5 common leadership mistakes

Part of our growth in leadership is recognizing when we have made a mistake, then addressing it so we can learn from it. If the mistake is in an action, such as taking the wrong path or deploying the wrong technology, the leader can more easily "course correct" to get back on the right path.

But sometimes, those mistakes can be in a leader's style—which requires personal reflection to improve. Here are 5 mistakes that leaders can make in their personal style, and how to make a personal course correction:

Reacting to everything

There's a lot going on in an organization, and some leaders feel that they need to stay on top of everything. These leaders have made a classic mistake of trying to stay involved at every level.

Remember that the leader's role is to get out in front and build the big picture. You can't do that if you're keeping tabs on every little thing in the organization.

Instead, look to build an organizational structure to manage the details for you. Delegate to your management team to keep things running, so you can stay focused on the strategic big picture, not the day-to-day.

Constantly busy

Many leaders tie their self-worth to how busy they are. These leaders are constantly in motion, picking up projects, taking on more responsibilities. Every hour of every day might be "blocked out" for a task. At the end of a long day, these people look back on the things they've done to measure their value.

But leadership is not about being busy; it's about creating strategic plans and leading the organization. Staying constantly busy is actually a distraction.

Instead of measuring your worth by how busy you are, measure your success by marking progress on goals. Look at where your organization is today, and consider what the future landscape might bring. Then identify the milestones that lead towards that future. Those are the markers for your progress, not how much time you worked.

By taking the view of interpolation, not extrapolation, we can imagine what promise the future might hold, then work to achieve it. In technology, we are the drivers of future progress. As leaders of IT organizations, we help shape what is to come. Our job as technology drivers, therefore, is to find the new technology that can best benefit our organizations and work to integrate the technology into our plans.

Measuring the wrong thing

One common issue I see when working with new leaders is the desire to measure everything. It's a worthy goal on the surface: with data comes insight.

But are you measuring the right thing? Consider how some organizations responded to remote work, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Without staff in an office, some leaders felt insecure that staff might take an afternoon off and skip working. These leaders looked to measure time spent working, such as by loading monitoring software on their staff PCs to detect when the mouse stopped moving.

Successful leaders didn't measure time, but instead reported on goals. Are projects getting done on time? Are milestones being met? These are the only measures that matter in an organization.

Urgent, not important

It's a problem that we all face, at some point in our leadership journey: Someone comes to you with a problem, and your natural instinct is to find a way to resolve it. But this is addressing the urgent, not necessarily the important.

Consider how to respond to different requests by organizing these kinds of requests in a matrix, to balance the urgent and the important. Let's put "Urgent" on the x axis, and "Important" on the y axis. Some people prefer to organize this in a 3x3 grid, where each axis has "low," "medium," and "high." But I like to think in quadrants, so I only use "high" and "low."

Getting distracted

We only have so much time during the week to get our work done. Sometimes, we get pulled in different directions, often involving meetings.

Defensive scheduling can be an important addition to any busy manager's "tool kit" in managing and scheduling time. Consider blocking out time on your calendar that is better spent on leadership, so others can't interrupt during this valuable productive time.