Achieved Strategies

Clearly people are pissed off: from Arab Spring showing how an organized, purposeful group of people can overthrow inhumane dictators to unorganized, yet persistent Occupy America to dissatisfied, disengaged employees. These events and others are punctuated by people’s anger over the misbehavior of politicians, figure heads, leaders, even manager. Humanity seems to be in great turmoil.

Yet in the hurled accusations flung from one person to another, one party to another, one department to another, from one manager to another, we each can find a moment of solitude and stop. In that pause reflect on how you can do better in your circles of colleagues and employees.

There is no better time than now to draw your line in the sand and demonstrate how you can repair fractured relationships and create workplace optimism for your team, for your company, for yourself.

A first step is to identify what might be holding back your leadership. What has imprisoned your leadership?

• Legacy pursuit. Most of us think about the legacy we’ll leave behind. It’s an exciting thought to entertain. It becomes selfish when the legacy plans of managers feed their egos. Plans become unrealistic, untimely, and unravel team performance. Organizational growth slowly grinds to a slow stop. Leadership dies.

• Need for notoriety. Leadership is imprisoned by the relentless need to look good in front of the boss. Or when a manager takes on more projects because of peer pressure to do so, meanwhile employees are coming in early and staying late, working on weekends and over holidays just to keep from choking.

• Need to be right. We’ve all been in meetings when another person will defend his position no matter how wrong it is. Wasted energy is spilled in meetings with a manager who needs to be right. Self-adoration lurks from the corners.

• Spreadsheet-Burn. Spreadsheets are merely numbers manipulated by assumptions to fit management’s needs. Spreadsheet-burn is when managers spend too much time with their nose in the numbers forgetting the context and people surrounding the analysis. No equation for leadership can be found in Excel.

• Self-seeking. Perhaps the worst offender imprisoning leadership are leaders who act to pursue their own interests. Such leaders put their interests and needs above those of their team. Hear that sucking sound? That’s the sound of trust, optimism, and performance leaving the team and the company.

We truly don’t have time to let angry and pissed off employees overshadow the great things they can accomplish. It’s up to you to do something about it.

Photo used courtesy of Steven Depolo