Good Leadership vs. Bad Leadership

Leadership applies to people, not things, and denotes the sending of value standard messages that most people then use to conduct their work. This is how industriously, cooperatively, openly, respectfully, caringly, honestly, neatly, cleanly, and the like to perform their work. Thus we say that employees have been led in the direction of those standards. Now, if value standards were a coin, one side would be stamped leadership and the other side would be stamped followership.

An employee experiences leadership through the support provided by management. The quality of this support dictates the quality of their work. The support they use comes in two forms; tangible and intangible. Tangible support consists of training, tools, material, parts, discipline, direction, procedures, rules, technical advice, documentation, information, planning, etc. Intangible support consists of feelings like confidence, morale, trust, respect, relatedness, autonomy, ownership, engagement and empowerment.

Leadership happens inexorably every minute of every day because the vast majority of people are followers, some more, some less. Followers follow the leadership of the boss. This is a Natural Law. The only choice available to a boss is to set the standard employees will follow—will they be good, bad, mediocre or somewhere in between?

Good Leadership

In order to produce the finest products and services, all employees must treat their work and their customers with great respect, with tender love and care as they say. It follows then that good leadership requires treating employees with great respect and tender love and care; the better the respect and caring, the better the outcome. Because of the Natural Law, treating employees as if they are very important and valuable causes them to feel and become this way. What then characterizes good leadership?

• Listening to your employees including subordinate managers/bosses — addressing their complaints, suggestions, concerns, personal issues.
• Coaching people when necessary to raise them to a higher standard.
• Allowing everyone to put in their two cents — you treat everyone with respect.
• Trusting them to do the work.
• Not giving orders or setting visions, goals and objectives, but instead soliciting this from them so that everyone is fully involved in how the company will be successful.
• Providing direction when needed to ensure that everyone is on the same page (the one they devised). A good leader communicates the vision that was set by all. If it is a vision of little interest, then another one must be found.

Treating employees with great respect leads them to treat their work, their customers, each other and their bosses with great respect. Every person wants to be heard and respected. Everyone has something to contribute. Listening and responding respectfully makes it worthwhile for employees to apply 100% of their brainpower on their work thus unleashing their full potential of creativity, innovation and productivity and making them highly motivated, committed and productive. All of this gives them very high morale, enables them to take great pride in their work and then they will literally love to come to work. Good leadership multiplies whatever creativity, innovation and productivity top management has by however many employees they have.

Bad Leadership

Bad leadership is characterized by attempting to control employees through orders, policies, rules, goals, targets, reports, visions, bureaucracy, and changes all designed to almost force employees to work and to create what management considers to be satisfactory products. In this mode, management on its own decides what to do, when to do it, and how to do it and listens only perfunctorily, if they listen at all, to what employees have to say.

What is bad leadership?

• Attempting to control employees through orders, policies, rules, goals, targets, reports, visions and changes designed to force employees to work and create what management believes to be satisfactory products.
• Not listening or only perfunctorily listening to complaints and suggestions.
• Trying to motivate employees.
• Exhibiting the Do as I say, not as I do mentality
• Providing inadequate support
• Withholding information
• Treating employees as if they don’t want to do a better job, don’t care about their work, don’t want to accept responsibility, or don’t really want to work.
• Treating them as if they are lucky to have a job
• Being afraid to discipline and never disciplining
• Staying in your office
• Us versus them mentality—“Why aren’t they performing better?”— “What’s wrong with that person? Why don’t they know their job? They should know their job.”

These actions or inactions are bad because they lead employees to believe that management disrespects them and does not care a whit for them. It also puts employees in the state of having to guess what management wants and management must be right about everything because no one else is allowed to make decisions. Bad leadership shuts off the natural creativity, innovation, and productivity of each employee and slowly but surely demotivates and demoralizes them. With the “I know better than you” and the “be quiet and listen to me” mentality being projected from management, the majority will act like robots waiting for instructions, even if that is not what bosses intended.

Most bad leadership is the result of a top-down, command and control style of management, where the employee is rarely if ever listened to. This style ignores every employee's basic need to be heard and to be respected. It results in a knowledge barrier and top management becoming ignorant of what is really going on in the workplace, which in turn makes their directives misguided at best and irrelevant at worst.

For example: An employee makes a mistake, or at least the boss, thinks they made a mistake, and instead of finding out if it really was a mistake the boss orders a change or grills the employee as to why they made the mistake. “What went wrong here?” Or “So and so said you were doing this instead of that, why are you doing that?” This is pure disrespect. You would not want to be likewise grilled, would you? But have you ever experienced such an exchange? Firstly, the employee does not think they did anything wrong and secondly, due to such passive aggressive behavior, can’t be certain what was really wrong. “Well, don’t do it this way, do it that way,” you might hear the boss say after the grilling. The boss basically sets the employee up for failure again, making them guess what the issue is or was. This is bad leadership and it is top-down in style.

In the top-down model, nobody is really listening to employee ideas, valuing the opinions of subordinates, or giving employees any recognition. The only way that the workforce can deal with managers who treat them in this way is to disengage and ignore the behavior of managers, bosses, and executives. In the workplace this is seen as being sullen, uncommunicative, having a poor attitude, low morale or apathy. Have you seen this? Have you used those words as a manager?

Bad leadership causes a huge amount stress for employees and managers too, and this turns into poor performance, sick days, mistakes, lack of adherence to rules, turnover and a whole host of other issues you may have seen in the workplace.

With management attempting to manage the work instead of the people, much damage is done as managing the work requires a huge amount of time and effort and leaves management little or no time to actually manage people.

Now, let’s look at the above example with good leadership. You think you have heard that something is being done incorrectly. You trot down to observe, ask some questions and listen. You say hello to the person involved, then “Hey, so tell me, how are you going about this job?” You get an answer. “Okay, so why like this and not like this?” If they are doing something that you really think is wrong, then you point it out by saying, “What if you did it like this? What do you think about that?” “Well, that doesn’t really work, because XYZ group doesn’t get us what we need on time…” Ah, there you go, a support deficiency. That’s your job, dear boss. Or maybe you find the way the person does something works better or that they get their work done faster that way or that they were lacking some knowledge or training, which again is support that you, as the boss, are responsible for providing. Who knows what you will find out, but most assuredly, if you go in combatively or passive aggressively, the person will shut down, because you are the boss, they are taught to listen to you and wait for your decision when you treat them like a robot.

So, leaders lead in a good direction or a bad direction with a full spectrum existing from exceptionally bad to exceptionally good. Every manager will by his or her actions lead in some direction within this spectrum, though this direction may not be understood or consciously chosen by the manager. Quite fortunately, we are all human and we are all good. We can, therefore, consciously choose to adjust our actions to always lead in the good direction to raise our performance and success in managing people.

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Next: Find out  Why Employees Are NOT Highly Motivated or Committed

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