7 Leadership Mistakes That Limit Team’s Growth

Published June 13, 2024 · Updated June 13, 2024

Leaders aren’t perfect—they make mistakes all the time. Some mistakes are costly to business while others directly impact a team’s productivity and performance.

Business related mistakes don’t go unnoticed—they’re highly visible, discussed at great lengths and much attention is given to how to prevent such mistakes from happening again.

Mistakes that concern the team’s growth though are hardly discussed or given proper attention. These hidden and often invisible mistakes not only limit a team’s growth, but also impact business outcomes.

A team that isn’t growing can’t keep pace with the challenges and skills required for the future. Building a strong, highly performant team is the only way to achieve organization goals and hit business targets.

Leadership is seeing the consequences of our actions further in the future than those around us can.
— Hans Finzel, The Top Ten Mistakes Leaders Make

Overcome these seven leadership mistakes as they’re integral to building a successful team.

Prioritizing urgent work at the cost of important tasks

Some leaders ruthlessly prioritize to ensure important work is not compromised at the cost of urgent actions. Other leaders treat every request as a priority and don’t pay attention to how much something deserves their attention.

Attaching a heightened sense of urgency to every request makes it difficult for their teams to get any meaningful work done. Being bombarded with a false sense of urgency makes them operate like a mad powerhouse—people in the team keep running in many different directions without actually reaching anywhere.

Jumping from one task to another and being in a constant state of overwhelm and reactivity can drain team energy, increase stress and can even lead to burnout. When employees don’t get time to do deep work or experience the joy and pleasure of being in a state of flow, they feel unhappy, stuck and dissatisfied.

Mindless busyness due to a false sense of urgency does not lead to progress, it only adds to stress.

Expecting your team to take urgent requests seriously and attend to them in a timely manner isn’t wrong. It’s counterproductive when every other request is given a high priority and the team is expected to jump at the chance.

If leaders don’t articulate their priorities clearly, then the people around them don’t know what their own priorities should be. Time and energy and capital get wasted.
— Robert Iger, The Ride of a Lifetime

Don’t limit your team’s growth by creating a false sense of urgency. Prioritize important work and show how true value is created.

Delegating without adequate support

A big part of a leader’s job is learning to delegate effectively. Delegation not only enables their team to step up and embrace challenges outside their comfort zone, it also frees up the leaders time to invest in future oriented work that is only meant for them.

But delegation isn’t about assigning work and leaving your team to struggle and figure everything out on their own.

Empowerment without adequate support can lead to frustration, add to confusion and make your team miserable, which can hurt their motivation and morale.

Delegate, don’t abdicate.

Be aware of your team’s limitations and skills.
Identify areas where they’ll need support and areas where they can operate independently.
Set upfront expectations on the intermediate milestones. Align on frequency of updates. Discuss how and when you can touch base to keep things moving.
When faced with challenges or setbacks, help them find their own solutions by asking questions instead of spoon-feeding solutions.

Delegation without follow-through is abdication. You can never wash your hands of a task. Even after you delegate it, you are still responsible for its accomplishment, and monitoring the delegated task is the only practical way for you to ensure a result. Monitoring is not meddling, but means checking to make sure an activity is proceeding in line with expectations.
— Andy Groove, High Output Management

Don’t limit your team’s growth by delegating without follow-through. Be around to help when they need you the most.

Telling team to avoid mistakes at all costs

Leaders may create unnecessary pressure in their team by setting very high expectations and demonstrating low tolerance for mistakes.

Expecting flawless execution without failures and setbacks comes at a cost—their team operates out of fear as opposed to doing what’s right.

They play safe and choose solutions that are less risky even though other solutions that are more risky but better suited to the situation exist.
They hide mistakes due to fear of reprisal until it’s too late to fix and course correct.
They refuse to take opportunities that are outside their comfort zone to avoid shame and humiliation that comes with failing.

In school we learn that mistakes are bad, and we are punished for making them. Yet, if you look at the way humans are designed to learn, we learn by making mistakes. We learn to walk by falling down. If we never fell down, we would never walk.
— Robert T. Kiyosaki, Rich Dad, Poor Dad

Your team isn’t learning if they aren’t making mistakes. Instead of telling them to avoid mistakes, help them adopt a learning attitude.

Letting conflicts linger on for too long

A leader’s job is tough because it requires the ability to fight our default tendency to avoid discomfort that comes with facing conflicts.

Ignoring conflicts or putting them off for too long does not make the problem disappear, it only makes it worse. Yet, instead of resolving the conflict at the right time and putting it to rest, some leaders choose to avoid it.

When the conflict is not resolved, unproductive and repetitive thoughts keep circling in your team’s mind which distracts them from focusing on the task at hand thereby lowering their productivity and performance.

When handled effectively, successful confrontations raise team performance. To manage conflict effectively, you must begin by recognizing there are three sides to every story:Yours / Theirs / The Truth
— Angie Morgan

Don’t overlook problems and hope they’ll go away. Handling conflict may be uncomfortable, but letting them linger on is much more damaging.

