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Team Building Articles Team Management Do As I Say Or As I Do? 
| Do As I Say Or As I Do? |
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Remember when you were growing up and your Mom said, "Do as I say, not as I do." Has that carried over into your leadership style? Requiring employees to behave differently than what you demonstrate is like asking them to row upstream without a paddle. It just won’t work.
Consider this scenario: The Zeedle Company has 160 employees. There is one leader at the top with four direct reports. Each director reporting to the leader has one primary area of responsibility. The leader meets with her direct reports once a month to talk about major issues and "hot" items. This is the only time the leadership team members communicate with each other. After the monthly meeting, each member goes their own way to address the issues that were surfaced at the meeting. During the course of each month, the top leader may contact any one of the directors to present additional issues for resolution. Many times at follow on meetings, each director will come back with a solution to the same problem. The top leader uses this information in the meeting to build walls between the directors and promote peer-to-peer competition. The company has scheduled the bi-annual "All Hands" meeting. One of the main items on the agenda is building the company team. The top leader wants each employee in the organization "on the same page" and "rowing in the same direction." She is excited about this meeting and feels as though once it’s over the company will work as a more cohesive unit. Will the company be successful in achieving this goal?
Does your organization promote do as I say or do as I do? The next time you hear someone say, "They don’t work as a team," or "I don’t understand why they don’t communicate with each other," examine the leadership team’s behavior first. Small business expert Denise O'Berry can be reached at http://www.deniseoberry.com/
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