The other night in the Liberty Bowl in Memphis the placekicker for East Carolina University missed three game winning field goals in the span of about three minutes. Twice in the last minute and a half and then in overtime. Poor guy.

What would you do if one of your key employees was messing up? Often a weak leader in business will pull the, “get out of my way I will do it myself” tactic. Even in the military we see leaders leading the charge with a classic “follow me.” Not in football, or baseball, or any sport. Those games have rules and the rules say the players play and the coaches coach. We don’t have such things in business but maybe we should.

When we do the get out of my way stuff we send a message of mistrust and lack of confidence in the employee. The leader ends up doing more of the work themselves and they get tired. Also the quality of the work suffers in the long run. It is bad for morale and bad for the long term success of the organization.

When you do the work you are doing not leading. You may think you can kick better but is that what you are getting paid to do?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 4:48 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.