| People give up on us for three reasons. First, untrustworthiness. Working with someone we don't trust is a miserable experience. And we lose the trust of others when we act inconsistently in what we say and do, seek personal gain above shared gain, withhold information, lie or tell half-truths, and become closed-minded. Trust is like a mirror - when it's shattered it can be pieced back together again, but the cracks usually show. Second, incompetence. The way to inspire confidence in people is not with charisma, but with competence. When a leader is incompetent he takes the focus off the organisation's vision and values and places it on to his own behaviour. If people working for an incompetent leader have a high degree of skill, they continually worry about their leader messing things up. If they don't have experience, they won't know what to do. Either way, productivity and morale suffer. Third, insecurity. Good leaders do two things: they develop other leaders, and try to work themselves out of a job. Insecure leaders never do that. They don't want to train people to reach their potential and be more successful than they are. In fact, they don't want them to be able to succeed without their help. Any time someone who works for them rises too high, they see it as a threat. People want to work for leaders who fire them up, not put out their fire. If they perceive that their leader is more concerned with maintaining their authority and protecting their position, they'll eventually quit and find someone else to work for. |
