In trying to understand leadership, it’s a good idea to take a brief look at some negative motivation techniques so that we understand what leadership is not. This list is not exhaustive; but it does include some of the most common crimes:

o Leadership is not the absence of orientation. Ken Blanchard has a great description for this; He calls it “leave him alone, zap.” He describes many managers who provide their staff with absolutely no guidance; then they criticize them the moment they fail to meet an uncommunicated set of expectations or cross an invisible line they haven’t been told about.

This is often caused by a manager who doesn’t really know what he wants or what his expectations are. He can’t clearly articulate what he wants in advance. He can only criticize when something is done and it doesn’t “feel” right or when his incompetent supervisor does the same to him.

o Leadership is not a control freak. Control freak management is the art of not letting a team member do anything, almost to the point of breathing, without permission. So no matter what the employee does, even with permission, he will be criticized. Control freaks feel they must have direct authority and be in command of absolutely everything. They have the need to criticize; almost compulsively. Even when your people perform a task exactly the way they were told to do it last time, they’ll still find critical opportunities. The work will never find approval; therefore, praise and encouragement are never given.

Control freaks typically have three attributes in common:

1. They genuinely believe that they are doing what is best for the people they control. Take note of this for yourself. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you’re not overly controlling because you mean well, or that your controlling nature is justified by your good intentions.

2. They are insecure. They feel that they are flawed and that the rest of the world is judging them. To protect themselves from such judgments, they resort to controlling their environment and everyone/everything in it.

3. Control freaks focus on others and their performance so they don’t have to acknowledge and address their own problems.

I once had a manager criticize me if I got up from my desk to attend a meeting two minutes before it started because I was wasting my time. However, he would also come to my desk a minute before a meeting and exclaim, “Aren’t you coming to the meeting? What are you waiting for?” No matter what I did, she criticized it. She was the classic example of someone who compulsively had to maintain control and did so mainly through constant disapproval.

The control freak is someone who is very insecure. He/she is terrified that people will pick up on his/her level of incompetence and judge him/her (this is often imagined or magnified by her/his insecurities). He will strive to control everything around him so that this does not happen. For the control freak, all of this happens on a subconscious level; the only conscious aspect is “an awareness” that the staff member is incompetent and needs constant supervision to protect him for her own good.

o Leadership is not preparing staff to take the blame for failure. Many managers meticulously document their staff’s mistakes so they have proof that any problem was a team member’s fault and not theirs. In fact, a good leader does two things that we will expand on more; they look for people who do things well, not badly, so they can praise them, and they (usually) accept responsibility for failures and problems.

o Leadership does not lie about future incentives. This is the carrot and stick approach with an emphasis on the carrot. You can get people to stretch in the short term by offering them some incentives (such as bonuses, salary increases, or promotions); however, if those incentives are not delivered when earned, all credibility, both present and future, will be lost. You have just used the employee and he/she will know it. He will know that the employer/employee relationship is not one of trust and will never go beyond the basic requirements of the job again.

I once heard of a company that made a big deal out of the big bonuses they paid each year (and were planning for the current year). Unfortunately for the team members, those bonuses were mysteriously reduced at the end of each year. Company executives were extremely creative in justifying the reductions in bonuses. At the same time, they couldn’t understand why big bonus promises were less motivating year after year and organizational morale was low.

o Leadership is non-threatening. More of the carrot and stick motivational philosophy with special emphasis on the stick. The thought process goes along the lines of, “If I threaten someone with something that terrifies them, it will motivate them to work harder than ever.” The threat is usually related to whether the employee will have a future in the company or career opportunities within it.

This thought process just doesn’t work. People are not motivated by the threat of negative repercussions; instead, they subconsciously avoid the situation from which the threat arose. So if you were to threaten an employee with termination due to bad work, they are more likely to avoid the task they did poorly than to improve performance.

If you want someone to avoid your job, threaten them about it.

In one extreme case I heard of, the president of a large company threatened to slit the throat of an information technology team member who wasn’t “fixing his computer fast enough.” Now, do you suppose this threat motivated the IT person to work harder or faster, or just scared or annoyed him and made him focus on the threat instead of the computer problem? Even if he wasn’t afraid of physical violence, it was still very insulting and demotivating for the president to treat him this way (not to mention a criminal act to threaten death).

This company president was one of the most pathetic excuses for a leader I have ever had the experience to meet. He was a man who thrived on absolute power by controlling and instilling fear in employees.

o Leadership is not playing political games. Save the politics for the leadership of countries. True leadership does not manipulate people or situations to curry favor with others. Politics occurs when hidden agendas collide and the individuals behind those agendas behave in subversive ways. A person will claim that he is fighting for the good of the company, but in reality it is his own career path that he is most concerned about. As stated above doing a good job as a leader is the way to get ahead, not politics.

o Leadership does not crave authority. Although authority is tied to position, leadership often is not. It is not the position that inspires people, it is the character of the person leading that inspires or detracts.

o Leadership is not a power trip. There are some individuals who fight for authority to stroke their own egos (the president mentioned above was one such individual). They may feel good, but they’re not going to motivate anyone else while doing it. They tend to be transparent in their motives and are not respected or appreciated.

I once had a manager who liked to call 2 hour long “emergency” staff meetings at 4:30 pm on Fridays. It turned out that they were just long status meetings that she would ramble on for a couple of hours while she put the employees’ weekends on hold. She obviously loved the feeling of power she got from it.

He did not realize that this behavior caused him to lose the respect of his staff. She quickly missed the opportunity to motivate them in a positive way.

This is just a sampling of some of the worst ways you can try to motivate someone. Obviously, if you don’t want to stall your career and alienate your staff, you should avoid using any of these techniques.

If you want to excel in your career and positively motivate your staff, get out of your comfort zone and start putting the leadership skills you’ve learned into practice.