Are you on the Manager Naughty or Nice List? Here’s some tips on both. Remember you decide which list you end up on, and your team is always watching!
Being in Human Resources, people come to me complaining about their leaders, unfortunately not many come to tell me about their great leaders, but it does happen sometimes. It is amazing how similar the complaints are across companies, across industries, and across levels of any organization. In honor of the holidays, here is my top ten list of ways to lose the respect of your team and end up on the Manager’s Naughty List – filled with a good dose of holiday sarcasm:
- Don’t hold people accountable. Don’t ensure that people do their jobs, meet commitments or work well with others. Let slackers slack, let people speak to others unprofessionally, and let people slip deadlines constantly. Remember, your team is a reflection of you.
- Worse: hold some people accountable and not others. You could call that favoritism, but I call it cowardly. Some people hold themselves accountable and those people are easy to manage. The ones that don’t hold themselves accountable need you as a leader to do it. So can you not do it, or won’t you do it? Bad either way. Fairness, what’s that?
- Take credit for your team’s work. Either work hard enough to earn credit for things yourself or realize that developing your team to do things that earn them kudos makes you a good leader. Doing neither of these and then taking credit for your team’s work is a great way to lose their respect.
- Only give “good” employees work. Load up your best employees with work until they are overwhelmed, while leaving others who don’t work well with lighter loads. Don’t worry, the good employees won’t notice.
- Point fingers and place blame. Also known as throwing people under the bus. Don’t admit your mistakes and rather than spend energy fixing problems, spend it placing blame. This is a two for one. You lose the respect of your team and your co-workers at the same time.
- Say you’ll do something and then don’t. Not meeting commitments and making promises you won’t keep is a sure way to destroy trust.
- Lie. Enough said.
- Hold people to a different standard than you hold yourself. Also known as “Do as I say, not as I do.” Expecting people to do work that you yourself wouldn’t do, or work hours that you wouldn’t work, or meet deadlines that you couldn’t meet, is tantamount to losing the respect of your team.
- Come in late, leave early, take long lunches, spend lots of time chatting, and then tell everyone how hard you are working. Don’t worry, people won’t see through that. Ignore the eye rolling when you tell them.
- Not playing nice in the sandbox. Refusing to work professionally with others. Treating others with disrespect – regardless of their level in the organization. This includes yelling, screaming, threatening, cussing, and encompasses all generally non-professional behavior. Your team wants to look up to as an example to strive to emulate. Why give them that?
Why do people in leadership positions continue to do these things? I can’t really tell you. They may have learned it from their leaders, or they may not be good at looking in the mirror and seeing their actions as they are perceived by others; the bottom line is that good leaders don’t do these things.
So if you want off the Manager’s Naughty List, stop doing those things and start doing these:
- Hold your team, and yourself accountable. Everyone should meet commitments, and work professionally. That builds credibility and respect for you and your team.
- Give credit away. Here’s the thing – the more you give, the more you get as a leader. It’s funny how it works that way.
- Balance workloads. It gives your stellar employees some work/life balance and your weaker employees a chance to grow and become stellar employees. Every manager I know wants a team filled with stellar employees, so work to get that.
- Spend energy on making things better, fixing problems, and making certain problems don’t happen again. Wasting energy on placing blame, publicly humiliating someone, and not working on the fix to a problem is just that…a waste of energy.
- Don’t lie. Enough said.
- Don’t ask people to do things you wouldn’t. Don’t tell your team to work a holiday and then leave. (Actually don’t tell them to work a scheduled holiday or vacation period.) Don’t tell everyone to work late until a project is done, and then leave the office at 5:00. Set realistic deadlines and when it’s crunch time – jump in there and help.
- Don’t tell people how hard you are working. They know the truth anyway. Just work hard and work smart.
- Be the manager that they will want to be some day. Always be professional. Set a good example. Be respectful – always and regardless of the circumstances. Develop, inspire and motivate. Three good words for managers to live by.
Only eight things to do to be on the Manager’s Nice List and 10 things to do to be on the Manager’s Naughty List. Why not make things easy on yourself and strive to stay on the Manager’s Nice List all year long? Your team will appreciate you for it, and who knows what presents you might get: the respect of your team, their dedication, a raise, a promotion, the possibilities are endless, and they sure beat a lump of coal.
