Is your leadership focus skewed?

All too often leaders are under pressure to attain short term and long term goals. This causes them to focus on instant goal attainment at any cost and the biggest cost they sacrifice is people. They then become poor ineffective leaders.

Gallup’s research (2018), states that only 15% of employees globally are actively engaged. That means that if you have a team of 10, less than 2 are engaged. And its all because of poor leadership. Poor leaders do the following:

• They sacrifice people development.
• They sacrifice giving and receiving their people's feedback.
• They sacrifice taking any genuine action on improving their leadership intention.
• They sacrifice their people's wellbeing.
• They ignore the telltale signs that their people are working while acutely disengaged.
• They sacrifice having courageous conversations with dignity.
• They leave their people feeling diminished - all because of the short term (annual bonus) mentality.

If you think your leadership is skewed and you are at risk of being a poor leader, start by doing the following:

• Take time to authentically assess your commitments versus your values by daily reflection and begin to self-correct.
• Build a strong personal board of directors around you to hold you accountable.
• Help your people understand the opportunities that arise during times of change.
• Ask yourself if what you are doing would enable your grandchildren take pride in working in your organisation in the future. If the answer is no, you need to take charge and re-direct your efforts to become more effective.

Start being a leader who is worth being counted as one who balanced the short and long term demands of leading and achieved results without sacrificing people's dignity.