Three Mistakes Leaders Make that Limit Success

Good leadership can make or break an organization’s success.  

Here are three mistakes that I see leaders make repeatedly that limit their impact… 

They stay in the weeds and focus their time on fire drills.

Focusing on the latest issues or problems is addictive.  There’s an adrenaline rush that accompanies triaging the latest crisis and being the hero. The problem is that there’s always a new crisis, and the more they focus on crises, the more even small problems seem like crises.

Unfortunately, crisis management can easily dominate their time, leaving little left for strategic, long-term thinking.

They establish themselves as the ‘go-to’ on every important topic.

Different leaders do this for different reasons. Some want credit for themselves and others don’t trust their teams. The results are predictable.

This pattern leads to burned out leaders who are trying to do it all. Employees become disengaged and overly dependent on their leaders. Bottlenecks are created that limit teams’ effectiveness.  

They fail to build strong teams.

Many employees are selected for leadership because they are strong individual contributors. They aren’t experienced in building teams. Organizations may (or may not) offer effective training, but also often reward individual performance rather than team performance.

As a result, many teams have too many weak players who don’t work well together. Leaders spend their time compensating for their teams’ weaknesses through their own efforts.

If you fall prey to these mistakes, how can you overcome them?

Make a long-term commitment.

It’s impossible to build a strong team overnight. It’s going to take a long-term, sustained effort. And, if you’re known as the hero in a crisis or the ‘go to’ person, it’s going to take a while to change your brand.

Change the way you view your role.

Shift from a focus on getting results through your own efforts to getting results through others. Begin to see yourself more as a coach and mentor and less as a star player.

Intentionally manage your time.

Begin blocking time for strategic, long-term thinking. Devote time specifically to team development. Measure how successful you are in sticking to your plan and work to get better over time.