4 Mistakes New Leaders Make

Welcome to leadership.

Welcome to your newly appointed position as the team leader.

Or, if you’ve been in leadership for a while, welcome the realization that we are always growing and learning as leaders and part of that growth involves examining our past beliefs and actions and considering whether or not we were mistaken. In my work with leaders across a variety of industries and sectors, I see a lot of mistakes. Well-meaning leaders—especially new leaders—often stumble into the wrong actions or wrong mentality when leading their team.

To help you avoid that fate, in this article, we’ll outline the most common mistakes new leaders make and offer a different perspective and action to level up your leadership.

Calling All The Shots

The first mistake new leaders make is calling all the shots. Too often, leaders join an existing team or are tasked with assembling a new team and immediately assume that they know the best way to move forward, the best way to assign tasks, and the best way to influence individuals on the team. 

But the truth is that there’s only a very small likelihood that your first impressions of how to lead this new team are going to match up to reality. As the philosopher Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

Rather than even use your mouth, use your ears. Start your leadership tenure with a listening tour. Take the time to meet everyone on your team—both individually and as a team—and listen to their perspectives and observe their behavior as they interact with each other. 

Make sure you understand the entire situation your team is in, as well as the knowledge, skills, and abilities of everyone on your team. And even then, bring the team in on the decisions. You’ll not only make a better decision—you’ll better influence your team.

Solving Problems Solo

The second mistake that new leaders make is solving problems solo. Similarly, to calling all the shots, solving one individual teammate’s problem without consulting others can lead to a disastrous decision and undermine credibility. 

When you begin to lead your team, individual teammates will come to you with their complaints, questions, and problems. However, their perspective on the root causes (and hence best solutions) to those problems is likely one-sided and missing information. 

Sometimes, their questions might even be an attempt to gain a few political points before you get to know the whole team.

Instead of jumping in and offering a solution—or even brainstorming a solution with just that teammate—take the time to step back and ask a simple question: who else is affected by this problem? Identify who else is facing that problem and who would be affected by any solutions you’d put in place. 

Then, bring them into the conversation. You’ll get a more diverse perspective on the problem at hand, and you’ll identify solutions that better incorporate the whole system within which your team operates.

Focusing On Process

The third mistake that new leaders often make is focusing on the process or at least focusing on the process too much. You can’t ignore the process. Your team was handed an objective or a collection of tasks to complete. 

Those tasks and how they are assigned are part of a process—a workflow—and that process sits inside a larger set of systems and processes inside your organization. You can’t achieve your objectives if you don’t understand the process.

But you also can’t achieve your objectives if you don’t understand your people.

In fact, understanding the people on your team is far more important than understanding the process. You need to know how to get stuff done—but you need to know the people who are going to get that stuff done more. 

You need to know their strengths and weaknesses, their knowledge, skills, and abilities, and their personality traits and preferences. You won’t make your team truly collaborate as a team if you don’t understand their variables. So, focus on people first and process second.

Overlooking Purpose

Another mistake new leaders make is overlooking purpose. Next to overlooking your people, overlooking the role of purpose in motivating those people is a big unforced error. 

There are processes to improve and objectives to accomplish, but all of those things require a motivated team. One of the most effective ways to motivate individuals is to help them understand the purpose behind those actions—it’s to answer the question, “Why are we doing the work that we’re doing?”

But it’s not just about why. It’s also about who. It’s not just about reciting senior leadership’s mission statement or vision. A growing body of research suggests it’s better to motivate people by connecting them with those who are beneficiaries of the work. This can be customers or stakeholders whose lives are made better. 

However, internal customers or coworkers can do their jobs better when your team works together better. Collect the stories of those who are being helped by your team’s work, and make sure you’re always ready to share them any time your team needs a motivational boost.

Leading a team is cultivating a group of relationships and harnessing that relationship power into effective collaboration. What all these mistakes have in common is that they overlook the role of those relationships and the importance of incorporating everyone before getting to work. 

But when you focus on “we” before you focus on work—you help your team do their best job ever.

Failing to Set Clear Expectations

The biggest pitfall for new leaders is perhaps failing to communicate with the employees. When there is a disconnect, you cannot expect them to achieve the outcomes you want.

You need to be very clear about their roles, responsibilities, and the goals you wish to achieve at the end of a task. The goals must be clear in writing and transparent. 

Now, why do team leaders make these mistakes? At times, the leaders assume that their members already know the expectations and the outcomes, especially when the team has been working on the same role for some time. 

It is natural to assume that they know the process and would know how to get the job done. Then, at times, the leaders are more focused on the high-level strategies and do not go into the details about how those strategies get translated into tasks. So there’s a miss out there.

Then another reason that can lead to setting unclear expectations is when the leaders take on a new role, it takes them time to understand the existing processes and workflows. This will delay their understanding that they must communicate and set clear expectations with the team.

How to Address these Failures?

But the good news is that these failures are easy to address. Here’s how you should tackle them:

Set clear, SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound for the team and the individual team members. 

Then, clarify each individual’s role and ensure they understand their responsibilities and how their role will transform and affect the big picture. You need to conduct regular checks, which must be one-on-one with the team members to give them updates, clarify their doubts, if any, and adjust your expectations as and when needed.

The best way to ensure clarity is to document everything. Prepare a document outlining the roles, goals, and performance indicators so everyone has a point of reference they can use in the future as well, and there will be fewer chances of ambiguity, too.

Wrap Up

Getting into a new leadership role is quite exciting, but at the same time, it comes with its set of challenges. There are many common mistakes that new leaders can make, which will affect their performance and long-term growth. 

Although those mistakes may come from good intentions, they can lead to a loss of opportunities for growth and development. So, leaders must prioritize clear communication and transparency and become effective leaders who form positive relations with their team members.

As a leader, you must understand your team, empower them with clarity and purpose, and create an environment of collaboration. Only then can you cultivate a team that is motivated and engaged and gives you its best.