The Biggest Mistakes a Manager Can Make

And the one behavior that can help you avoid the worst mistakes a manager can make.

Clients frequently ask me, what are the biggest mistakes a manager can make?

If you are thinking about how to do your best as a manager, or at least how to avoid being a bad boss, you may be wondering the same. In this article, I’ll review some of the biggest mistakes managers can make, and the one behavior that will help you avoid making the same mistakes yourself.

Why These Are the Top Mistakes a Manager Can Make

Throughout my career, I’ve seen managers make the same mistakes over and over again. They happen in every industry and in every country. They happen to first time leaders, and sometimes, leaders spend whole careers trapped in them.

I call these behaviors mistakes because they consistently lead to poor results and teams that don’t try very hard. People stop learning and don’t try to innovate or improve processes. They don’t adapt to new circumstances. People roll their eyes and whisper behind the leaders’ backs. People do the minimum required for the job. They may get blamed (which makes them even less motivated), but everyone knows they are not responsible. They did what they were told to do.

I’ve also seen brilliant leaders pull together inexperienced teams and achieve extraordinary results. These leaders take responsibility for every problem and give their team credit for every achievement. When things go wrong, they listen carefully to what happened, and let people know their mistakes are understandable. They help them learn and figure out how to try again smarter. On teams like this, people will do anything to get it right.

From what I have seen, I agree with Jocko Willink who says, “There are no bad teams, only bad leaders.” Here are the five biggest mistakes a leader can make, and the one leadership behavior that will help you avoid them all.

The Five Biggest Mistakes Managers Make

Mistake 1: Focusing on results rather than building trust.

Teams work best when everyone knows what everyone else does best, and they trust each other to do their best job. When leaders focus on results before building trust on the team, team members become siloed. They focus on results and try to protect their own results. The last thing they want is to get blamed for someone else who didn’t do a good job, so territorialism and silos arise.

Mistake 2: Trying to be heard and not listening enough.

Leadership presence is about perception. When leaders try to assert their leadership by demanding attention, commandeering the agenda, and asserting their authority, it backfires. Others perceive these behaviors not as leadership but as arrogant, aggressive, or compensating for a lack of self-confidence. You can’t be seen as a leader if you’re not tuning into what other people are saying. In fact, responding to what other people need is exactly what makes people trust a leader enough to follow their suggestions. The number one skill that predicts effective leadership is the ability to be aware of other people’s needs.   

Mistake 3: Trying to demand respect, rather than earning it by building your team’s self esteem.

Respect cannot be demanded. You can command behavior, you can make people act deferentially, but these behaviors will not make people respect you. In fact, they will more likely make people resent you and lose faith in your abilities. Instinctively, we know the pretenders from people with authenticity. If you want respect, the best way to earn it is by building other people’s self-esteem. When you respect others, you show them you have the confidence to respect yourself. 

Mistake 4: Trying a command-and-control leadership style or trying to do your team’s work for them.

These two behaviors, which seem like opposites, actually have the same root. When a leader doesn’t trust their team, they try to control the team or control the work. Either way, it backfires.

Here’s what happens. A team member makes a mistake. Most learning on the job is trial-and-error learning, so mistakes in every job are inevitable. In response, the manager tells them exactly what to do in order to avoid that mistake in the future. They do exactly what the manager told them to do, and it doesn’t work because some circumstances have changed. Now both the manager and the team member are frustrated, and it’s likely that blaming will ensue, eroding trust further. This is the point at which many managers just try to do the work themselves. Or maybe the manager tries to be more exact with instructions and starts to micromanage.

Either way, the result is a lack of trust on both sides, leading to a cycle of mistrust. The negative feelings on both sides become the main distraction and lowers work quality.  

Mistake 5: Not connecting with team members as people.

When managers are only interested in their team members’ work, and don’t show interest in them as individuals, people lose interest. They feel replaceable. They don’t feel appreciated for the unique individual they intrinsically are. When people are treated this way, they feel disrespected and their motivation goes down. Inevitably, performance suffers.

I once had a client who was complaining about a team member who wasn’t meeting expectations. “Why don’t they just do their job!” she asked, incredulously. When I asked her what she knew about her team member, she went quiet for a moment and said, “I don’t know anything about him, really.” Suddenly, it dawned on her that maybe he was unmotivated because he didn’t feel that anyone at work cared about him. It was too late. The guy resigned a couple weeks later. However, it was a great lesson, and she has been leading a much more engaged team ever since them because she goes out of her way to show she cares. She learned quickly how to avoid one of the biggest mistakes a manager can make.

You don’t have to be their best friend, but you do have to be a real, authentic friend and care about them. When that happens, they will begin to try harder. Be patient. If you have not built friendship before, expect a real relationship to start to form over a year or two, not in a few months. Your patience will pay off in the long run.

The One Behavior that Helps You Avoid All of the Biggest Mistakes a Manager Can Make: Listen More than You Speak.

It may seem simple, but it is harder to do than it seems. It requires that we tune our attention to others and quiet down our own needs and desires. That is no easy matter. But when you dedicate yourself to listening to others, expecially your team, you are acting like a real leader.

When you listen to your team:

• You are showing trust that what they have to say is valuable and worthy of your time and attention.
• You are showing respect. Listening is, in fact, the greatest sign of respect.
• You are also demonstrating your own confidence and self-awareness.
• You are showing that you care about them as a person.
• You help them feel heard and understood. As a result, they calm down, feel safe, and become receptive to influence, suggestions, and ideas.

When you trust your team enough to let them decide, on their own, how to proceed, they will do their best to be worthy of your trust. If you encourage them to take responsibility, they are more likely to take ownership of the work. When they get it wrong and you help them learn to make it right, their self-esteem will rise. When they get it right and you praise their accomplishments, their self-esteem will rise. Either way, your influence, respect, and leadership will grow, and your team will work harder to get the results you want.

So if you want to be a good manager, and avoid the biggest mistakes a manager can make, trust your team and listen more than you speak. It is not easy, but it is the best way to be a better leader.