Common Mistakes Leaders Make

Dan Blank -- Expert Business Source, 3/14/2007 6:52:00 AM

As a leader, you must balance a huge number of responsibilities. In order to cope, you may have started habits that seem to solve a problem in the short term, but in reality, will be a barrier to your success.

Fast company magazine looks at the ways leaders mess up their companies and their own potential:

• Avoiding confrontation.
  A lack of confrontation can give the guise of control and order.
• Hiring advisors, but not listening to them.
  Many leaders know that they need a diversity of opinions from experts in order to solve complex problems. However, committing yourself to change is often the key component that is missing from these relationships.
• Not Accepting when you're wrong.
  Admitting failure in one area does not mean that a single crack will expose other points of weakness. Also, don’t avoid a situation because it seems overwhelming
• Waiting too long or not long enough to cut losses.
  Accept when your current direction needs to be reevaluated. Likewise, don’t change direction so often that you lose the buy-in from your team.
• Focusing too much on strategy vs. execution.
  Avoid embracing solutions that are great on paper, and are backed by sound analysis, yet just can't be implemented. Just because something is logical does not mean it's rational or realistic.
• Trusting instinct over analysis.
  Be wary of focusing on some facts more than others in order to support what you want to believe.
• Favoritism.
  Making certain people feel more important than others can insidiously poison a culture and cause non-favored people to respond with non-productive behavior.
• Minimizing the importance of what you don't understand.
  The less important you can convince yourself something is, the less you have to address it.

Find more details on FastCompany.com.