The 7 Deadly Sins of Leadership – Series Wrap Up

December 16, 2014

This article represents the ninth and final blog posting for my series “The 7 Deadly Sins of Leadership”. I hope you’ve enjoyed it and learned from it. I wanted to use this also as a reminder to take this information and apply it to your professional life. Once you eliminated these seven deadly sins from your professional life, the sky is the limit! Employees and peers will want to follow you. Let’s do a quick re-cap of the “The 7 Deadly Sins of Leadership”.

Sin #1 – Relevancy: As a leader, know what your focus should be and don’t get sidetracked. Stay relevant!

Sin #2 – Dispassionate: True passion is not limited to a single focus. It is the way a great leader thinks about ALL THINGS.

Sin #3 – Hypocrisy: We cannot guarantee to our followers that we will live flawlessly. However, we can promise them that we won’t live hypocritically.

Sin #4 – Unnecessary Wars: A successful leader chooses carefully his battles. Just be sure you are the one who picks your fights. Don’t delegate that privilege to anyone but yourself.

Sin #5 – Leadership Production: There can be no equivocation as a leader. Ted Turner’s desk motto says: “Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way”. Cursed is the leader who puts on the appearance without bearing the expected fruit.

Sin #6 – The Soft Bribe: State your purpose, establish clear and simple policies, insist that everyone follow the policies and set the example. Then enforce fairly using generous doses of training, patience, example and reward.

Sin #7 – The Wrong Bottom Line: What should trump, yet increase profits? Satisfied, mature and well-balanced employees.

Will you ever be a perfect leader? No. Will I? No. However, my goal for this multi-part series was to help you become a better leader. My hope is that readers will at a minimum, take some of these recommendations and apply them to their professional lives. In doing so, not only are you improving your leadership style but you are creating a better work environment for all of your employees. If enough of us apply these changes, we become the antidote for a poisoned corporate society.

Thank you for your readership! Be sure to bookmark this page for future reference and feel free to subscribe to my blog by registering on the right hand side of this page. There will be many quality blog series to come!