Common Mistakes Leaders Make

The path to great leadership is one fraught with pitfalls. Many have fallen in these pitfalls and -thankfully- learnt from them, and so can you. Your management and leadership skills will grow over time, but to do so effectively, you’ll need to spot your errors as early as possible.

Here are three common mistakes that you may be making on a daily basis in your work environment.

1. Forgetting to give feedback

You don’t have to wait until the performance reviews are around the corner to provide your team members with valuable feedback. I find that, in most cases, colleagues are very keen to hear feedback. However, they can become frustrated if they feel that they don’t get it in a timely manner. Your team members want to get better at what they do. However, they can’t do that if you don’t provide the crucial feedback that explains to them what they’re doing wrong (and right!) at the moment they are doing this. Giving useful feedback is undoubtedly an essential leadership skill.

The best way to solve this is to create a culture of giving and receiving feedback. This way your team members will be comfortable both taking feedback and giving it back to you.

Giving continual and timely feedback is an important leadership skill.

2. Trying too hard to avoid ‘micromanagement’

Don’t get me wrong – micromanagement is both real and something you want to avoid. However, the problem arises when you are trying too hard to avoid it and you end up being far too hands off. Your team doesn’t want to be told what to do every step of the way, but they also don’t want to be thrown into the deep end without knowing how to swim.

Taking some management training courses is a great way to learn the balance between these two extremes.

3. Taking on too much yourself

Some leaders may feel as though they need to be the person in the office doing most of the work in order to justify their position. To me, this is a misunderstanding what leadership is. Making sure that the organisation goes where it needs to go doesn’t require you to do all the work yourself. In fact, it probably requires the opposite. You hire great people for a reason, which is that they do great work. A great leader is simply the facilitator, the person that makes sure the conditions are right for your team to do their best work. You don’t have to do that work yourself.

To learn more about the management courses we have on offer at ICML, get in touch with a member of the team today.