Are You Wondering if You Are a Good Leader?
/
Within a cyber-stone’s throw you can find leadership assessments that list any number of essential qualities a “good” leader must possess. Many relate to the systems you’ve built around your people: Are you hiring good people? Do you have effective onboarding and training systems? Are you holding on to your best people? Do you have good succession planning in place?
All important skills, to be sure — and measurable. But, as they say, skills and systems are only as good as the people who apply them. I have come to believe that behaviors are the root-cause drivers of a leader’s ability to succeed, and be a good leader.
Experts on the Forbes Human Resources Council offer their take on some essential traits leaders need to have, such as: High EQ (emotional intelligence) and AQ (adaptability), active listening, empathy, open communication, hyper-transparency, receptivity, and mindfulness. Music to my ears in my work coaching executive level leaders — yet it’s tough to measure “soft skills” like these.
We specialize in coaching leaders and managers whose conduct is perceived negatively by their subordinates, peers and superiors. These are people who have the professional and technical skills to have advanced to leadership roles in their field, and they are often seen as important — even indispensable — to the organization. Yet they’ve exhibited a chronic pattern of disrespectful or overly-aggressive behavior that can range on a continuum from mildly irritating to severely disruptive to those around them.
They are abrasive leaders — and in most cases they are not aware of the effect they’re having on others and on the organization as a whole. Somewhere along the line they missed some empathy, receptivity, or listening skills. They may have developed a management style that they believe is effective: “Sometimes you just have to be tough on people to get them to perform.” And they haven’t discovered that this is never a management strategy that works in the long run.
So people start to complain about this behavior, avoid the leader as much as possible, and may even request transfer out of the department or leave the organization altogether. Morale and productivity become affected and can spread beyond the abrasive leader’s immediate circle to the whole organization.
This person’s expertise and technical performance becomes overshadowed by their disruptive interpersonal conduct. And even the best of organizational systems cannot help, unless they address and improve their chronic abrasive behavior.
How do you tell if there is an abrasive leader in your organization, or gauge the impact they may be having on your people? How do you tell if YOU are one of those leaders?
Interpersonal behavior may seem difficult to measure, but we’ve built a diagnostic tool that measures the unmeasurable — behavior that can harm an individual and poison an organization. This tool effectively identifies abrasive behavior that is having a negative impact on others. It’s called the Abrasive Leader Diagnostic (ALD), and is a crucial first step in determining if there is a problem and, if so, the nature and severity of the behaviors. The ALD is a brief, confidential online survey which we offer free of charge to anyone whether HR professionals, management, employee/coworker or the leader themselves. You receive an instant report with the results and recommendations for next steps (personal information is not collected).
Then what? Well, the situation is not hopeless! Abrasive behavior is learned — and can be UNlearned. Our Boss Whispering® coaching approach helps individuals quickly gain insight into the impact of their words and actions, and we work together to develop non-destructive management strategies. We can also work with those who have been affected by the behavior as well as overcome resistance within teams or management to help change this unacceptable, harmful conduct.
A next step in being a good leader could start with taking the Abrasive Leader Diagnostic survey, or a no-obligation conversation with me which I would welcome — I stand ready to help as, sadly, I have seen the high costs of unaddressed abrasive behavior to everyone involved, including the abrasive leaders themselves.
When we join a company, partnership or team, our expectation is that everyone involved will exhibit professional behavior toward us and each other. Instead, it’s highly possible that we may become one of the more than 60 million adults in the United States who are affected in some way by bullying behavior at work.
What kind of behaviors are we talking about? Our definition is any interpersonal behavior that causes emotional distress in others sufficient enough to impede their productivity or disrupt organizational functioning. It isn’t just a personality conflict — it’s a chronic pattern of disrespectful behavior.