Poor leadership skills affecting morale or the bottom line?

How to improve things:

1.) Learning about "Management Styles" is critical.

Management Styles
There are three primary management styles: The "Boss," the "Buddy," and the "Leader."

"Bosses" manage employees with a domineering management style. They tend to focus on the negative and all too often take positive things for granted. This manager is hard to please, causes high employee turnover and productivity potential is not reached.


"Buddies" focus on being nice to their employees. They avoid confrontation and dealing with negative issues (such as, under performance and behavioral problems). Buddies often get taken advantage of by poor-performing employees and lose top performers because they are burdened with covering for poor-performing employees who aren't properly corrected by buddy managers. Often this is the source of what employees call favoritism. However it really is a lack of aptitude on the buddy's ability to deal with poor-performing employees.

"Leaders" are nice most of the time, but are firm when they need to be. Their ability to motivate and empower employees to excel is the key to their success. People enjoy working for leaders and they have the highest productivity and retention rates of all the management styles.

"Leaders" have the moral fortitude to act decisively because they have a clear conscience about acting in the best interest of all concerned. Leaders don't treat everyone the same. They think through issues and people's backgrounds to respond appropriately. Experience and training enables them to wisely respond to the unique circumstances they encounter. And, most important, they are proactive and lay the foundation for nurturing employees to bring out the best in them. Leaders do this, in part, by wisely addressing performance and behavioral problems. This develops the untapped potential in employees and increases profits for the long run!


What if you are a "Buddy" or a "Boss?"

First realize they are very common management styles with little sophistication. Being nice or tough, in and of them self, doesn't make one a good manager. Many leadership skills aren't natural and must be developed. But since many managers don't get the resources they need to develop their leadership skills, they default to one of the simpler management styles.

Most managers can become excellent leaders if they are supplied with books and training that help them develop their leadership skills. The best book I can recommend for "Buddies" is The One Minute Manager by Dr. Ken Blanchard. The best book I can recommend for "Bosses" is the classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Amazon.com sells both.

I fully understand it is hard to break old habits. And sometimes we keep doing things the same old way, because to change would be a tacit admission that we could have done better before. But we can’t fool our employees about our leadership shortcomings … they already know them!

Managers, you have a greater impact on the productivity of your employees and their quality of their life than you realize! I encourage you to improve your leadership skills and apply character-based leadership with your employees. If you don't know where to start, just have a short meeting and say, "In the past I tried to manage the best I could by examples from my previous managers, but that no longer is good enough. Now I’m learning about leadership and I want things to be better." Then take pleasure in how much things improve under your leadership!


The next issue is dedicated to help buddies (and bosses) discipline and restore employees with performance/behavior problems.

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