The Biggest Leadership Mistake You Can Make

What comes to mind when you hear the words leadership mistake? Maybe you thought of a bad decision by an executive that costs the company millions of dollars. Or perhaps you thought of a poor personnel decision that has caused dysfunction on your team. You might even have thought about a mistake you recently made in leading a project.

Often, we don’t consider our own leadership mistakes, yet, these mistakes tend to happen more frequently and can have the longest impact on our success as a leader. If you want to become a better leader, you need to eliminate the most frequent leadership mistake leaders make. What is that mistake? It’s probably not what you think.

The most frequent mistake a leader can make is being insecure.

An insecure leader wants everyone to think they are the smartest one in the room. They are always looking for an opportunity to show they know more than others on the team, and they are constantly trying to prove that they belong in the job.

If you’re the kind of leader who struggles with insecurity, here’s some truth for you: if no one thought you could do the job, you would not have been appointed to a leadership role.

So, what should you do? Start by asking others for their input, and then give them credit when you use their ideas. When you celebrate another person’s idea, you gain that person’s trust. Confident leaders enjoy showing how others contributed to the success of the team.

Recognizing your team members is the best way to ensure they will continue to share ideas. Then, you and your team can build on those great ideas together, and you’ll be known as a leader people want to follow.

Want more insight on leadership? Check out the David Novak Leadership Leadership Podcasts. You’ll hear from some of the best leaders in the country as they share about mistakes they’ve made, how they became successful, and you’ll even get tips on how you can grow as a leader.

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David Novak

David’s passion is to make the world a better place by developing leaders at all ages through David Novak Leadership, his family’s Lift-a-Life Foundation, Lead4Change, Global Game Changers and The Novak Leadership Institute at the University of Missouri.

Novak has been recognized as “2012 CEO of the Year” by Chief Executive magazine, one of the world’s “30 Best CEOs” by Barron’s, one of the “Top People in Business” by FORTUNE and one of the “100 Best-Performing CEOs in the World” by Harvard Business Review…