Lead with respect, not fear
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Have you ever worked with someone who leads with fear? When I mean lead with fear, it does not mean that the leader is constantly afraid of anything. It’s more like he is using the authority to lead the people under him, by constantly scolding them and threatening them – pretty much like a master and a slave. Some people call this the “military style leadership”.
But is this the right way to lead your people?
In my humble opinion, NO.
I rather lead with respect, and not fear. If your people are constantly afraid of losing their jobs (or afraid of being scolded in front of everyone in the office), they will STILL be able to work hard but the atmosphere is different if compared with people who are working for you because they love to work for you.
Totally different working environments and the end results will be totally different too. Let’s try to summarize the 2 types of leadership.
Lead with respect
- People willingly work for you
- The environment will be friendlier
- The people will be motivated and work with good morale
- Turnover rate will be lower since a good and respected leader can really keep his people
Lead with fear
- People will only work with you because they have no other choice
- The environment is quite hostile and negative since everyone is afraid to lose their jobs (or get scolded publicly)
- People will be moody and pretty much demotivated, even though they will still do the work
- Turnover rate is very very high since everyone will try their best to get out from there
From what you can see, most of the things associated with the latter are bad things and yet, there are many leaders out there who prefer to use this way. Perhaps it’s due to the way they’ve been brought up in the corporate world, or perhaps it’s due to their ego. But either way, it’s bad for the employees and also the organization itself (having high turnover rate is not a very good thing to have in any organization).
For me, the keyword here is “respect”. Respect other people and others will respect you. If you cannot even understand that simple word, then I doubt you have the rights to lead.
p/s……. and in an extremely stressful environment, the last thing you want to do is to force people to do things they don’t want. Everyone has their limits and as a leader, you need to know that.
My supervisor lead with fear. Always scolding people not matter whether they did a great job or not (always looking for ppl mistakes). She should praise or motivate them to work hard for her . As a result , all the staff excluding me resign together because cannot stand with her attitude. It is very stress to work with her and not happy working with her at all
I have a long and rather clinical theory about why some leaders prefer to terrorize their staff into action. Will probably blog about it some day. The same malaise effects relationships – the spouse who terrorizes another into doing whatever he or she wants. It is a type of emotional violence.
In the office, I call it workplace gangsterism. Sometimes the CEO is the biggest gangster of them all. Sometimes, its the few VPs that gang up to terrorize the CEO. I know of one situation where a lowly sales manager kept the VPs and the CEO hostage for years.
Once a while you will meet leaders who sigh and lament, “My staff don’t fear me enough. They need to fear me more.” I also learnt that you can’t tell a violent person to stop being violent any more than you can tell a gentle person to stop being gentle.
This is an issue close to me because of how it helped me decide to leave employment, most likely for good.
@ Monk
I’ve heard of many such leaders before and it’s quite disheartening. I do hope that these leaders will start to realize before it’s too late.
If one or two person leave her team, then it’s okay. But if it’s more than that, then something must be wrong.
@ Damien
Most often than not, there will always be one or two gangsters in the company. To them, the company is their territory and they will just shove people aside.
Things will be worse if for some reasons, these people managed to use this gangsterism successfully in the past…….and this only boost their confidence to use it again.
But time has changed and such behavior is no longer useful to many employees – who are now smarter.
I’ll be waiting for your post
yeah it very true in the corporate world, many practises this culture.
and today in the 21st century i believe employees have to be smart & fight the right of the employee.
turnover is the impact and also the highlight of an organization is not doing very good. But still, some employers rather it going like that than improving it especially in terms of low salary yet every-work-u-need-to-do attitude.
@ ladylike
low salary is pretty subjective. some people think they’re underpaid but actually they are not. it’s just bcoz they compare with those higher than them, and not looking at those below them. But that’s another topic lah.
What some employers think is this – who cares if people leave? There are so many fishes in the sea for them to bully and slaughter.
But what they forget is that – this industry in our country is not that big and what goes around, comes around. If they continue to bully and slave-drive their employees too much, sooner or later, their reputation will become from bad to worse.