The 7 deadly sins of leadership.

How to destroy trust and credibility without even knowing it.

Trust is difficult to build, easy to lose, and hard to repair.

When you’re in a leadership position, that trust is everything. In many ways, you’re holding the keys to your team’s growth, success, and path. And if your team believes the person holding those keys isn’t in a position to drive, they’re not going to want to be along for the ride.

The challenge with trust is that it’s largely built through nonobvious situations, behaviors, and actions.

But awareness is the beginning of change, and these are the 7 areas that any leader should bring awareness and attention to if they want to build and lead a team with trust and credibility as the foundation.

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Sin #1: Not setting clear expectations.

Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments. There’s a reason this is at the top of the list, and it’s an important enough topic that I wrote about it earlier this year.

If you throw a bunch of puzzle pieces into the air and cross your fingers that they land in perfect formation, you’re not going to end up with a puzzle. You’re going to end up with a mess.

Being clear with your expectations doesn’t just serve you. It serves your team, who want more direction, not less.

Here’s an easy way to think about expectations:

There should be clear, explicit expectations for every role. Think of these as the metrics that someone’s performance is judged by. They’re the things that performance reviews are built around and variable compensation plans are paid on.

Then there’s the implicit expectations, which is what a lot of leaders struggle with. These are the things that bother us in our leadership role - someone showing up late to a meeting, someone over-promising and under-delivering, someone communicating poorly, etc. Pay attention to these things that bother you and…make them explicit. Voice them. Put them on paper. Set the standard for the team.

Sin #2: Not living up to their own expectations.

Do as I say, not as I do.

If we’re willing to set clear expectations and a high standard with the team, then we better be willing to meet those expectations and standards ourselves.

This is likely the most obvious sin on this list, and we don’t need to spend time expanding on the obvious. If you want the shortest path to destroying trust, it’s being a hypocrite.

Just look at politicians if you need further evidence.

Sin #3: Not holding people accountable.

It’s one thing to set clear expectations. It’s another thing entirely to hold people accountable to them.

Without both, the expectations are simply wishful thinking.

Holding people accountable can seem like some draconian measure, as if it’s the part of the job that requires you being an asshole. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Holding others (and yourself) accountable is what shows that we see the best in people. We understand what they’re capable of, and accountability is what helps them course correct when they’re drifting from those capabilities.

If we want people to see the best in themselves, it starts with challenging them to live up to the standard that we already know they can live up to.

Great leadership comes from a high amount of support combined with a high amount of challenge. Without candor and accountability, we’re only giving our team half of the equation.

Sin #4: Not being open to ideas and feedback.

It’s easy to fall into the leadership trap of believing we know the solution to every problem, the answer to every question. After all, it’s our experience that got us to this position in the first place.

But when we are continually shutting down people’s ideas and feedback, we’re training them to be helpless. We’re telling them that their input doesn’t matter, and there are few things more demotivating for an employee than believing they’re a cog in a machine.

Good ideas can come from anywhere, and our odds of landing on the right solution narrow dramatically when we’re only looking in one place.

There’s another more subtle reason good leadership requires openness to ideas and feedback: you’re teaching your team how you think. When you process an idea or feedback with someone, you’re giving them insight into the way you think about the business. You’re helping them connect dots in your own thinking, and that insight helps them develop in their own role and leadership.

Sin #5: Gossiping.

It’s so damn easy to start down the slippery path of gossip. Work relationships oftentimes evolve into friendships, and what is friendship if not spilling the tea every now and then.

But let me be as clear as I can…When people hear you gossip, they assume you’re willing to gossip about them. They may not say it. They may not even consciously recognize it. But you can guarantee that their subconscious has now bucketed you as someone who is willing to say things behind a proverbial closed door that you wouldn’t be willing to say with it open.

Gossip is the sneakiest of sins because it can seem harmless at surface level. What’s the harm in a little venting about a colleague? Or in poking fun at the latest watercooler topic?

The harm is significant. It’s just unseen, as all sneaky sins are.

Sin #6: Ghosting.

Canceling 1on1s. Moving a meeting at the last minute. Being physically present in a conversation but with their mind elsewhere.

There are many ways ghosting shows up in leadership, and the only thing it tells the team is that you don’t care. The reason doesn’t matter. The action does.

There are one of two conclusions someone will come to when their leader is consistently ghosting them or the business: the leader is checked out, or they themselves aren’t important enough to merit the attention of the leader.

Both conclusions break trust and make the other person feel small.

Sin #7: Criticizing in public.

Praise in public. Critique in private. It is really that simple.

Great leaders praise in public because they’re showing the rest of the team the type of effort that is valued, which makes it more obvious the level of effort that should be repeated.

When leaders criticize in public, people shrink. Trust is broken not just with the individual being criticized but with everyone in attendance. Criticizing in public shows a level of emotional maturity that is reserved for bullies, narcissists, and those with fragile egos. There is nothing gained from it. Ever.

And you’ll notice in the first sentence I said critique in private. That’s because criticism is a bad leadership trait generally, where critique leaves room for the nuance of candor and fighting for the highest good in others. See sin #3 for a refresher. That’s not to say there’s never a place for criticism. It should just be reserved for the extremes, where someone is being blatant, flagrant, or otherwise disruptive, and direct criticism is the only way to cut through the noise (and the other person’s ego).

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Leading others begins with leading yourself.

And leading yourself begins with understanding the subtle and not so subtle ways in which we can undermine our own influence.

Bring attention and awareness to the above, and a foundation of trust and credibility will be the natural outcome.

Your team is depending on it.

Want to become a leader worth following?
Let’s chat.

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✌️ and ❤️,

Adam Griffin