The Leadership Project Podcast
The Leadership Project with Mick Spiers is a podcast dedicated to advancing thought on inspirational leadership in the modern world. We cover key issues and controversial topics that are needed to redefine inspirational leadership.
How do young and aspiring leaders transition from individual contributors to inspirational leaders or from manager to leader to make a positive impact on the world?
How do experienced leaders adapt their leadership styles and practices in a modern and digital world?
How do address the lack of diversity in leadership in many organisations today?
Guest speakers will be invited for confronting conversations in their areas of expertise with the view to provide leaders with all of the skills and tools they need to become inspirational leaders.
The vision of The Leadership Project is to inspire all leaders to challenge the status quo. We empower modern leaders through knowledge and emotional intelligence to create meaningful impact Join us each week as we dive deep into key issues and controversial topics for inspirational leaders.
The Leadership Project Podcast
190. Self-Reflection Fridays - Are you a BAD boss? with Mick Spiers
Unlock the secrets to effective leadership and avoid the common pitfalls that can turn even the best-intentioned bosses into bad leaders.
In this episode of the Leadership Project, we promise to shed light on the top 10 characteristics of bad leadership, drawing insights from Jessica Lindsay's article and Deborah and Ken Corey's survey. From the avoider to the micromanager, learn how these roles can permeate a workplace and erode morale. Our primary takeaway? Bosses must ensure their team members feel seen, heard, and valued to cultivate a thriving and positive work environment.
Ever wondered how cognitive and emotional biases influence your decision-making? Lisa Tromba, author of "Mind Knots," joins us to explain how recognizing and managing these biases can balance your leadership approach. She offers practical advice on surrounding yourself with team members who possess complementary biases, like pairing optimism with realism or intuition with logic. Lisa's insights are invaluable for anyone looking to enhance team performance and make more balanced decisions.
As we navigate the complexities of hybrid work environments, intentional task planning emerges as a crucial strategy for boosting productivity. We share personal reflections on allocating deep work to home days and collaborative tasks to office days. Techniques like the Zeigarnik effect help overcome procrastination and maintain momentum. Looking ahead, we’re excited to feature Clint Padgett of the Project Success Method in our upcoming episode, where we'll explore the critical link between people, process, and technology in project management.
Join us for this episode filled with actionable leadership lessons that can transform your workplace dynamics.
🌐 Connect with Lisa:
• Website: https://luisitromba.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisatromba/
📚 You can purchase Lisa's book at Amazon:
• Mind Knots: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRNL2BQL/
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If you would like a signed copy, please reach to sei@mickspiers.com and we can arrange it for you too.
Are you a horrible boss? A recent survey showed that 99.6% of us have experienced having a bad boss at some point in our career, and we're going to unpack what are the ingredients of being a bad boss, and how do we sometimes fall into the trap of these very simple things. In today's episode, we're going to talk about bad bosses, and we're going to unpack what we learnt from our guest, Lisa Tromba about bias, and we'll finish with our weekly self reflections on leadership. Sit back and enjoy the show. Welcome back to The Leadership Project. Today's episode is our second installment in our weekly self reflections around leadership. This is part of our new format where we now have one international guest on our show on a Tuesday, and we do these self reflections on a Friday. In today's episode, we're going to unpack what it means to be a bad boss, and you're going to be surprised at some of the things that come out of this list. I'm going to share you of the top 10 traits of being a bad boss and how easy it can be for us to fall into those traps. We'll then unpack our lessons that we learnt from Lisa Tromba about how to manage bias and how we can convert bias to work for us instead of against us. And we'll finish with my five weekly reflections on leadership, where I share with you live the things that I learn about leadership through my week. So let's start with bias and Lisa trumba. Lisa joined us on Episode 189 of The Leadership Project podcast, and shared with us her work from the book my knots about psychological bias and how we can manage cognitive and emotional bias in the workplace. The key concept here is how we can get bias to work for us instead of against us. Lisa shared with us some complementary concepts that are similar to some things that we've heard on the show before, but certainly add to it we've spoken before about the power of surrounding yourself with people with complementary profiles and complementary skills. For example, if you are a visionary leader that thinks that 1000 ideas per minute, you best surround yourself with someone that is more operational, that gets things done. If you are not good at finance, you better have a strong numbers person with you. If strategy is not your strength, have a strategic thinker on the team, and so on and so forth. Lisa Tromba added our own cognitive and emotional biases to the list of these things that we need to look for complementary skills on. Now to give you some compassion here, we are all biased. To be human is to be biased. It's a natural part of our evolution and the hard wiring in our brain, so don't beat yourself up about being biased. The bias itself is not the issue. It is when the bias impacts our decision making and our behavior that it becomes a problem. So