Anatomy of Ineffective leaders

Over 10 years of being someone's worker, leaders that own those characters demonstrate worse track records in company performance than leaders that don't have those characteristics.

Speculating on stocks or futures

A leader should spend all their time creating and engineering a better future. Speculating on markets outside their expertise should be a waste of time if they really know what they are doing.

Even lower confidence if I peeked at their portfolio and notice them losing trades on speculative assets. Is that the reason why my boss urgently needs money and productivity?

There are some exceptions, where a great investor is also doing the hands-on work of running a company. ¹

Threatens misbehaving employees with pay cut and termination

If an employee is a problem and you can do without them, terminate. Don't need to threaten.

If you must threaten, intimidation is a poor strategy to motivate someone who is underperforming or misbehaving -- a leader that makes a poor strategy is a poor leader.

What happens when you threaten is resentment and people preparing to jump ship as soon as they find the opportunity. Bad retention strategy.

Roll for persuasion, not intimidation.

Not respectful of other people's time

By showing up late, or keeping people overtime on projects or meetings.

Usually, this behavior is confounded with regular poor business judgment.

They tend to have budget issues and lack of manpower issues, but I hypothesize the true cause is that they cannot properly allocate priorities.

Underpays or too much cost-cutting

You don't build a sports team that wins by buying players at wholesale prices. Lots of people do it, but I haven't seen one that works.

If someone really had a good solution to your problem, you pay as much as you can to get it.

Underpaying and cost-cutting is also a behavior that's confounded with priority issues similar to (3).

Underpaying, while it works against workers who are desperate enough to put up with those conditions, also has the effect of hiding the real costs of the problem.

Leaders will take for granted that this is all the investment that needs to get things done (at unsustainable prices) and think they have margins to pursue even worse market ideas.

You don't win from someone's losses by lowballing. You also lose out on real information that would have stopped you from pursuing bad ideas.

Footnotes

1. In rare cases, I met leaders who are great investors and they are great people to work with as they understand macro, accounting, and good business models. I hold suspicion to leaders who are responsible for a large part of the company and its workers future, but somehow find time for short-term derivatives and engage with trading systems they cannot explain. ↩