Leaders Top Three Mistakes


1. Managing instead of leading.

When a leader spends more time managing than leading, morale suffers among the troops. Most people would prefer a goal to shoot for and some freedom to figure out how to reach that goal.


2. Mistaking individual loyalty for team building.

The next mistake is a bit more subtle and difficult to detect.
Let's say that you are the person at the top of the leadership chain in your organization. You are the crossbeam. Those steel spheres hanging beneath the crossbeam are the people who work closely with you. The plastic connectors are the individual relationships you make with those people.
You, the leader, pull one of your team members away from the others and get him pumped up about a change that needs to be made. That's like pulling one of the steel balls and holding it there. Then when you let him go, you expect him to return to the rest of the team, where they will all function with superb team dynamics, solving the current problems, achieving team goals, and making changes.
The leader lets that team member go, and he just bangs against the other team member closest to him, and that one bangs quickly into the team member next to him, and so on. So all that really happens is that this one team member bangs into the others, and they swing back and forth, bumping into each other."We shouldn't neglect the individual relationships with those who work closely with us. We also can't miss the important steps necessary to putting those people together in team situations where they learn what it means to work together.


3. Failing to apply what motivates us.
"What motivates you?" . "The ability to create? The freedom to apply what you know in order to solve problems? The thrill of a new challenge? Ask most leaders what motivates them and those items will surface. But when we get our jobs down to a science and there are no new challenges, we get bored or lose interest."
A leader may know what motivates him, but he forgets that the same things motivate those who work for him.