To conclude this series of things-to-avoid-as-a-leader, here are the remaining 10 ‘to-don’ts’. If you still haven’t read the other two posts in this series, see ’20 Things to AVOID as a leader’ and ‘Accelerate Your Personal Growth By NOT Doing These 5 Things’.
As a leader, it’s not about you, it’s about ‘them’. Meaning, your primary responsibility is to ensure growth and the pursuit of excellence among your people. The higher up the leadership ranks you move, the more people you are responsible for. With this in mind, consider the following 10 things to avoid as a growing leader.
- Claiming credit that we don’t deserve: The most annoying way to overestimate our contribution to any success.
- Making excuses: The need to reposition our annoying behavior as a permanent fixture so people excuse us for it.
- Clinging to the past: The need to deflect blame away from ourselves and onto events and people from our past; a subset of blaming everyone else.
- Playing favorites: Failure to see that we are treating someone unfairly.
- Refusing to express regret: The inability to take responsibility for our actions, admit we’re wrong, or recognize how our actions affect others.
- Not listening: The most passive-aggressive form of disrespect for colleagues.
- Failing to express gratitude: The most basic form of bad manners
- Punishing the messenger: The misguided need to attack the innocent who are usually only trying to help us.
- Passing the buck: The need to blame everyone but ourselves.
- An excessive need to be “me”: Exalting our faults as virtues simply because they’re who we are.
Remember, it’s not about you, it’s about them.
TAKE ACTION: Get started by identifying any of these things you may be doing in your day to day. Start small by making changes in a few areas, maybe the ones that can have the most immediate and sizable impact. For example, if you don’t normally say ‘thank you’ that often, get started now! These two words are some of the most powerful in a leaders vocabulary. With that being said, I’d like to thank you for reading this article!
