The 7 Most Common Leadership Traps To Avoid

If you create a
high-performance team, you can exert tremendous leverage to create value. If
not, you’ll face severe difficulties because no leader can hope to achieve
ambitious goals on his or her own. Poor personnel choices will usually come
back to haunt you. The right team makes or breaks an organization.

Strong teams
improve productivity and make your company a good place to work. But a strong
team doesn’t just fall into place. Finding the right people is essential,
but it’s not enough. Begin by evaluating current team members to decide who
will stay and who will have to go. Then create a plan for obtaining new people
and moving the people you keep into the right positions without doing too much
damage to short-term performance. But even this is not enough. You still must
establish goals, incentives and performance measures that will propel your team
in the desired direction.

Avoiding
Common Traps

When it comes
to building a winning team, many new leaders stumble. It’s crucial to recognize
and avoid common pitfalls that can hinder your success. Here are seven traps leaders
should steer clear of to ensure their team remains effective and motivated.

● Keeping
the existing team too long
. Some leaders clean house too quickly, but it’s
more common to keep people on board too long. Whether because of pride or
because they shy away from tough personnel calls, many leaders end up with
less-than-outstanding teams. This means they will have to either shoulder more
of the load themselves or fall short of their goals.

● Not
repairing the airplane.
 Unless you’re in a start-up, you don’t get to
build a team from scratch: You inherit a team and have to mold it into what you
need to achieve your A-team priorities. Molding a team is like repairing an
airplane in midflight. You will not reach your destination if you ignore the
necessary repairs.

● Not
working organizational alignment and team restructuring issues in parallel.
 You
can’t build your team before reaching clarity about changes in strategy,
structure, systems and skills. Building your team prematurely could put the
right people in the wrong jobs.

● Not
holding onto the good people.
 Uncertainty about who will and will not
be on the team can lead your best people to look for opportunities elsewhere.

● Starting
team-building before the core team is in place.
 It’s tempting to
launch team-building activities right away. New leaders with a
consensus-building style often are eager to begin collaborating with their
direct reports, but some group members may be leaving.

● Making
implementation-dependent decisions too early.
 When implementing your
plans requires buy-in from your team, you should postpone making decisions
until the core members are in place. It can be very difficult to implement
decisions that commit new people to courses of action they had no part in defining.

● Trying
to do it all yourself.
 Keep in mind that the process of restructuring
a team is fraught with emotional, legal and company policy complications. Find
out who can best advise you and help you chart a strategy. The support of a
good HR person is indispensable to any effort to restructure a team.

By avoiding
these common traps, founders can foster a positive, productive team environment
that supports sustainable growth and success. Implementing these strategies
will help ensure that your team remains motivated, innovative, and aligned with
the company’s vision.

Without a great
team, you’ll face severe difficulties because no leader can achieve ambitious
goals on his or her own.




Subscribe to my feed Subscribe via Email LinkedIn Group Facebook Page @TimALeanJourney YouTube Channel SlideShare

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top
Abrir chat
¡Parece que usted tiene un problema y nos ha encontrado ,quizás pueda contratarnos!