If you have invested a lot of time and money into developing your leaders but are still not seeing the results you had hoped for then maybe you are focusing your attention on the wrong area. It does not matter how talented a leader is if they are working in a place where the culture towards them is negative. This may mean that you have to work on your culture in order to get the most out of your leaders.
How do you know if there is a culture in your workplace that is negative towards leaders?
Here are a few common signs:
- Staff have an “us against them” attitude with leaders and clearly view them as the enemy.
- Team members have not actually ever met their senior leaders and do not recognise them or know their names.
- Staff are often trying to catch out their leaders and belittle them
- There is often negative talk amongst team members about leaders
- Team members deliberately creating problems or testing their leaders to see how they will cope.
If you have noticed this kind of behaviour within your organisation then it might be time to work with your senior leaders to form better relationships with team members before investing any more time, money or effort into developing new leaders.
Here are a few ways to strengthen relationships between team members and leaders:
- Encourage understanding of shared goals and task. For employees to work together effectively, they must understand group and individual goals. When this understanding is poor, work inefficiencies, lower work quality and low employee morale often are the result. Lack of understanding over goals is often misdiagnosed as an individual performance management problem, when actually the team member is unsure of what the organisation expects from them.
- Provide team members with sufficient Knowledge and Resources. Managers can’t have a high performing organisation without capable and knowledgeable employees who are provided with the right resources and tools required to do their jobs. If staff are made to do work they are not qualified for, they will not be happy and their performance and the quality of their work will suffer because of it. Without proper knowledge and training, employees are likely to use resources inefficiently and become disheartened which leads to frustration and higher staff turnover.
- Communication. Ineffective employee communications lead to inefficient coordination efforts. Miscommunication causes poor information sharing and makes it difficult to get the right people involved at the right time to make the best decisions. Effective interaction can encourage opportunities for combined learning for both manager and employee and greatly enhance employee job satisfaction. Effective interaction creates a culture of collaboration and encourages sharing of ideas and information.