My guaranteed plan for demoralising your team

Most of us don’t want to do a bad job and we have truly good intentions. But sometimes it helps to take a step back.

If you’re doing any of these seven things…… no beating yourself up.

But maybe time to make a few changes?

As always, a journey of 1000 miles starts with one step..

• Keep cancelling those 1-1s because ‘something else came up’ (your team love playing second fiddle to your email list or your unmet deadlines or the latest crisis) whilst spouting those words ‘our people are our greatest asset’;

• Chair meetings with no clear purpose and no clear outcomes. Let the same people speak or just speak yourself, for the whole time, with no input from your team. (They love being talked at). And then arrange another meeting about that meeting. Or ask everyone to share what they are working on this week – why?

• Never explicitly show appreciation – they know you’re pleased with what they do (because mind-reading is one of the behavioural skills you insist on).

• Give vague feedback – ‘you’re doing fine’ or ‘you could do with improving your communication’. Yeh, that’s clear.

• Telling your boss that those great ideas came from you (giving no credit whatsoever to your team members who thought of them). Unaddressed sibling rivalry somewhere in your past?!

• Not dealing with that poor performer/slacker/time waster in your team – hoping it will all ‘work out fine in the long run’. It won’t, and your team are p****d off that you’re not dealing with it as they carry the extra workload.

• Empire building, silo building, points scoring, bad-mouthing other colleagues – none of this is helping anybody get the right things done. Be the one who builds bridges not walls (we know what kind of leaders build walls…..)