6 Ways You Are Sabotaging Your Team

**Pre-publication excerpt from The Antidote: Building Insanely Profitable, High Performing Teams Without Creating a Toxic Workplace That Makes People Want to Kill Themselves, Benjamin’s newest book that will be available in April 2022.**

Go to PriorityInitiative.com/Connect and fill out the form to get emailed when it is available!

The following is a list of six ways that you, as a team leader, can sabotage your team.

Often, the leader has a blind spot to many of the things that they are doing wrong, especially the things that may be shackling the team and preventing them from doing what needs to be done. Most of the time this isn’t on purpose, but they still can’t see what’s right in front of them. To get true clarity on this, perform an anonymous survey of your team to see if they think you are doing any of the following six things on your team. This can be set up in Google Forms for easy response and compilation of data. Use the feedback to adjust your leadership approach and guide your next team training session on adaptability.

Sabotage #1: Trying to Be the One-Eyed King.

This is a reference to the quote by Dutch philosopher Erasmus who said, “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” If you keep your team members in the dark about what you’re thinking and where you want to go with the business, it doesn’t make you the leader because you know more than them. You are taking away the ability of your team members to help and sabotaging your team in the process.

You may not be able to see the whole picture yet as the one-eyed king, but if your team members don’t even know what their part is in the picture you can see, they can’t act intentionally to move the company forward.

The one-eyed king doesn’t communicate changes. They expect the rest of the team members to recognize for themselves that things are changing and flow with it. They also don’t communicate why changes are being made. They keep the strategy and reasoning close to their chest, often because they are afraid of failure, challenges to their leadership, or because they don’t trust all their team members.

Communicate your vision, mission, intent, and end state (like we talked about in chapter titled “Team by Design”) and extend trust to your team members. A true leader will extend trust to all their team members until mistrust is earned.

The good leader is strategic and intentional when hiring, so they surround themselves with the best people. And if everyone on their team is the best, they deserve trust from the leader by default. Extended trust produces loyalty as a natural response.

And loyal team members will take disciplined initiative to grow the organization in the direction of the goals you have communicated.

Sabotage #2: Treating Your People Like Employees, Not Team Members.

Do you think about your team members like children or less capable versions of yourself instead of fellow adults and professionals with insights and ideas to share? If you do, it will come through in the way you interact with them even if you’ve never said anything to them to indicate the way you think about them. If you don’t respect your teammates, they will pick up on it and not be motivated to do their best work for you.

One of the easiest ways to pinpoint this mindset and attitude is with micromanaging. When team leaders give their teams too much direction without allowing them to come up with their own solutions, they prevent their teams from doing their best work by not allowing the team to make any decisions themselves. When people are micromanaged, they become frustrated and don’t feel like they have any control over their own success.

And this moves them into the more than 75% of the employed workforce who are readily open to the opportunity to go work for a different team that better expresses appreciation of their abilities and allows them to feel more in control of their success on the team. (And this 75% of team members are willing to take a pay cut to join a more appreciative team!)

Sabotage #3: My Way or the Highway.

When you insist that things be done your way or no way at all, you make it impossible for your team to adapt as circumstances require. This is even worse than micromanaging.

You delegate tasks but fail to delegate decision making authority to your team members. You expect team members to think, respond, and act just like you and complain or correct them when they don’t do things exactly the way you would. After all, you built this company and you know better than everyone else, right?!

The more you take back the reins from team members who don’t pursue goals the way you would have, the less interested anyone will be in taking them up in the first place. Learn to let go and choose your battles wisely. Realistically, only about 10-20% of the decisions being made in your company actually need to be made by you as the leader.

While it’s helpful for leaders to know what every team member is doing for situational awareness in a smaller company, there comes a time when the team needs to be trusted to get their work done.

Sabotage #4: Dismissing Ideas Without Fully Considering Them.

Dismissing new ideas as silly, impractical, or ineffective without even seriously considering them first is a surefire way of missing out on new opportunities to generate revenue. Often, team members will be able to identify friction points in the business and see problems areas before you will and have solid recommendations for a solution. If you continue with plans even after it has become clear they are not working, you are forcing everyone down a path of misery.

If you fail to solicit feedback from your team and don’t act on it when it is given, they’ll feel unvalued and unheard. When leaders don’t ask their teams what they think about various work challenges or issues, team members will start feeling as if they’re just punching the clock.

If your team members tell you about ways in which they think things could be done more effectively, it’s your job to take action. If you continually fail to solicit feedback from your team members, they’ll start to feel as if the only way that they can get ahead in their career is by quitting.

Sabotage #5: Overload Them with Work They Cannot Handle.

As an effective leader, it is your responsibility to know each member of your team. Understand their strengths and areas for growth. If you overload your team members with work that they cannot handle yet, they’ll become frustrated and want to quit. What does this look like?

Giving them tasks that have tight deadlines on a regular basis. When you assign a task without knowing if the team member has enough time to complete it, you are putting your team member in an impossible situation and almost always guaranteeing their failure.
Piling extra work on top of their regular workload. When you assign them tasks that they don’t have time (or professional capabilities) to complete, it makes the whole team unproductive.
Not prioritizing the right tasks. If your team members are constantly asked to do low-priority projects instead of working on the biggest needle-movers (profit generating activities) for their role, they’ll become frustrated. They will get so tired of the meaningless activity that they may end up going somewhere else to take on some productivity.

Sabotage #6: Don’t Give Them the Tools They Need to Succeed.

If you don’t provide your team with all the tools that they need to complete their work successfully, they’ll feel as if they’re playing a game without any rules. The minimum tools that every team member needs are: time for training, the right information, the right resources, and a way to provide feedback.

If your team members aren’t trained for success, they’ll become frustrated when they can’t do their work well because everyone wants to be a winner. If they are kept in the dark about how things work, they will feel as if no matter how hard they work, they’re not going to get ahead.

When your team isn’t able to use the right equipment or software, it leaves them feeling as if they’re treading water and wasting time. And when you don’t provide a way for your team to provide feedback about the problems that exist within your organization, your team will start to feel as if they’re not getting any better and leave for a healthier work environment.

Go to PriorityInitiative.com/Connect and fill out the form to get emailed when it is available!