Want to Keep Your Best Employees Happy and Productive?
Want to Keep Your Best Employees Happy and Productive?
These management practices can disengage employees and harm your bottom line.
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After nearly 30 years of studying leadership literature, interviewing hundreds of leaders, and coaching my own clients, I have found that leadership, at its purest, revolves around one main idea: serving people’s needs so they can achieve their full potential.
Truth be told, however, not everyone selected for the prestigious role of leading other human beings is equally qualified. Some, in fact, shouldn’t be there at all.
While exploring the opposite side of true leadership for many of those years, I discovered some toxic management behaviors and practices that can disengage employees and harm organizations and their bottom lines.
Here are six of the most common.
1. Excessive bureaucracy
Want to observe toxic, top-down management? Just examine the approval process to move things forward and get things done. In a command-and-control hierarchy, numerous approval levels, committees, work groups, and councils meet, with layered management steps required for a final decision. This bureaucratic process demotivates employees and sends a clear message: “We don’t trust you.”
2. Not sharing information
Managers who hoard information do so to wield power and control their environment and the people in it. The oppressive exercise of power and control over others is the quickest way to destroy trust. Conversely, a leader who shares information responsibly and displays transparency with their team fosters trust.
3. Taking the spotlight away from your employees
The team creates a fantastic product and delivers it on schedule. The client is thrilled. Then, the manager takes all the credit. There’s no praise for the team, no celebration of everyone’s success, and no acknowledgment of individual contributions. Managers like this tend to hog the spotlight, which can really bring down team morale.
4. Ineffective communication
Poor communication skills can sometimes cause managers to say one thing on Monday and then change direction by Wednesday, often without letting the team know. It’s a classic example of where “the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.”
5. Absentee leadership
Research indicates that one of the most prevalent forms of ineffective and harmful management is “absentee leadership.” They are often mentally disconnected from their teams and avoid genuine engagement. Your company might be unaware of these absentee leaders, as they tend to work discreetly. However, the reality is that absentee leaders can silently undermine and destroy organizational health.
6. Micromanagement
Managers who dominate people, decisions, and processes will eventually damage a team’s morale and take down their performance. A few warning signs that employees might be working under a toxic micromanager include:
·The manager either can’t or won’t delegate tasks, often taking work back to redo it themself.
·They specify exactly how to complete a task instead of emphasizing the outcome, leaving no room for the employee’s approach.
·The manager seeks approval for nearly every action, including small, routine, or low-risk tasks.
·They also insist on continuous status updates, instant messaging, or frequent, unplanned meetings.
Employees in micromanaged environments often feel trapped, powerless, and undervalued, which can erode their confidence and initiative. Even worse, they may choose to leave for your competitors.
7. But add involving your team
With every client we have worked with, while conducting customer service training, the front-line employees are challenged to come up with creative ways of connecting with the customer, in order to create a more robust customer service culture. We are constantly WOWed by the ideas they generate, with the understanding that their ideas cannot create additional expense for the company.
Implementing those ideas creates a sense of pride and ownership in the employees responsibilities in the customer’s experience.
Need help in growing your customer service culture? Give us a call, we're anxious to chat with you.
EXPERT OPINION BYMARCEL SCHWANTES ANDCARL PHILLIPS
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