Tolerating bad behavior or poor performance

Robert Sutton writes in Good Boss, Bad Boss “The best bosses do more than charge up people, and recruit and breed energizers. They eliminate the negative, because even a few bad apples and destructive acts can undermine many good people and constructive acts.”

When it comes to eliminating these bad apples though, many leaders turn a blind eye, especially if these people are high performers who have an uncanny ability to produce outstanding work.

Tolerating their toxic behavior—getting agitated when others make mistakes, expect them to work at their pace, pass sarcastic remarks, challenge their intelligence, belittle their skills, or demean them when things don’t work out the way they expected—conveys the message that such behavior is acceptable and anybody can get away with it.

This can happen in two ways:

Passive enabler: Passively enabling these behaviors by failing to notice them and staying ignorant of the effect they have on your team.
Active enabler: Actively contributing to it by delaying action—waiting for more proof, ignoring the conflict, worrying about losing them. You may also try to rationalize the situation by convincing yourself that things aren’t that bad after all, or they are too minor to be noticed.

You may also ignore poor performers in the team with the attitude that they don’t deserve your attention. But doing nothing about their poor performance is not harmless—it impacts morale in the team as others feel dragged down to make up for their slack and find lack of accountability as a sign that you as a leader don’t care about fairness or building excellence in the team.

Don’t burden your team by ignoring poor performance or toxic behavior. Give them a healthy work environment to flourish and thrive.

Being too busy, hence unapproachable

Leaders calendars are packed with meetings, agendas, issues to resolve, business to grow and stakeholders never ending demands.

Trying to keep things running and meet everyone’s expectations makes them miss a critical element of leadership—being approachable and available to their team.

Not being around to answer queries keeps their team blocked or make wrong assumptions, lead with suboptimal decisions and miss the opportunity to fix issues on time. Waiting endlessly without clarity on when they’ll get a response is also highly frustrating to the team.

Another problem with creating a wall between them and the employees is lack of understanding of the issues that plague their team’s productivity and performance. Leaders end up wasting time in attending to superficial issues without addressing the root cause.

Cut down on busyness by applying the 80/20 rule—only 20% of your meetings account for 80% of your results.

Richard Koch explains the 80/20 principle this way “The 80/20 Principle asserts that a minority of causes, inputs or effort usually lead to a majority of the results, outputs or rewards. Taken literally, this means that, for example, 80 percent of what you achieve in your job comes from 20 percent of the time spent. Thus for all practical purposes, four-fifths of the effort – a dominant part of it – is largely irrelevant. This is contrary to what people normally expect.”

Less meetings are not only less taxing on your schedule, they give you the mental space needed to be available to your team.

Your value as a leader is not based on the number of hours you put in, it’s the time spent creating value. The more value you create, the more your team will learn and grow.

Too much focus on execution without the big picture

Leaders are responsible for setting the strategy and giving life to that strategy through a strong execution plan.

Execution minded leaders can often forget to leverage the big picture thinking when motivating their team to deal with setbacks and challenges.

When struggling to keep up with a behavior or looking for inspiration, connecting action to a larger purpose and thinking about goals using the big picture ‘why’ based thinking is highly motivating. So whenever your team finds it hard to pursue their goals, energize them using the big picture ‘why’ based thinking.

Ask these questions:

What is the purpose of this action?
What goal does it help you achieve and why is this goal meaningful to you?
What will be the benefit of completing this action?
What will happen if you do not complete this goal?

If you’re not showing them a big picture of your business growth and how they can contribute, they will never know what the next step looks like. They don’t understand what skills they need to develop because they don’t know why they would need to develop into something different; the picture has not been created.
— Natalie Dawson, TeamWork

Pushing your team when they’re struggling won’t get you the results. Use the big picture thinking to motivate and energize.

Summary

Creating a false sense of urgency distracts your team from doing impactful work and making meaningful contributions. Clearly define priorities to enable them to put their time and energy to good use.
Empowerment is important, but it does not mean leaving your team to struggle and figure everything out on their own. Be around to support and guide.
When avoiding mistakes is the goal, playing safe takes the front seat while risky opportunities that might be more valuable are pushed aside. Teach your team to treat mistakes as valuable learning lessons and not something to avoid.
Not attending to conflicts at the right time exacerbates the problem and eats up into people’s mental space that’s better spent in solving problems. Embrace conflicts even if they’re uncomfortable at first.
Tolerating bad behavior or letting poor performance slip by communicates a wrong message to the team that you only care about outcomes and nothing else matters. Set clear expectations on what kind of behavior and outcomes won’t be accepted.
Leaders who are too busy with meetings, agendas and goals fail to give their teams their time and attention which is necessary to perform and execute. Apply the Pareto principle to eliminate work that does not matter and double down your effort on work that does.
When your team faces challenges and setbacks at work, pushing them harder to achieve goals does not work. Using the big picture thinking in such situations can motivate them to reach for their potential and identify creative solutions to unblock themselves and move forward.