7 Telltale Signs of a Weak Leader

Most people associate a weak leader with being docile,
deferential, timid or meek. While that may have some
merit, weak leaders can also be bombastic, egocentric,
domineering, dictatorial and imperious. Even if you are
successful at adding to the bottom line, bringing in new
clients or developing new products and services, if
people are not seeking you out or jockeying to be on
your team, you are a weak leader.
Here are seven behaviors that beset a weak leader:
1. Your team routinely suffers from
burnout.
Being driven and ambitious are important traits for
successful leaders. However, if you are excessively
working your people or churning through staff, than you
are not effectively using your resources. You may take
pride in your productivity by doing more with less, but
today’s success may undermine long-term
organizational health.
Crisis management can become a way of life that
reduces morale and drives away or diminishes the
effectiveness of dedicated people. With any business,
there are times when you have to burn the midnight oil
but it should also be accompanied with time for your
team to recharge and refuel.
Related: How Google's Marissa Mayer Prevents Burnout
2. You avoid making the tough call.
A decision needs to be made and you are dancing
around the situation. This can stem from the need to be
100 percent certain or not having confidence in your
abilities. So you keep sending people off to find more
facts in order to get as close to 100 percent as possible.
Routinely you wait until the last possible moment so if
the decision turns out to be off the mark you can say
“we” ran out of time or “we” did not have all the
information. In the meantime, you hold up the process
and have people spinning their wheels searching for
certainty (that more often than not does not’t exist)
while other work is not getting done.
3. You do not provide adequate direction.
You are in a rush to get a project or assignment
underway but you have not thought through what you
want. You gather your team together for a quick kick-off
meeting and start thinking out loud. Your meandering
unfocused thought process leads to divergent tangents
that are contradictory and leave people confused. At the
end of the meeting, you still have not clearly
communicated concrete goals and objectives and many
murky areas are left open to interpretation. Ultimately,
you’re leaving it up to the team to figure out and take the
“I’ll know it when I see it approach”. As the team leaves
the meeting they quietly whisper, “Here we go again”.
Knowing the assignment will be a chaotic mess.
4. You belittle your team members in a
public setting.
Dressing down someone on your team in a meeting or
public setting is a fast track to a bad reputation as a
leader. You may think that what someone did or said
was stupid. Making a point of it in a meeting only
demonstrates that you are unstable and a loose cannon.
Weak leaders will habitually demean others as a way of
making themselves look or feel better. If someone is
deserving of constructive criticism, do it in private.
Creating a spectacle in a meeting in which you make
everyone uncomfortable does not put you in power
position. Quite the contrary, good people will not tolerate
such actions and you will be left with a feeble team that
will deliver mediocre results because they are afraid of
you.
Related: 3 Questions to Ask to Determine If You Are a
Good Leader
5. You make commitments but do not
follow through.
You routinely swoop into an important client meeting,
and to assert your position, you seize the moment with
grand gestures and assurances that you will personally
see certain actions through. This makes you look good
for the moment but once you have received your glory
with the client there is no follow through on your
promise(s). You move on to the next big thing and the
rest of the team is left to pick up the slack and figure
out how to address what the client thinks is a done deal.
Over time, this is will diminish your credibility and people
will view you as all talk and no action.
6. You ask multiple people to work on the
same request independently.
This may seem like a good idea since you will have
more to choose from and a greater probability it will get
done to your satisfaction. However, when people find
out, they will feel angry and frustrated because you have
pulled multiple people away from their regular
assignment to work on your special project. This is
especially damaging if you do not use someone’s work.
It will signal that you do not trust either of them enough
to do the job. Or it will mean you take a scattershot
approach to managing the business hoping that
something will stick. In either case, it will begin to erode
your leadership position.
7. You don’t provide honest feedback.
In order not to hurt someone’s feelings, or to keep them
happy, you do not provide truthful actionable feedback.
This can be about their performance, likelihood of being
promoted or whether you see them as a long-term player
on your team or with the company. By skirting the issue
you create unrealistic expectations for the person on
your team and confusion when implied promises are not
kept. Left unchecked, people will place little credence in
what you say assuming everything that comes out of
your mouth is a half-truth. Providing tough, yet fair,
feedback is a hallmark on a strong leader. In the long
run, people will appreciate your candor.
Being a strong leader requires equal amounts of self-
awareness, self-management and humility.