Reading books about Richard Branson, Sir Clive Woodward or Greg Dyke successfully lead their teams and organisations can be useful, but they will not necessarily help you to improve your leadership skills. Up and coming leaders will be more successful if they focus on developing and correcting their own weaknesses rather than trying to emulate others, advises leadership development specialists Developing People.
Developing People’s Managing Director commented, “I believe that it is easy for an individual to understand how their own behaviour and approach can demotivate others and to do something about it, rather than learning a totally new, radical or “proven” approach. Our experience is that many managers demotivate their employees by failing to understand the basics of human motivation”.
Developing People’s approach is to help managers understand the behaviours that can quash people’s motivation. They believe that the top 8 failings are:
- Taking away personal responsibility by over controlling peoples work.
- Making unfair decisions about work routines, pay and reward.
- Being too aggressive and task orientated, disregarding individuals needs and work-life balance.
- Failing to engage people creatively by asking them to do meaningless work.
- Being incomplete or inconsistent in communications.
- Failing to get the involvement of others.
- Rewarding and promoting the wrong behaviours and punishing the correct behaviours.
- Acting without integrity.
If organisations wish to improve the performance of their leaders, they need to provide constructive feedback, and make room for, informal discussions, training and development as well as coaching and mentoring to help leaders change their behaviour.