what can we do about it? The first thing we need to do is elevate our own awareness of our own cognitive and emotional biases. What is it about the way that we think, the way that we approach problems, the way that we process information in front of us, to bring that elevation of awareness of how bias might impact the way that we make decisions and the way that we behave, we can then surround ourselves with people that have complementary biases. So I'm going to give you some examples here, if you're falling into the trap of what we call the egocentric bias, you better have someone in your team that has an altruism bias. Now there's a balance here. If you're completely egocentric, you're not going to make the best decisions in your business. If you're completely altruistic, every single moment of every day you might soon go out of business. So there's a balance here between egocentric and altruism. For you, it might be that you're overconfident, that you're always thinking that things are going to work and they're going to work better than you think. You look at your sales forecast and you're you're always overly optimistic about what the results might be, and you might need to surround yourself with someone that has more of a loss aversion bias. So this could be balancing optimism with pessimism, confidence versus loss aversion. You might find yourself having an intuition bias, where you want to make all decisions from a gut feeling. You might want to surround yourself with someone who has a logic bias, same thing. We need to balance these two things, because a logic bias person might find themselves in analysis paralysis and not make a decision, whereas an intuition person may not be looking at all of the facts around you and making a sound decision. So you bring them to. Together. The next example might be a planning bias. If you're the type of person that likes to plan everything to the final detail, you may find yourself not taking action. So you need to surround yourself with someone that has an action bias. The balance here is the person with the action bias. Might want to do things left, right and center and be acting all the time, but without any plan, and that can lead to chaos. So bring two people together, someone with a planning bias and then someone with an action bias, and together, if they hold space for each other, they can make a great team. Once we understand these things, once we understand our biases, and we surround ourselves with people that have got complementary biases, we can now start making a real impact, and we can put actions in place that help us to improve our decision making and our behaviors. This now requires the discipline to pause when you're faced with a new challenge. Take a beat, take a pause, collect diverse inputs from those around you that have those counter balancing biases, so that you can collectively make a considered decision. And if you're doing this well, you're going to co create a solution that is far better than any of those individuals with their individual biases could have done themselves. So this is a great call to action for everyone listening to the show this week. Think about how you might put this into practice. Think about how you might elevate your own awareness of your own bias to consider the biases of those people around you and how you might come together as a team to acknowledge those biases and have some open and deep conversations around the way that you make decisions about the culture that you're creating in your organization and the behaviors that are coming from those biases. If you would like to know more about the 40 different biases and eight different bias groups. You can get a copy of Lisa's book, mine nots on Amazon, and we'll put the link in the show notes. All right, let's talk about these Horrible Bosses, these bad bosses, and there's going to be some sobering thoughts in here for you, because I'm going to say when I read this list, it is super easy to fall into the trap of some of the things that we're about to talk about this discussiondiscussion that I'm sharing with you today was stemmed by an article by Jessica Lindsay on msn.com which came from a survey In the Corey survey, it showed that 99.6% of people have experienced having a bad boss at some point in their career. That's pretty much all of us, if you take away few anomalies, every single person has experienced some level of horrible boss or bad boss in their career. And then when confronted with it, 80% of people admit to have done some of these behaviors at some point, so it's a really easy trap for us to fall into, but it's something that we need to be aware of if we want to become a high performance boss, a high performance leader, and become the leader that we wish we always had. Now here's the truth of it. No boss wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror and goes right. What can I do today to really demotivate my team, to infuriate them, to make them angry. No one does that. In fact, most bad bosses think that they're good bosses. They think that they're doing a good job, but they have these blind spots where they're not aware of how their behavior is impacting those around them. So from this article and the survey, the article by Jessica Lindsay and the survey by Deborah and Ken Corey, we end up with a list of these 10 attributes of being a bad boss. And when you start reading them, you can have these self awareness moments of going, Yeah, I think I've done that at some point in my career. Now here's the thing, these things aren't even necessarily intentional behaviors. They're quite often unintentional, and we're not aware of the impact our behavior is having on others. In some cases, it might even be well intentioned actions that fall badly and are not well received by the recipient. Now it doesn't matter what the intention was. What matters is how the person felt and the person on the receiving end. What is it like to experience you as a boss, it's their experience that is important in this list, not what you intended, but