A senior leader once told me – A leader’s every action is an example! I looked at her puzzled. She clarified and said, “Every action a leader takes is an example of good leadership or bad leadership.”
Why is This Important
Being able to tell the difference is key for those who work for leaders as well of those who are leaders. For those who work for leaders today, being able to distinguish good leadership from bad leadership can determine your work happiness, your potential to learn from that leader, and your career trajectory in the current company. If you work for a bad leader and don’t know it, you can be unhappy at work and not realize that it may not be your fault but that of your leader who had set a toxic culture. You can develop bad habits early thinking your leader is a good example and perpetuate that example when you become a leader later.
For those who are leaders today, you may not even realize you are being a bad leader. Unfortunately at least 50% of leaders today in corporations are mediocre at best. You may have blind spots or learned from bad leaders early on in your career. Not realizing you have bad leadership habits can lead you to cause negative team morale or worse churn of high performers.
Soft Skill Gym Workout: Can You Tell the Difference?
All five examples below are real life stories from my current or past jobs. Can you distinguish which of these are examples of “good leadership” vs “bad leadership?” For this soft skills gyms workout, please jot down for each example.
- Is this good leadership or bad leadership? You can also say it depends
- Please explain why
- If you are open to sharing, please share your thoughts in the comment section below
Five Examples of “Leadership”
Example 1: Giving time off
It’s Friday before the week of Thanksgiving. The senior product leader in your group sends out a mass email thanking everyone for their hard work and announces that everyone on his product team can take the next week off.
Example 2: Heart to Heart conversations
The head of product comes to your initiative to speak to the collective team for 30 minutes. This team has 30 product managers in it, 50 tech resources, 20 scrum, program, and support staff. The Head of Product thanks everyone for their amazing achievement and then ask for honest feedback for where she can better help this effort. She says things like “What are some things that should be easy but are hard for you?”
Example 3: Asking for Feedback
Your leader has asked for anonymous or direct feedback from his direct reports and partners. You can respond anonymously via his admin or directly. For all those who give him direct feedback, he sets up a call to better understand the feedback on his leadership style. Either way, he will share at the end of it with the entire team what he learned and how he will take action to evolve.
Example 4: Asking for Help from Your Leader
Your leader and his leader set up a small group meeting with six product manager who are working on a difficult initiative with aggressive timelines. The purpose is to have a safe forum to raise concerns to your leaders and get their help. You raised a need for analytical resources as a concern. Your peers echo the same concern. Your leader states to his leader that this has been an ongoing challenge for the last few months. He shares he has tried to solve this with the analytics group and had no luck. The senior leader told everyone – “Okay, I will set up a meeting with the analytics lead.”
Example 5: You are Empowered to Solve
You share with your leader that the timeline that she drafted for senior leadership for the next few launches are too aggressive. The teams are stretched as it is and this new scope is a surprise. She says it’s just a draft and she empowers you as the Agile product lead to push back and come back with what’s a reasonable timeline. She says “We have proven to others that Agile works. I empower you to define the timeline based on your analysis of what can be reasonably done and by when.”
You can see my debrief on these examples next week. I will share my perspective on each as well as what you can learn from it.
Your comments: Which of these examples do you know are signs of good leadership? Which of these examples do you think are signs of bad leadership? Please share why. I look forward to your response.
Your comments: Do you have an inner voice that tells you that you are not enough? Do you where it comes from and how to ignore it? I look forward to hearing from you.
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Lei
Lei
My thoughts on Scenario 2. There are 100+ people in this meeting! this is not a time to have someone respond to that question (awkward!). The Head of Product should have already collected some feedback and announced to the audience how they could send her feedback (e.g. send it to a special email address/fill out a survey) or share her observations on what went well and what didn’t that should have been shared to her by her PMs. This is an example of not reading the room; therefore, bad leadership. Would love to hear what others think!
Very astute observation as well, Linda.
Great to see that you’ve offered examples that are “grey”. I’ll comment on the 1st example. At first glance, it looks like the Sr.Prod Leader is a “hero” for giving her team a week off. But she should have consulted the other leaders within the group if there were any team members that were working with other departments that were customer-facing which usually can’t take time off (even during holidays). Her email should include some kind of footer that says something to the effect of “for those who are working with or in customer supporting roles” that need to be… Read more »
Great point, Linda. Thanks for sharing. I will also share more in my next article about each of these scenarios. It’s coming out this Monday.