and grow out of concern that someone will develop a stronger skill set in a particular role. The challenge with that thinking is that the supervisor or manager who has that concern is rarely responsible for performing those tasks that they’re still holding onto.

In each of these situations, the way we think about the issue can make us an effective leader or break us as a leader! Developing team members who can complete a task even better than we ever could doesn’t call our own ability into question, it shows that we’re effective in training others! Being open to ideas that can improve our process isn’t acknowledging the old ways were bad, it shows that we’re focused on always getting better! And providing opportunities for the people around us to thrive doesn’t threaten our own turf, it opens the door for us to move onto even bigger and better things!

Cindy and I address nearly everything we’ve looked at here over the last several posts in significantly more detail through the six lessons of our Emerging Leader Development course. And each lesson challenges participants to detail the specific action steps they can apply immediately that will provide them and their organizations with a tangible return on investment. We even offer strategic leadership coaching as a way for those participants to get even better results and build their action steps into their organizational culture! If you or someone on your team would get value from digging even deeper into these Essential Leadership Qualities, building more Leadership in Management throughout your company, and avoiding these Qualities of a Bad Leader, we should catch up one on one to talk about what that can look like!