It would be a truism to comment in this article that the mythical 10 commandments are a kind of guide for men to achieve heavenly paradise, among other things.
Going the other way, I propose to indicate which are the main actions that guarantee failure in effective leadership performance.
1. You will intrude on the private life of your staff
Most well-meaning leaders seek the emotional well-being of those in their charge. However, many of them get confused and go further, trying to have an active participation in the intimate life of each one.
Undoubtedly, an employee will show better performance if he has a healthy and balanced relationship life, but if this does not happen, it does not enable him to offer advice or give moralistic opinions aimed at guiding him in love.
The consequences will be that people will become reluctant to talk about those sensitive aspects of their lives, thus becoming a sort of bureaucratic automatons that only see work as a purely individual activity.
Not to mention the sustained increase in his paranoid anxieties. It is very likely that they perceive being directly persecuted by their superior, thus hiding their extra-work behaviors from him.
2. Make your employees an accomplice of your lies to customers and suppliers
There is little doubt that most leaders seek to appear likable in the eyes of their employees. Unfortunately, there are those who get lost in this and lose their way: The pleasure of your own staff is not achieved by being unfair with third parties. Rather the opposite. When employees see this type of behavior, and feel used as involuntary witnesses to this spurious situation, the discomfort is manifest, and what is more, they cannot express it either for fear of being materially or symbolically sanctioned. Examples of the latter abound and can be illustrated with phrases such as: "He is bitter, he does not laugh at anything" or "You can see he had a bad night that does not laugh at jokes."
3. Recognize the work of your subordinates only when they resign
The idea of some is that it is not worth congratulating when the task is well done under the umbrella of: “That's what they get paid for”.
Do not confuse empty praise for mediocre jobs at this point.
I speak of giving a warm welcome to those goals that were complex and that were achieved.
Using a soccer metaphor, I mean those goals that are difficult to make, until someone decided to kick from outside the goal and violate the defense.
It is imperative that a leader recognize these merits when they happen. Not when a long time passed and it was liquefied with emotional content.
Its last straw: doing it only when the employee got tired of these events and decided to migrate to other places. The compliment is not only late, but is also perceived as a dangerous mockery.
4. Speak badly of your current and former employees
Denigrating current collaborators behind their backs aims to achieve a double effect: on the one hand, it tries to obtain information, rumors or gossip from another through ill means. And in addition, it seeks to intimidate the interlocutor, making him aware that "The boss can know everything he wants about his employees", in any way.
The dangerous thing is that many employees get hooked on this, creating a vicious and extremely negative spiral for the organization as a whole.
5. Constantly criticize your competition
How wrong is the policy of elevating employees' sense of belonging to a company by this means.
There is something elementary, and very didactic for those who have the opportunity to manage people: "Speaking badly about your competitors is equivalent to speaking badly about yourself."
Having competitors keeps us awake, active and gives us the daily opportunity to generate new things through that "annoyance" caused by our rivals in the fight for the love of customers.
6. Don't pay your debts, but show off your expensive tastes to your people
In itself the fact of duty to another should not be a reason for boasting. However, the trick here is to minimize this situation and, far from being ashamed of it, downplay it, redoubling the bet: Show a position of absolute disinterest in the debt and simultaneously believe that it will be worthy of respect and admiration if it acquires a face watch brand or have a $ 100 champagne.
7. Don't worry about learning
With the excuse of: “I don't need to study anything. Titles are useless. It is only intuition that counts to carry out a business ”there is a gradual deterioration in the management capacity that subordinates suffer daily.
On countless occasions I have witnessed collaborators who advance well above their boss in knowledge and find it difficult to make themselves understood.
Other times the funny situation occurs that the leader tries to explain in a very rudimentary way something that his dependents already solved a long time ago, using much more efficient concepts, tools and systems, to which they agreed by studying.
8. Install fear in your staff as a method of loyalty
A well-known phrase in the field of management states that people enter companies for the money and leave for bad bosses. Some of the latter, knowing what it means to lose a staff, try to retain it through fear mechanisms. Typical phrase to be used in these cases. “Outside things are very rough. You are lucky to have a job here ”.
9. Promise utopias
It's one thing to build an inspiring vision for the company, and another to rave into an unbelievable panacea.
Employees are not so naive to sustain a medium-term illusion. At most, they will be able to do it for a short period after their admission, which is logical since they are still unaware of the limitations of the organization but once a reasonable period of time elapses they will begin to realize the little criterion of reality of the proposal and the feeling of frustration will rise dramatically.
Undoubtedly, bidding on a dream is an indubitable motivating lever, but dreams should not be confused with impossibilities.
You, as a leader, have the responsibility to guide your supervisees emotionally but without neglecting the rational aspects along the way. Otherwise, they will take you for a lunatic, mythomaniac or little credible.
10. Pay miserable wages
"Here they are paid with knowledge and experience" is something typical of hospitals or non-profit organizations. In them, professionals are inserted and fulfill their tasks with pleasure because they understand that it is part of their duty to give something back to society that supports them in the exercise of their professional title.
But the reality in companies is different. Don't be fooled. The people who are really worth it and who will make a difference may receive low remuneration at the dawn but it is a sine qua non condition that as they show progress in their work they are materially recognized through a fair salary according to the level of their performance and responsibilities.
In short, these anti-commandments need to be taken into account so that none of them operate, even covertly, in your organization. On the contrary, be sure to act against them and you will immediately be a responsible, excellent, quality leader and see brilliant results.
