Most articles about leadership focus on best practice. However, this piece is about worst practice – and how to avoid it.

1. Being the No.1 ideas generator. Most of the people we work with in leadership positions think that they are there to come up with ideas. They are living in the past to be brutal. That is the territory and luxury of the early shift – people early in their careers. As soon as you get people working with you as your team then the whole game changes. You have other mouths to feed with inspiration. It’s not just you who has to stay interested and excited – others do too. You can either help this to happen by giving them permission and encouragement to think or you can starve them and have all the fun and challenge yourself.
2. The ‘open-door’ policy. This is one of those things like ‘teamwork’ and ‘empathy’. If you are naming it it’s because you’re not doing it. When the doors to management offices opened all those years ago it was only the dinosaurs who didn’t take them off the hinges altogether. The new generation of leaders were encouraged (ordered) to get out on the floor to MBWA (Manage By Wandering Around). The expectation was now that we would leave our offices and get seriously interested in what all those funny little people out there, called ‘staff’, were doing with their time and the company’s money. Let’s not go back on that one by talking about the ‘open doors’ that shouldn’t even be there.
3. Buy-in. If you have begun a project or initiative and you are now looking to get buy-in you are too late. Involvement which produces ‘buy-in’ should be adopted at the conception stage – not after the birth.
4. Teams bigger than seven. Something strange happens in a group’s dynamics as soon as you have more than six people around the table. If you have fewer than four it can be hard to generate energy and ideas; things can get stuck. As soon as there are seven or more around a table then someone will almost certainly quieten down or shut down. Is this another manifestation of the power of the magical number 7?
5. Email to your direct reports. I’m not just going off email – I’m getting frightened about its capacity for messing up the message and the flow of relationships in general. Here are 5 reasons not to communicate with your team this way. Firstly a ‘good’ email takes time to compose and check – time is probably one thing you have little of. Secondly, ambiguity – can you guarantee its absence? – No. Thirdly, unknown reaction – how have you made the other person feel at that moment? You don’t know. Next: Depersonalisation – the email replaced the corporate memorandum or ‘memo’ – the dinosaur’s manager’s way of communicating bad news, orders and all the other forms of rubbish that floats around companies between people. Don’t ruin the email by making it do the jobs that should be done face to face. lastly… Relationships are about creating a feeling of closeness. Emails, in a team situation, tend to create distance.
6. Working more than 45 hours a week. The toughest consulting outfit I ever worked with had one really good rule: no working on client site after 6pm. The thought was that if you couldn’t get it done in nine hours you were deemed to be “out of control” as the saying went. The reality was that they wanted to make their consultants look efficient to the client which enabled them to constantly point out the inefficiency of the client’s staff. Nevertheless, here are three genuinely wholesome reasons to go home on time: The return on time invested dips more steeply the later you work. Secondly, your people will think they have to copy you – a daft competition is set up. Lastly, rest will make you more personally effective the next day.
   

   55 hours this week and still going wrong

7. PowerPoint. I like a good graph as much as the next man. But within a team I cannot think why anybody needs to even open their laptop other than to show off a new litter of puppies or exchange holiday snaps. The alternative? A pen, a flipchart and the minimum amount of data and information that you need to get the troops fired up.
8. Big words. Continuing on the theme of impact… this comes up again and again in PEC client sessions. Bottom line: everyone likes to listen to an expert who uses simple language to express complex ideas. People also trust simple language largely because people who have something to hide (like bad news or a lack of knowledge) mostly try to cover their tracks with big words (and lots of them). Go simple for maximum impact.
9. A client suggested this one: He wanted his boss to: “Stop trying to do my job for me – provide guidance etc. but then let me get on and do it myself.”
10. The same client sought some 360 degree feedback. His team gave him feedback about being more himself – here are his comments: “[they wanted me to] to switch off and just sometimes be myself, rather than by business-self. I suppose we get wrapped up in doing what’s right for the business and forget about the importance of emotional connections.”

My comment on this feedback would be that most people, both in our public and private lives, want to be given the chance to know us – to be trusted with the real person. To pretend perfection is to shut people out – to say to them: “I don’t trust you with who I really am.”

So that is the PEC take on what good leaders should give up. As always, please feel free to get in touch if you want to discuss the points we have made here.