How Being A Sh*t Leader Costs Your Business Money

How Being A Sh*t Leader Costs Your Business Money

Is your business bleeding because of poor-performing team members?

Drip, drip…

I find it interesting—funny, actually—how little business owners want to take responsibility for the poor performance of their team. Reality is, it’s often poor-performing team members that negatively impact your bottom line and it’s your responsibility, as the leader, to fix it.

Drip, drip…

Often, business owners are either stuck in indignant self-righteousness, or more commonly and worse, self-doubt. Neither promote great culture or high-performing teams. Any inaction as a result of self-doubt means poor performance is already an accepted norm.

Drip, drip…

Your business is bleeding!

Drip, drip…

Unless you were blessed with luck far beyond my own experience, you’ve probably worked with shitty bosses in shitty work environments. I asked a bunch of people to describe the worst traits of shitty managers:

  • Dominating
  • Overbearing
  • Bullying
  • Patronising
  • Sexist
  • Neurotic
  • Self-centred
  • Narcissistic
  • Egotistical
  • Passive-aggressive
  • Unapproachable

They also listed many implementation traits, and these are the problems I often see in business owners:

  • Micro-management
  • Lack of guidance
  • Lack of leadership
  • Poor decision-making
  • Stuck in the details
  • Passing the buck
  • Not using staff to their strengths
  • Incompetence
  • Lack of emotional intelligence
  • Lack of empathy for junior staff
  • Poor communication
  • Failure to share business’ vision
  • Failure to understand employee career goals
  • Taking staff for granted
  • No succession planning
  • Lack of strategic clarity

The killer here is this: the skills to fix these problems are easily teachable—if (and that’s a big if) the leader can realise they have a problem, be willing to pull their head out of the weeds and take responsibility, and make a conscience effort to change.

Drip, drip…

How do you make these changes?

  • Realise you are the problem and things need to change both internally and externally to create a solution.
  • Realise when things change, people get nervous and you’ll need to drive the ship even harder—if self-doubt is a challenge, that’s going to be highlighted! #sorrynotsorry
  • Realise this will be a CANI process—a Constant and Never-Ending Improvement (Tony Robbins)—not something you do once and forget.

Obviously, I’m a massive supporter of enlisting help to achieve this change. Someone like a business mentor or coach, even a business partner, can shine a light on the flaws we often overlook. It’s probably going to hurt to get this feedback, but at the end of the day, if your business is dripping, it’s only going to get worse.

An organisational vision or mission is often the first step taken when developing your business; however, unless it’s used to drive performance, it’s just another ‘tick box’ on the task list. Your organisational vision should be shared across the entire organisation. Values must have defined standards and norms so knowing how to live up to the values is clearly articulated. All team members, including you as the leader, need to be held accountable to these values.

Ensuring your team has a clear understanding of their responsibilities and a definite understanding of how they fit into the bigger picture drives personal accountability to the business’ success.

As the business owner, it’s your responsibility to set up clear and challenging, yet manageable, expectations and to provide your staff with the support they need to achieve them, otherwise you’re at risk of bleeding out…

 

What to do next:

I live and breathe helping business owners get the clarity needed to continue going forward, and this is without a doubt my deep passion and purpose; I absolutely love what I do. If you want to have a chat about how I help you achieve your goal, get in touch.

Read this next:  Big problems in small business

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