Overview: Turning leadership weaknesses into strengths starts by identifying weaknesses and leadership skill gaps. Leadership coaching can help leaders gain an accurate picture of their abilities. An executive coach can also help leaders recognize the detrimental behaviors that lead to poor leadership.
Nobody is perfect. This includes even the most successful leaders. There is a difference between thinking you are perfect, leaving no room for improvement, and recognizing your human condition. Intelligent leaders are aware that how they use their leadership strengths does not fully define them. It also matters how they manage their weaknesses.
The first step in tackling your leadership weaknesses is identifying them. That is where leadership coaching can help.
Some leadership behaviors are undesirable. Others are potentially devastating. What detrimental behaviors should intelligent leaders avoid? What traits should they attempt to correct through leadership coaching?
Bad Communication Equals Poor Leadership
Communication is an essential ingredient of intelligent leadership. Leaders cannot afford to fail at it.
The damage poor communication can do in an organization is far reaching and impossible to contain. Poor communication can:
- Ruin relationships with clients and suppliers
- Cause misunderstandings and frustration in the workforce
- Feed disengagement among employees
- Create frustrating bottlenecks
- Increase failures and blame
Leaders who can’t clearly articulate a company’s purpose, vision, values, and mission are unfit to lead.
Micromanagement Promotes Disengagement and Frustration
By micromanaging their employees, poor leaders rob them of the empowerment and motivation they need to consistently deliver their best work. Micromanagement limits team growth and fails to deliver results.
Employees need to have ownership of their work, processes, and projects. Micromanagement denies them any chance to assume psychological ownership of their work. An employee robbed of the psychological ownership element becomes disengaged and loses motivation.
Defeating micromanagement should be one of the top priorities of leaders and executive coaching professionals.
Lacking Change-Management Skills
Intelligent leaders act as agents of change for their organizations. Always seeking to fulfill their visions for the future, they devise ways to achieve their ambitions and defeat the inevitable resistance to change.
Some leaders lack ambitions, however. They fail to overcome their innate averseness to change. Such leaders are happy with the status quo and unwilling to disturb it.
Intelligent leadership needs progress and change to survive. With stale leadership, organizations stagnate, lose direction, and falter.
Failing to Recognize the Value of a Positive Organizational Culture
An organization without a well-defined culture is like a ship without rules or direction. Organizational cultures define how employees interact, the values they observe, and the purpose their work reflects.
Healthy company cultures create psychological safety for employees, giving them continued support in the form of mentoring and coaching. Coaching-focused company cultures are capable of covering the leadership succession needs of the organization, establishing the leaders of the future in-house. Positive company cultures empower and motivate employees, reducing turnover and improving productivity. Missing out on these benefits by ignorance or laziness is a leadership sin.
An Authoritarian Know-It-All Approach
Authoritarian leadership using rigid vertical hierarchies is a thing of the past. Acting like a know-it-all at the helm of an organization is poor leadership. No one can know everything. Intelligent leaders know they have to step back now and then to ensure an optimal outcome by letting someone else assume temporary leadership.
Know-it-all leaders never empower their employees. They rob them of the satisfaction of having control over their work. Such an attitude demotivates and demoralizes, increasing employee turnover and hamstringing the organization.
Conflict Averseness
Positive, constructive people loathe meaningless conflict. Some leaders grow so averse to conflict that they avoid it at all costs. This approach is untenable.
Avoiding conflict merely postpones the inevitable. It lets disagreements fester and breeds animosity.
Good leaders learn to deal with conflict as soon as it rears its head. Executive coaching can help conflict-averse leaders develop the essential skills they need to put conflicts to rest within their teams and organizations.
Turning a leadership weakness into strength isn’t always possible. Leadership coaching can help leaders avoid poor leadership by identifying weaknesses and devising methods to deal with them. Stellar leadership is not perfection; it is the conscientious and intentional application of the principles of intelligent leadership to strengths and weaknesses.
To learn more about how you can join the IL Movement as a coach, or how you can benefit from bringing IL Solutions to your organization, contact us today.