STUPID Things NOT to Say to Your Team: 5 Leadership Pitfalls

Ok you are. But you're absolutely nothing without your team. They're the ones who produce the end product that you are responsible for.

It's your job to be the catalyst to allow the team to succeed. Break down the barriers, coach, empower, support. But they're the ones doing the work. And as such, you need them more than they need you!

Celebrate their achievements and make sure they are front and centre when they succeed. And when they mess up it's you that needs to step in front of the bullets and take the hits.

You'll find your team know you're in charge. And they'll be cool with it. So get on with the vitally important role of looking after your team like they're your own family.

You know what - it might be. It might be ludicrous. But one of the most critical aspects of team leadership is to provide an environment where your team is safe enough to be free to innovate and try those crazy ideas. Some of them may work and be the idea that takes your firm into a new business. And if it bombs, then hey it's no big deal.

Team leaders need to create that safe place for their employees to fail. That culture of psychological safety. If people feel that they are going to be hammered for any mistakes then innovation will dry up completely. I've worked in environments like that and it's truly toxic.

So as a boss, make sure you're giving your teams all the autonomy in the world to be able to experiment, innovate and be creative. You might think something is a stupid idea, but be emotionally intelligent and self-aware enough to keep those thoughts to yourself and instead provide the encouragement that your team needs.

In today's workplace, and especially in the post-covid work from home era, this couldn't be further from the truth. It might have been the case working in the factories of generations ago, clocking in and clocking out - but the truth of today is that many people are utterly absorbed and deeply committed to their careers and to making a difference to their teams and companies.

You'll find bad days will affect them at home. They'll make family sacrifices to get that deliverable over the line - they might even abort a family vacation to get you and the company out of a nasty problem - I've seen commitment like that before.

So as a leader it's vitally important that you try to establish a culture where your teams can have and enjoy a good work life balance. That might mean different things to different people, but it's your job to understand that both work and home life can continuously overlap and impact each other. Far from being separate, they are very much intertwined.

Your team will regularly take their office problems home with them. And the more you can recognise and react to that, the better.

That comment is one of the most toxic and least desirable things that anyone can say to anyone else in a workplace, and certainly not from manager to employee.

People make mistakes all the time. And yes, mistakes are usually someone's fault. And how a manager responds to one of their team making a mistake can be a defining characteristic of whether that manager is worth working for.

Great leaders make sure that when their team messes up, it is them that steps in front of the clients to explain what went wrong. And they won't mention their teams. The boss is accountable, and will face off to the stakeholders and do the explaining. And when the team smashes it out of the park, then the boss puts them in the spotlight. Basically leaders take none of the praise and all of the blame.

And that also applies to the manager and employee direct conversations. Sure you might talk about mistakes, and you might even agree that yes it was the fault of the employee. But mistakes are rarely ALL down to one person. There can be a lot of contributory factors. Poor IT systems and processes, systems prone to error. Or external factors affecting the performance and delivery of an employee. There can be all sorts going on.

So rather than "that was all your fault" say "you made a mistake, are you ok?" Showing that empathy is true leadership behaviour.