What Leadership List Are You On?
At the beginning of my leadership workshops, one of the ice-breaking activities is to have the participants think about and jot down the characteristics and behaviors of great and lousy leaders that they’ve experienced in their careers.
It’s always fun to watch the small groups attack this task with relish. Some groups immediately move towards the “lousy” leaders column and literally burn through the ink in their markers. Others gravitate towards the “great” leaders column and often lose track of the assignment as they start describing to their group members why so and so was such a great leader.
One element of this exercise that is very predictable is the listing of the items that make it into each column. In class after class and by now with several hundred data points, the words and behaviors are consistently the same.
The Lousy Leaders:
- Don’t pay attention
- Actions don’t match words
- Self-serving agenda-all about them
- No coaching or feedback/focuses on weaknesses
- No developmental support
- Disrespectful
- Micromanages
- CYA style of leading
- Not approachable
- Won’t make a decision
- Supported my professional development
- Treated me with respect at ll times
- Honest
- Gave me feedback/coaching
- Makes decisions in a timely manner
- Pushed me out of my comfort zone
- Didn’t throw me under the bus when I made a mistake
- Acted as a mentor and teacher
- Easy to approach
- Gave me room to grow and learn
Comments
5 Comments on What Leadership List Are You On?
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Gwyn Teatro on
Tue, 5th May 2009 4:38 pm
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Art Petty on
Tue, 5th May 2009 5:26 pm
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Three Star Leadership Blog on
Wed, 6th May 2009 5:21 pm
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Fred H Schlegel on
Thu, 7th May 2009 2:50 pm
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Staff Door » Blog Archive » Weekly Reading List - Week 19 on
Fri, 8th May 2009 4:08 pm
It would be interesting to see if we could get all “lousy leaders” in a room and ask them to do the same exercise, what their lists would look like. 
Gwyn, I like your thinking! If only…
5/6/09: Midweek Look at the Independent Business Blogs…
Every week I select five excellent posts from this week’s independent business blogs. This week, I’m pointing you to posts on employee engagement, feedback, supervision, communication, and what kind of leader you are.
…
Sad thing is, if you did pull all the lousy leaders into a room they probably wouldn’t recognize themselves on the first list. That or they’d want to move the conversation towards lousy followers…
[...] What Leadership List Are You On? (Art Petty) [...]
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