How To Challenge Your Leadership Abilities & See How You Diminish
What I learned about improving my impact on a team from Liz Wiseman’s study of accidentally bad leaders
I was in a meeting in a different organisation recently and noted that the team in the room felt really low on energy, in fact the only one in the room that seemed energised was the person talking the most. I realised that this person was the ‘leader’ of the team and that it seemed that their personality was smothering the room, they were limiting debate, and only selecting one or two people to ask their opinions on their decisions (once they had already been made by them). This person was creating a team where they were the most important person, they believed they were the smartest and needed to fix all the problems and make all the decisions otherwise it wouldn’t be right.
On reflection, I realised what I was seeing was something that Liz Wiseman described in her book Multipliers where she describes multiplying leadership and diminishing leadership. Using the leadership framework she developed, the role of a leader has five distinct facets. These facets relate to; creating the right work climate, setting direction, managing their team’s talents, making appropriate decisions, and delivering results. In using this framework, she then…
