Delivering value through leadership

Delivering value within a team environment requires a strong focus on collaboration, open communication, and a shared sense of purpose. The culture of a team plays a crucial role in this, as it sets the tone for how team members interact with one another and approach their work. An effective team is often governed by clear roles, responsibilities, and decision-making processes that ensure everyone is working towards the same goals and that the team can adapt and evolve as needed.

Good leadership

Good leaders are individuals who enable the empowerment of others and their unique abilities and skills to achieve deliverables. Great leadership builds great environments where individuals can thrive and where directives are transparently understood. They are also emotionally intelligent, open to self-improvement, and will lead by example. Despite the majority.

Maintaining great leadership is difficult as it is not an innate human ability like most people think it is, rather it is achieved by many of the above characteristics along side setting clear goals and expectations, communicating effectively, and fostering a positive and inclusive team culture that includes the shareholders and managers alike. By focusing on these key elements, leaders can effectively guide and support their teams to achieve success.

Toxic Leadership

It’s reported that 56% of employees presently work for a toxic CEO and 1/3 of leaders are capable of exhibiting toxic behaviour. Most organizations lack the experience and the ability to counteract poor and toxic leadership. Poor leadership such as neglect, hostility to peers, lack of empathy or concern for peers and self centered agendas that exploit teams, all foster an organizational environment of poor performance, lack of trust, lack of engagement, and decreased creativity.

Additionally, groupthink can occur when there is a lack of diversity in thought and a lack of willingness to challenge the status quo, leading to poor decision-making and a lack of creativity. Teams who are given the freedom to explore possible solutions in a creative environment will yield better results than a highly restricted one.

How to avoid dark leadership

Each organization is different from the next. However, it is upper leaderships sole responsibility to be vigilant in spotting potential “red flags” that may lead to toxic environments. Based off experience, here is a small list of red flags that may indicate a toxic leader.

• Lack of or no transparency: Leadership avoids being clear, concise and open to most discussions. They may hide information from other teams or even their own team members/peers.
• High turnover rate: Team member dissatisfaction in leadership will push a productive teams or team members to leave, leading to a higher turnover than normal.
• Micromanagement: It comes to no surprise that most poor performing teams usually have a micromanager who lacks trust in their own team. Constantly monitoring every move, initiative or reprimanding every small mistake leads to low morale and engagument and eventually performance. Teams and individuals will have little to no excitement to take on bigger initiatives.
• Undermines peers and others: A sure shot indicator that a toxic leader is amongst your organization is that they will undermine others, downplay others achievements and or take credit for others work, giving little to no credit to contributors. Most of the time this is done openly in public and is one of the easiest red flags to spot. They avoid sharing as much of the success as possible while also being the first to blame others for the lack of their own success.
• Overpromising and or having inconsistencies in their values: They will contradict initiatives, undermine the organizations mission or values and cause confusion. Overpromising and under delivering is also a inconsistency. A leader who cant objectively communicate, and be realistic will usually double down by continuing to set unrealistic deliverables that are almost next to impossible to meet and potentially blame shift when these goals are not met.
• Micropolitical: Leadership that engages in informal office politics, favoring or exploiting power dynamics over merit, is likely to create a toxic environment. This behavior may manifest through subtle actions, such as inappropriate or unfair influence over decision-making processes, undermining fair policies, equity, and the overall organizational culture.

This small list can be helpful in identifying potential leadership problems. As stated previously, if upper leadership doesn’t care to take a critical look, then nothing changes.