Leadership

I just read a very interesting online article that I thought I should share:

Most People Don’t Under-Perform, They’re Under-Led – 5 Ways Leaders Sabotage Performance



My thoughts:

Everyone is unique - some can work with more supervision, some require less supervision (and some stress out under over-supervision). In today's hectic world where you always hear that "time is money", people don't have the time to figure out each person as an individual, preferring to regard everyone as a group. That's when the problem arise.

I think the solution sounds simple, but is tough to do - Analyse your employees (or those working under you) and see which style of management/leadership you should be using with him/her. There is no one size fits all leadership, and for any team to work you have to tailor your style to suit each individual.

Giving feedback to those you lead is also important. Giving feedback leads to a double-loop learning:

picture credit: AFS (click on the link to learn more about single-loop learning and double-loop learning.)

Double-loop learning has been deemed to be more effective. Giving feedback about getting what is obtained helped the person to identify where he/she went wrong and what he/she can do to improve his/her performance. Otherwise, all he/she know is the end product (which can be either good or bad) and not learn whether what he/she did was right/wrong or beneficial/harmful.

So my thoughts are that leaders need to modify their leadership style when dealing with different individuals and give timely feedback, even though this may take up more time and effort.