Leadership is about helping the people you lead succeed. In a previous post, I provided a list of tips for helping the people you lead succeed, grow and flourish. I’d like to discuss one of those leadership tips in more detail here.
Lead by redirecting, not rewarding poor performance.
What Great Leaders Do
- Great leaders are comfortable providing negative consequences to the people they lead when the situation warrants.
- Great leaders don’t fix problems that the people they lead create.
- Great leaders don’t take away a difficult or unpleasant job just because a person they lead does it poorly.
- Great leaders don’t promote of transfer problem people they lead – just to get them out of their work group.
- Great leaders avoid paying too much attention to the problem performers they lead.
How Great Leaders Do It
Great leaders make the people they lead handle their own problems.
Great leaders know that while sometimes it seems easier to fix a problem themselves than to have the person they lead who is responsible fix it. Great leaders also know that this is a bad idea. Fixing a problem created by one of the people you lead creates subordinate imposed time. Subordinate-imposed time begins the moment a leader takes responsibility for something for which one of the people he or she leads is responsible. It doesn’t end until the leader returns the responsibility to the proper person.
Great leaders don’t clean up the messes the people they lead make. They make the people they lead do it. Great leaders guide the people they lead. They give them suggestions and help, but great leaders make the people they lead solve their own problems.
Great leaders make all of the people they lead carry their own weight. When people continually screw up a certain job or jobs, many leaders give up, and take away those jobs. They give them to someone they can trust. Pretty soon, the one or two people who leaders trust are doing all the work, while everyone else is coasting. Great leaders don't let this happen.
Great leaders insist that all of the people they lead do a good job on the jobs for which they are responsible.
Great leaders coach, advise and teach, but hold the people they lead accountable and responsible for doing their jobs. They keep the workload fair and evenly balanced.
Great leaders never reward poor performers with promotions and transfers. They do their best to turn around poor performance on the part of the people they lead.
Failing this, great leaders work on an exit strategy. They don’t pass their problems on to someone else by promoting or transferring the poor performers they lead. Great leaders fix the problem performance of the people they lead. They don’t pass it around like a box of Cracker Jacks.
Great leaders don’t give undue attention to the problem performers they lead. This last problem is an easy one to slip into. However, when leaders spend a disproportionate amount of time with problem performers they lead, they create two potential problems:
- Problem performers get more attention than they deserve. Often problem performers are starved for attention. They prefer negative attention to no attention at all. They are like children who throw tantrums when they feel their parents are paying enough attention to them. It’s easy for leaders to fall into the trap of meeting the attention needs of the people they lead by spending too much time with problem performers. Great leaders don’t give problem performers undue attention. Great leaders let problem performers know that they are not happy with their performance, give them some ideas on how to fix their problem, but make them fix it themselves.
- Good performers don’t get recognized for their contributions. By avoiding spending too much time with problem performers, great leaders free up time to reward the good performers they lead. Recognizing good performance is a much better use of leader time than constantly looking over the shoulder of your poor performers.
Great leaders don’t accept poor performance on the part of the people they lead over an extended period of time. They know that this is a good way to lose credibility as a leader.
Great leaders know that most of the people they lead will perform well as long as they know what to do. Why they should do it and how to do it.
Great leaders know that the great majority of the people they lead will need little more than a gentle nudge (a conversation about how they are failing to meet expectations) to get them back on track.
When a nudge doesn’t work, great leaders us an explicit statement of the potential negative consequences of continued poor performance. This usually does the trick and gets the performance of the people they lead up to standard.
When all else fails, great leaders know that the poor performing people they lead will need to actually experience negative consequences – the initiation of formal disciplinary action.
Great leaders approach these types of discussions with the people they lead with goodwill in their heart. Their main concern is to get the poor performer’s performance up to an acceptable level – not to punish the people they lead.
Great leaders work with their Human Resources professionals to ensure that any negative consequences they deem necessary are in line with their company’s philosophy and policies.
That’s it for today. Please log on to my other blog www.CareerSuperStar.com for common sense advice on becoming a leader and the star you are meant to be.
I’ll see you around the web, and at Alex’s Lemonade Stand.
Bud
PS: Speaking of Alex’s Lemonade Stand – my fundraising page is still open. Please go to www.FirstGiving.com/TheCommonSenseGuy to read Alex’s inspiring story and to donate if you can.
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