how it came across and how it felt to them. So let's go through the list. The avoider, this bad boss, is typified by not showing up for you. They ghost you, they don't give you time, they don't give you attention. They don't give you feedback, whether that's good feedback or bad feedback, and you feel somewhat invisible to them. They might be always canceling their one on ones with you, and in doing so, making you feel unsupported and that you don't matter. The ignorer. The ignorer is the type of person where the other person feels like their ideas are not being considered. It may be that the boss is really listening and really aren't really taking into account those ideas, but if the person that's presenting those ideas always feels like that their ideas are disregarded, they will not feel valued. The hoarder. The hoarder is someone who withholds and keeps information to themselves. Once again, this can sometimes come from a place of feeling like the boss is protecting their team, but by hoarding information and withholding it, it can be very dismissive to the team. It can come across as this is not for you to worry about that the adults have got this so it can be very dismissive when you're a hoarder that keeps information to yourself. The next one is the unappreciator, where the team don't feel that they're getting recognized or any gratitude for all of the hard work that they're put in. They feel invisible and unappreciated for their actions and contributions the pretender. This one's really interesting. The pretender is someone that may be trying to shield their team from bad news, that there could be something going on in the business that isn't good news. And the team usually are pretty intuitive, so they kind of know that something's going on. But here's the boss, pretending that everything's fine and nothing to worry about, etc. And once again, this can be very dismissive. The boss could be coming across as being superior and going, this is not for you to worry about. The adults have got it similar to what we're saying before. The blocker, this one can fall into the either intentional or unintentional category, and this is where someone is blocking your development and your career progression, once again, either intentionally or unintentionally, the firefighter, the boss that's always in reactive mode and acting with everything's urgent. And we're going to fight this fire today, and then there's a different fire tomorrow, and there's no clarity of priorities, and you're just moving from one fire to another fire, the micromanager, I'm sure none of you are surprised to see this one on the list, the one that wants to get in there and not just, not just leave it to you to decide how to do the work. They want to tell you exactly how it should be done, and always looking for mistakes as to, oh, that's not how you do it. You do it like this, and not holding space, not empowering people, not trusting people. The blamer. The blamer is the Teflon boss. It's the it's never their fault. It's always someone else's fault, and they're very quick to pass on blame when something doesn't go well. And the final one is really interesting, the coercer Once again, whether this is intentional or not, if the person feels like they've been manipulated, then it never goes around well. So the coercer could be on a big spectrum from a person just feels like the boss manipulated them into a certain course of action, all the way through to full on bullying control coercive behaviors. The coercer is definitely a spectrum from relatively seemingly benign activities that still diminish the person all the way through to inappropriate workplace behavior and treating people in a very, very, very bad way. So what are the reflections from this? The key thing here is it comes back to what do people look for in the workplace? Everyone wants to feel seen, everyone feel heard. Everyone wants to feel valued. They want to feel that what they do is important. They want to feel that what they do matters. As bosses, what we need to do is to practice that every day. So when I look at this list and all of those 10 attributes of a bad boss, I'm going to stick up my hand and go, Yeah, I think I've fallen into that trap, not intentionally. But it doesn't matter. It's how the person on the receiving end felt about that behavior that makes the difference as to whether they go home that day feeling like they had a great day at work or they had a horrible day at work. I'll let you in on a secret here, when people go home and see their loved ones at the end of the day and their partner or their children ask them, How was your day today, the answer that they kind of give is always going to be about the interactions with other human beings, and quite often it's their boss. So if they've had a bad day, they're not going to. Say, Ah, just couldn't get my spreadsheet to work today. It's going to be something like you wouldn't believe what the boss did to me today, or you wouldn't believe what this jerk said. So to go to the famous Maya Angelou quote, people will forget what you said. They may forget what you did, but they'll never forget how you made them feel. And all of these behaviors are about how we make our teams feel. It also tells me that leadership is a daily practice that we must work on this every single day. It's not a one and done. Have a look at the list. Give yourself a self reflection. Did I fall into any of those behaviors intentionally or unintentionally today, where I made my team feel that they were not valued, that they were not seen, that they were not heard. If you can do that and you can practice on it every single day, be better today. Be better tomorrow. Get 1% better all the time. People will see that. People will notice that, and they'll deeply appreciate your leadership. So take a self reflection. Think about this list. Have you fallen into these traps? Have you either intentionally or unintentionally acted with some of these attributes that we're talking about today? And what are you going to do about it? What actions