It’s hard to be a leader. Learn how to navigate these hardships and succeed.
- Leaders often struggle with cultures of overwork. Focusing on key priorities can help.
- Strong leaders recognize that “bad apples” have complex performance profiles.
- Leaders need to recover at the end of the workday, but rarely do.
Being a leader isn’t easy. Being a great leader is even harder. Even when leaders are well-intended, there are often roadblocks on their path to success. What are some common challenges that even great leaders face? And how can you overcome them? Our research on exemplary leaders and their ability to maintain leadership excellence, even in the face of hardships, can help.
Below are several core challenges that we found leaders may face as they strive to create happier, healthier, and more productive teams, along with ideas for overcoming these challenges so you can continue to be the leader you want to be.
Cultures of Overwork
We often hear from leaders who are trying to set a positive and productive tone on their teams that they are combating a broader culture of overwork. If you’re trying to support your team in working smarter instead of harder, and you want team members to have appropriate boundaries between work and life, you may feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle if other leaders aren’t doing the same. What can leaders do if the culture they want to create is different from the culture in their larger organization?
We found that leaders who are successful in creating a culture that is better than — and different from — their larger organizational culture do so in a few ways. First, they focus on demonstrating how their teams are delivering on the key priorities that their senior leaders care about. Happy and healthy teams usually perform better. So, understanding how to communicate your team’s successes in ways that you know will resonate with top leadership can help. This can also help you to scale back the amount of work your team is expected to perform. Communicating that key priorities will get less time and attention if more is added to your plate could help keep workloads reasonable.
Going hand in hand with this, keeping track of metrics can also help. Is turnover or employee engagement top of mind for your senior leadership? Show how your leadership style is improving these metrics by tracking them and presenting this data to senior leaders directly.
Finally, these leaders find like-minded champions to partner with. There is power in numbers, so finding others who view your leadership style positively and have had good results emulating it can help make the case for more broadly adopting your practices.
Bad Apples
The second core struggle that we hear about from leaders trying to create better team environments is that there are some members of the team who aren’t on board. Sometimes leaders refer to these employees as “bad apples”. But the truth is that “bad apples” are usually not all bad — and their behaviors can often be improved.
Leaders who have been successful at ensuring that “bad apples” don’t ruin the whole bunch do a few things. First, they recognize that most people have complex performance profiles — they aren’t all bad or all good. Instead of focusing just on what needs fixing, these leaders will point out and reinforce what these employees are doing well. By reinforcing positive behaviors, these leaders show them what they want to see more of in the future. In other words, they proactively reinforce good behaviors in the hope that this will not only fix issues but also potentially turn “bad apples” into good ones. They also focus on team members who are positive role models and ensure that they continue to shine their light. By making positive behaviors more normative throughout the team, it’s harder for other employees to ignore. Finally, they are willing to send employees to training when needed, if the behaviors they should be exhibiting can be trained. Almost all behaviors are trainable, so this is a great option!
Struggling to Please Everyone
Leaders who are most successful at creating sustainable, positive team environments realize that it’s impossible to please everyone all the time. For example, imagine an employee who wants their team to work in the office five days a week and another employee who prefers to work fully virtually. No leader could make both of these employees happy, since their needs are diametrically opposed.
Instead of holding themselves to the standard of constantly making everyone happy, these leaders work to ensure that their actions are well-explained and rooted in logic. Most employees understand that a leader needs to make decisions that won’t always align with their personal desires. However, many leaders fail to communicate the “why” behind their decisions. This can lead employees to make assumptions about the leader’s rationale, which can cause them to jump to conclusions about potential favoritism or leaders’ own desires. When leaders need to make decisions that might be unpopular with some, they should explain why they made that decision and make it clear that they weighed all employees’ perspectives equally. In doing so, it removes the mystery from the decision and allows employees to see why their preference may not have been honored in this particular instance.
Lack of Personal Wellness
Finally, even the best leaders struggle to keep up with their own wellness. But role modeling work-life balance and well-being is important for making sure employees are happy and healthy in the long run. When leaders build sustainable teams, they realize that their own sustainability is a key part of the equation.
There are several things leaders can do to ensure their own recovery. First, they can simply relax. Listening to music or watching TV at the end of a long day can be a helpful way to unwind. Second, they can try to disconnect fully from technology. Reading a book or taking a walk in nature is a great way to recharge. Third, they can make sure that their schedule for the week is planned out. While this may seem counterintuitive, a lot of brain power is used trying to figure out what to do next or how to manage one’s workload. Setting a schedule for the next day or week can help to ease stress about the days to come. Finally, engaging in a hobby that is fun and achievement-oriented is also useful. When you care about improving at something outside of the work domain, you can find real joy and pleasure in your free time. That’s invigorating and gives you more energy for the next day.
Overall, leadership is hard. But if you have strategies for overcoming barriers, you’ll be much better able to rise above challenges and continue to be a great leader. These are a few ways to do so, but don’t limit yourself. There are many ways to resolve leadership challenges. Being resilient and resourceful is half the battle.
Source: PsychologyToday – Patricia Grabarek, Ph.D., and Katina Sawyer, Ph.D.
