“If no mistake have you made, yet losing you are ... a different game you should play.”
Yoda
By Wolf J. Rinke
1. Providing equal rewards to everyone. Violates the important management principle of tying rewards to performance. Do not reward slackers. Do reward positive, energetic, high performance team members.
2. Making work painful. Many managers make work so painful that 25% of employees in the US hate their jobs, 56% could take it or leave it, and 19% love it.
3. Downsizing. Improves the bottom line immediately but can lead to successive years of being less profitable. You gain the competitive advantage through people, not by getting rid of them. Your assets are your people.
4. Hoarding power. To increase your power you must give it away. By giving it away, you grow the people under you. Always push decision making down to the lowest level when possible.
5. Spend too little on training and human resource development. High performance organizations invest between 3.5 – 5% of payroll in human resource development, education and training. Good training: Builds self-confidence in the employee, Creates positive peer pressure, Enhances levels of job satisfaction and builds teamwork.
6. Spend too much time with trouble makers. If you spend more than 5% of your time with slackers you are inefficient. Spend the majority of your time with people who deliver positive results and high performance.
7. Catching people who mess up. Focus your energy on catching people who do things right. Manage by appreciation, not by exception.
8. Satisfy customers. If you only satisfy your customer, you will be out of business. If you exceed your customer’s expectations your customers will remember you and your organization. Otherwise, they will forget you.
9. Spending too much time in the office. You should spend 66% of your time practicing MBWA, or management by walking around.
10. Mistrusting employees. If you consistently mistrust all employees you will be correct 3% of the time. If you trust your employees until they prove you wrong, you will be right 97% of the time.
Additional Reading
The Top Ten Mistakes Leaders Make by Hans Finzel
101 Biggest Mistakes Managers Make and How to Avoid Them by Mary Albright and Clay Carr
Point of Reflection
"The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing."
Henry Ford