Leader weakness considerations

When identifying potential leaders within your current staff, you might often look for desirable or promising leadership qualities. However, it can also be beneficial to look at leader weakness traits to look for potential issues. These issues can be coaching points if you’re mentoring someone to move toward management positions. You might also realize that some weaknesses could make the employee a poor candidate for a leadership role. 

Looking at your own leadership style and qualities to identify potential weaknesses is an effective way to improve your performance and become a better leader. Reflecting on your go-to management strategies and how you interact with your employees can help you spot common leadership weakness issues in yourself.

Every leader has some weaknesses and areas of improvement, and some are easier to overcome than others. Some weaknesses can be corrected with training and coaching. However, others are innate or deeply rooted traits that are more challenging to overcome. For instance, having a general lack of integrity is much more difficult to overcome than needing to hone communication skills. 

1. Lack of integrity

Company values vary from one organization to the next, but integrity should always be one of the guiding principles. A leader with a lack of integrity creates a negative work environment. As someone who serves as a role model, a leader without integrity encourages that behavior in other employees. This can create poor habits that hurt the company’s work and reputation. It can also cause tension between employees if some maintain their integrity while others resort to dishonest behaviors. Lack of integrity often leads to trust issues and makes it difficult for your employees to respect you as a leader. 

2. Lack of empathy

Failing to show empathy with your employees sends the message that you don’t care, and it causes you to miss out on valuable information. Empathy means you can see things from someone else’s perspective and can recognize their emotions, motivation and experiences.

Say an employee’s performance has declined because they’re going through personal challenges. If you lack empathy, you might reprimand them for their poor performance instead of supporting them while they deal with their personal situation. Another example is when an employee comes to you and tells you they can’t handle the current workload. If you tell them they need to figure out a way to do it and offer no support or solutions, you’re showing a lack of empathy. 

3. Poor communication skills

Lacking communication skills as a leader creates confusion. When employees don’t have the information they need, they often can’t perform their job duties well. Some examples of poor communication include:

• Not giving employees feedback or not giving them useful feedback
• Being vague
• Over-communicating with too many emails, staff meetings and other communications, causing people to stop listening
• Using technical jargon that some employees don’t understand or use regularly
• Having an aggressive or abrasive tone

It can take time to get your communication just right. Getting feedback from your staff on your communication style can help you improve. 

4. Inflexibility

Effective leaders need to be decisive and take charge, but that doesn’t mean being completely rigid and unwilling to change. Sticking to the same methods and procedures you’ve always used can keep your organization stuck. While some industries with strict regulations need consistent structure, it’s still possible to consider new ideas and adapt to situations as they arise. Introducing flexibility can help you find new solutions and improve on processes to boost efficiency. 

5. Hypocrisy

Holding your team to a high standard helps your company achieve more and maintain your values and morals. However, you also need to hold yourself to those standards. Telling your team to do one thing while you do the opposite fosters resentment and negativity. Your employees might start doing whatever they want as well. You could also see an increase in complaints or face high turnover rates.

Managers set the tone for the team. Your behaviors are more powerful than what you say to your team. By following the rules and expectations that you set, you’re showing that you value those standards and expect everyone to follow them. It can also help build loyalty and make your team members feel like they can trust you. 

6. Micromanagement tendencies

Micromanagement in the workplace can hurt employee productivity and morale. Not only is it annoying for employees to have their manager looking over their shoulder at every turn, but it also sends the message that you don’t trust them. It can be difficult to release control and let your employees handle the process on their own, but you hired them for their specific skill sets so you need to let them use those skills. That doesn’t mean you should never check in with your employees. It just means you need to support them without being too involved. 

7. Trust issues

A lack of trust in any capacity negatively impacts your leadership. If you lack trust in your team, you might second guess them, micromanage or not support them. This will create a disconnect and likely hurt productivity. Believing in your team and providing training if necessary to give them the skills to handle their duties can help build trust. 

If you act in an untrustworthy way, you’ll also damage the relationship you have with your employees. They’ll always wonder what your intentions are or if they can trust you this time. Mistrust can grow if you’re inconsistent, don’t follow through on your word or outright lie to your employees. Being transparent in communication and staying true to your word are simple ways to build trust with the team. 

8. Failure to see other viewpoints

It’s easy to get focused on your goals and push hard to reach them. Failing to see the bigger picture or look at things from other perspectives can limit your team’s achievement. If you’re stuck in this way of thinking, you might reject suggestions from your team or struggle to consider new solutions. 

You’re in a leadership position for a reason, and your decisions might often be on point. But it’s also important to be open-minded and hear out other ideas. Collaborating with other team members can help you perfect your solutions and decisions or come up with something even better. Even if you go with your original idea, being willing to listen to other ideas objectively inspires collaboration and helps you make solid decisions. 

9. Showing favoritism

Favoritism affects team relationships, often creating tension and leaving some employees feeling resentful. It can hurt motivation for employees who feel like you favor other people. They don’t have an incentive to work hard if they’re never going to get the advantages that the manager’s favorites get. It could also lead to higher turnover.

Being aware of unconscious biases that might cause you to favor certain employees can help you overcome this issue. For instance, affinity bias happens when you have something in common with someone and might like them more because of that connection. The halo effect means that you might let one outstanding characteristic or achievement of a person overshadow anything negative that they do. These and other biases could cause you to favor those employees. 

10. Not having clear expectations

Clear goals and expectations help guide your employees’ actions. Failing to set expectations leaves everyone guessing what they should do. It can create inconsistent or low-quality results. Your employees might feel frustrated because they don’t know what you want or how to achieve high-quality results. 

Even if you have expectations and goals in mind, you can have another leader’s weakness if you fail to communicate those expectations to your employees. Because you have the expectations clearly in mind, it can be easy to forget that other people don’t already have those things in mind as well. Expressing your expectations clearly and checking in with your employees to make sure they understand the expectations can help you get the desired outcomes from your team. 

11. Having unrealistic expectations

Another potential weakness of leadership related to expectations is being unrealistic. This often happens if you’re disconnected from your employees. Examples of unrealistic expectations include expecting sales numbers that are unattainable, expecting a project to wrap up faster than possible or giving employees new duties when they’re already struggling to meet their current responsibilities. 

Those unrealistic expectations can affect morale and the mental health of your employees. Too much pressure can leave them feeling overwhelmed. This can be even worse if your employees feel like they can’t talk to you about your unrealistic expectations. 

Developing closer working relationships with your employees can help you be more realistic. Encourage open communication, and meet for one-on-ones regularly to make sure your employees have the support they need.