you going to take to make sure that your team feels seen, heard and valued. What are you going to do today to make your team feel that they matter? If you take this approach, you're a long way to not being a bad boss. Okay, so what were my self reflections this week? So as I mentioned in the show last week, I've practiced daily self reflection for the past 11 years. I asked myself the same five questions, what went well? What didn't go well? What would I do differently next time? What did I learn about myself and what did I learn about others? And I'm going to do this live with you right now, so to highlight some of my learnings from this week. So what went well for me, it was hybrid work and focus and being intentional. There's a lot of you out there that are working in hybrid arrangements. You might be working in the office three or four days a week and then having one or two days a week at home. And for me, this week, it was four days in the office and one day at home. Now what did I do well with that? The first thing was intentionally planning my week so that I was doing my deep work, my individually prolific work on that day at home, so when I had to spend some time in some spreadsheets and in some documents, where I had to respond to a quite deep questionnaire and then produce some documents. I did that at home, and I used time blocks of 90 minutes to avoid multitasking. Then when I was in the office, I intentionally prioritized collaborative work, face to face meetings, taking my one on ones with team members doing these things in the office. So it's hybrid. Work is not about location, it's about intentionality. So when you're at home, do your deep work. When you're at the office, intentionally do your collaborative work. The time blocking was really important. So when I was doing some of these deeper works on documents, working in these 90 minute blocks. First of all was, is what works for me cognitively, and secondly, I only worked on one at a time. It didn't do multitasking. And guess what? I got the jobs done. They're ticked off and they're put to bed. If I had I tried to multitask, I'm sure that some of them would not be complete yet. Now, what didn't go well? I did have moments of procrastination and distraction, so it was difficult at times to get going on some tasks that I'd been putting off for a while, for whatever reason, it was difficult to get going. So what would I do differently? And what did I do differently? Because I did this in real time. I implemented what we call a zygonic effect. The zygonic effect is just to get started, to overcome inertia, to get moving with these tasks that you've been putting off for some time. The first five minutes is the key get started, open up that laptop, grab that pen, get started and get inertia to move for you. So the law of inertia tells us that a body at rest stays at rest, and a body in motion tends to stay in motion. So get in motion. This is how we overcome procrastination. In those first five minutes of those tasks, I then got into a flow state, and guess what? I kept going. I didn't stop after five minutes. What did I learn about myself that time blocking works for me. It really worked well for me. So these 90 minute blocks of focus time and avoiding multitasking really works well for me, and I'd love to hear from you what. What you do for your own personal productivity and for your own personal focus. I also reflected on that bad boss list, it was really, I'm going to say, challenging to read some of those things and to reflect and go, Wow. I think I've done some of those things before, unintentionally. I've never intentionally been a bad boss, but I think I've done some of these things, the the avoider, I think I have come across as avoiding people and canceling one on one meetings. The ignorer. I think I have, at times, had people come to me with really good ideas, and they probably felt that I didn't listen to them. I did listen to them, but did I? Did I show them? Did I show them that I was listening to them and that I wasn't ignoring them? So it was a sobering review for me to look at that list of attributes of a bad boss and realize just how easy it is to fall into the trap of some of these habits. What did I learn about others? It reaffirmed my view that people want to be seen, heard, and they want to be valued. They want to feel like they matter, and that we must work on our leadership every single day. We must check in with ourselves. Are we falling into any of these traps, and what actions are we taking to make sure that people feel seen, that they feel heard, and that they feel like they matter. So that's it for this week's episodes. We had Lisa Tromba earlier in the week for Episode 189 This is episode 190 our self reflections on what we're learning about leadership in our next episode, we are joined by Clint Padgett of the project success, method. Clint and I have a deep conversation about the connection between people management and project management, with some really interesting and surprising results about the importance of the connection between people process and technology. If you're enjoying our content, we would love it. If you would leave us a rating and review on Apple podcasts, on your preferred podcast service, you can also catch The Leadership Project YouTube channel where we give weekly video podcasts, curated videos, and our weekly live stream show that's designed to help you become the leader that you wish you always had. Thank you for listening to The Leadership Project mickspiers.com a huge call out to Faris Sedek for his video editing of all of our video content and to all of the team at TLP. Joan Gozon, Gerald Calibo And my amazing wife Sei Spiers, I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to the Leadership Project YouTube channel where we bring you interesting videos each and every week, and you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Now, in the meantime, please do take care, look out for each other and join us on this journey as we learn together and lead together.
