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Bad leadership can sink the ship. Good leadership, with good habits and good communication, can keep the ship afloat and on the right course.
How can you tell the difference between a bad leader and a good one? The cracks will be clearly visible. Once there are cracks, is it possible to reverse course and change the model and the culture? You bet it is.
Bad leadership: what are the warning signs
A Society of Human Resource Management survey revealed employees’ biggest gripes with out-of-touch leadership. The top five skills they’d most like to see their managers improve were:
- communicating effectively (41%)
- developing and training the team (38%)
- managing time and delegating (37%)
- cultivating a positive and inclusive team culture (35%)
- managing team performance (35%)
Given that we’ve seen the recent back-to-work bungling, it’s no surprise to see ”listening’s” close cousin, “communication” top the list. Communicating effectively is a two-way street, and employers who improve their ability to listen will become better communicators as a result.
And yet, despite the critical role that developing this soft skill can have on improving leadership, it remains alarmingly underdeveloped compared to more traditional leadership traits. A 2020 poll of learning and development leaders found that 49 percent had no plans to increase their focus on soft skill development during management training. That’s nearly the same amount of leaders who Gartner predicts are unprepared to meet the management challenges of the post-pandemic world. There are a raft of new obstacles for leaders to overcome in the next normal that are contributing to this estimation, but a growing gap in empathy, perhaps the most important soft skill of them all, is chief among them.
Resolving communication problems should be top priority.
Neglecting to address a widespread communication breakdown within your workforce can be costly.
In fact, one study even found the average annual loss to be $62.4 million for organizations where communication practices were poor.
Companies where employee communication was inadequate experienced an average annual loss of $62.4M.
Poor communication disconnects colleagues from one another and distances them from your organization and its goals. As that chasm widens, engagement suffers.