China Recruiting Blog

Signs Your Leadership is Suspect

Knowing how your leadership is doing is not reading tea leaves fortunately.  First, I often hear complaints from businessmen that their workers are complaining about pay.  I smile and think of ways to break to them that they could save a lot of money by learning to lead.

• Some non profits with a strong vision and culture pay people nothing and have people applying all the time.
• Some businesses pay people poorly and no one leaves.
• Some businesses, no one wants to work there unless they get paid to the moon.

The difference is leadership.  In a factory I know nearby, you can multiply the cost of their poor leadership by 200, because  200 people (virtually the whole business) are only there for a paycheck. So all they think about is how to do less and get more pay. And they feel dirty as working just for pay is not in line with the human spirit.

Second, fire fighting is high.  Weak leaders are very busy people.  They do many things themselves and as their workers do not have important work, they do not cover her back well. Fire fighting becomes epidemic. Proper leadership drives down fire fighting by paying enough attention to non-urgent important issues.  (culture development being foremost.)  Great leaders have time as the people around them take responsibility for many heavy responsibilities while she is able to support them in strong ways.  You might want to refer to our Do You Want To Be a Hero post as well as any in the Leadership category to find what great leaders are spending their time doing. Given enough smart work in the non-urgent area, fire fighting will go down while productivity goes up.

Last for today- Turnover is high. Perhaps that needs no introduction.

So, complaints about pay when pay is OK, high fire fighting, and high turnover are reasons to sound the alarm. Anyone have anything to add or contradict?