You Might Be a Weak Leader If… No one on your team has criticized one of your ideas in the past month (or offered you a breath mint ever). You spend more time planning your own career progression than planning that of your team members. You don’t know the names of one child or spouse/partner/parent for 90% of your team members (for teams < 35) or 50% for teams >35). You haven’t had at least three completely non work related conversations with a team member weekly. Different team members would provide different answers if asked your top 3 priorities for the year. Team members are afraid to fail. You ask team members to work harder than you do. You tend not to hire people smarter than you. You couldn’t explain in some detail what your team members do. Conversation changes when you walk into the break room or join the conference call. Rarely do team members proactively ask for your coaching, feedback, or mentoring. Your team has no vehicle for honest feedback (on what’s working and what’s not) on a regular basis. You talk about your accomplishments more than your team members’. Team members (more than one or two) are surprised at their appraisal ratings at the end of the year. You haven’t admitted a failure to your team in the past six months. You haven’t proactively taken a professional development course in the past twelve months. You couldn’t name a couple key accomplishments for each team member each year. You haven’t truly asked a favor of someone on your team or shared something that made you vulnerable in the past three months. You haven’t covered/taken the blame for someone on your team making a mistake in the past six months (but only once). Strong leaders are rare and there’s a reason for it. Strong leaders embody a seemingly paradoxical combination of confidence and humility, authenticity and political savvy, candor and empathy, work ethic and work-life balance. This balance is difficult to find and even more difficult to achieve personally. The first step towards becoming an amazing anything is being humble enough to acknowledge deficiencies and work on them. Indeed, the best leaders I’ve found don’t stumble into it, they work at it – every day.
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