Leadership - The 5 Worst Traits of Poor Leaders

As a leader you are tasked with delivering results. Thesuggested that work place bullying was costing more
best leaders know that consistently delivering greatthan £2bn a year in sick pay, staff turnover and
results is not something that they can do in isolation. Toproductivity.
get others to support them in consistently deliveringIn the long run, leaders who rely on bullying or heavy
results they need to avoid the 5 worst traits of poorhanded tactics will more than likely find themselves in
leaders. In my experience these include:the middle of an ocean in a sinking ship without a life
Trait 1: Being arrogantjacket at some point. How appealing does that sound?
Without doubt you want a leader to be self assuredTrait 4: Favouritism
and confident. At the same time you want them to beTough as it may be, your job as a leader is to try and
self aware and understand the impact that they haveaim to treat everyone the same and avoid favouritism.
on others. If you are someone who is arrogant you willIt can be tempting to have favourites but can be
do a great job at turning people off and disengagingextremely dangerous in the long run. The reason is that
them.you will create divisions in teams that can lead to 'in
Trait 2: Unwilling to listenfighting' instead of time and energies being focused on
You are the leader, you are in charge, you take theresults.
decisions and you make things happen. You don't needTrait 5: Disorganised
the views and opinions of others- right? Well yes ifIf you have ever worked for someone who
you want do completely de-motivate people andconsistently turns up late for meetings, does not have
isolate them. On the other hand if you want to workall of their papers available and fails to keep on track,
with your people to deliver great service andyou will know just how troublesome this can be. With
performance, make the time to listen to them.more and more demands on leaders' time, being
Trait 3: Bullyingorganised is no longer an optional extra.
No one likes or respects a bully. A bully is not only badBottom line- If you want to prosper as a leader you
news for those that they lead but is costly too. Anneed to maximise good traits and minimise the bad
article in Personnel Today in December 2007 suggeststraits. So what action do you need to take to achieve
that it hits the bottom line. At that time it wasthis?