10 “old school” Leadership practices you ought to chuck, and “new school” practices to champion instead

This post is a reflection on a short article I found about old leadership practices that managers need to stop today by Paul Spiegelman. I will go more in depth on the first point, as I find this to be the most powerful change that I have made in an organization over my management career till now. “1. Out: Micro-management, or the need to control every aspect of your company. Replace it with: Empowerment, the ability to give your people some rope–even rope to make mistakes without blame.”

A micromanaged company relies heavily on the manager who is employing this tactic. Employees get accustomed to asking the manager what to do in different situations, rather than take on the responsibilities of making the decisions themselves. This leads to operational inefficiencies, as a staff member will need to wait for a manager to give them instructions before they can take action. A customer for example would be negatively impacted by this wait-time for a manager to show up and give orders. Not to mention that managers will get stressed and tired of always having to solve everyday simple and or urgent matters.

In order to move away from micro-managing, we need to first teach employees how to feel comfortable in making decisions on their own, as they will be so accustomed to asking the manager what to do. One issue we usually run into is, that some employees may be afraid of losing their job if they do not get approval from their manager before taking action. As a manager we would need to start off by asking employees what they would do in different situations as they arise, instead of taking charge right away. This way we get the staff to start thinking about how they would handle the situation before we give our own opinion. After they explain the actions they would take, it is important to point out why certain decisions are better than others.

By explaining our reasoning, a staff member will begin to understand the managers thought process of taking into account all the possible effects certain decisions could have on a customer and or the organization. This is one way to teach employees to become better decisions makers. As employees become better at understanding the managers decision process, a manager should begin to slowly hand over more responsibilities to them. Empowering organization members to take a more active approach in making his or her own decisions will help a company grow, achieve goals more quickly, increase productivity, and encourage creativity.

Here is a link to the article if you want to read about the other 9 Leadership practices to stop today: http://www.inc.com/paul-spiegelman/leadership-practices-to-stop-today.html

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Tagged as: encourage creativity, leadership, leadership practices, management, value creativity