Leadership and the One Minute Manager Tip #4: Consequences of Wrong Leadership Styles
When I am reading through “Self-help” books, it is often easy to “understand” a topic, yet not realize the significance of the objectives in the chapter. For example, in this book, I may be able to understand the different types of leadership, yet not realize the impact they have if used incorrectly. Here are a couple examples pulled from the text that I think are very helpful in understanding the topic.
Let’s say there is a guy, Scott, who runs a small business. Times are a little tough right now, and he is feeling stressed out about finishing a project before the deadline. If he doesn’t get this project successfully completed on time, then his business could take a large hit. Here are two different scenarios which could happen if he uses the wrong leadership style on the wrong people.
- Scott has a 4-5 “experts” in his business. It is obvious that without these few individuals, his business would go belly up. He is feeling so stressed out about this deadline that he keeps bossing around the most committed employees, because without them on board, he won’t have a business. These employees become angered because they are being treated like newbies, yet they are the most experienced. They already know what to do!
- Scott has 2-3 newer employees that are not yet trained for this project. Instead of directing them, he simply leaves them alone, he doesn’t want to “waste” time on them. Because Scott practically ignores these employees, they have no productivity and are just messing up labor costs. They don’t know what to do, and no one is telling them what to do.
Considering these two points, Scott’s office is not near peak productivity. He should have just delegated projects to those that were competent, and trained those that were not competent, yet were committed to the business. Now the experienced employees are not feeling very committed, yet are very competent. His newer employees may be committed, but that doesn’t matter since they don’t know how to do the projects yet.
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