In the movie ‘How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days’ Kate Hudson plays a character trying to make her guy (Matthew McConnaghy) pay for his boasting about picking up girls. She deliberately does all kinds of horrible things to annoy and frustrate him trying to make him break up their relationship.
It would seem that some leaders are almost as intent as Kate on losing their followers (although I’m pretty sure most are not deliberately trying to do so). I thought it would be instructive and perhaps a fun exercise to come up with the top 10 ways leaders can lose followers.
We are talking about the inconsiderate things leaders do because they really are too busy focusing on themselves and totally underappreciating their team members.
If you are a leader of a team, an organisation, a business or any kind of group of people (even a family) then I’d suggest that here are 10 ways you can ensure that you will lose all but the most docile followers. And the opposite is also true – as you take care to be considerate, empowering, caring, supportive, inspiring and well organised you will find your team rising to make outstanding contributions to your organisation or group.
The Top 10 Ways For Leaders to Lose Followers
- Change your leadership vision and plan regularly and spontaneously so that it is very difficult to follow you
- Make policies and decisions on the run and then often change them and deny you said it
- Show no interest at all in the personal passions of your team members
- Forget appointments and what is important to your team members, worse still call them by a wrong name
- Often make demands of them at the end of their day or week which easily could have been made earlier in the day
- Lose you temper at them without any good reason other than that you are frustrated and want to yell at someone
- Blame them for your mistakes in front of others
- Take credit for their contribution to projects and outcomes without giving them any acknowledgement
- After they have done a lot of work on your urgent project putting in extra hours tell them that it didn’t matter after all
- Play them off against other members of the team, creating a competitive rather than a cooperative work environment
Might that do it? How to lose followers and demotivate people?
One more…… Never compliment staff when they do well but ALWAYS notice and comment on the mistakes they have made.
I have come across leaders, bosses and business owners who act like this often and expect that their employees will take it simply because they are being paid. Did you know that far more people leave jobs because they don’t like the boss than because of lack of pay. In fact many people will stay in a lower paid role because they love the work environment.
I can think of a lot more points but I would rather focus on the positive. If you turn each of these points into the positive you will have a list of 11 ways to ensure you build a fantastic team who will love to flow with your leadership.
Have you got any comments to add? I’d love to hear from you.
