Learning from common leadership errors

As a leader in the AEC world, you’ll likely find yourself making certain mistakes over the course of your career. 

As long as you are identifying these mistakes and learning from them, these valuable experiences can be used to do a better job in the future. Likewise, if you learn from the mistakes of others, you can successfully navigate around some potentially hard roads for yourself.

Here are a few common leadership errors that can easily be avoided:

Hesitance to give feedback

Though it is important to have a unified, singular vision throughout any project or business, it is also important to realize that feedback can be an excellent opportunity to course-correct before something truly bad happens.

It’s important to provide ongoing feedback to all your employees on a regular basis to help make sure that they are truly the best that they can be. If you see someone doing something that you don’t like or isn’t conducive to productivity, you need to speak up. Additionally, you should always welcome feedback from your own team. 

Being too friendly

Maintaining a rapport with your employees is of the utmost importance. It is said that a happy employee is a motivated employee. However, that doesn’t mean you should treat employees like they’re your best friends. You need to be able to successfully walk the line between a friend and an employer. 

Vaguely defined goals

Defining goals is a great way to make sure that all your employees are on the same page and that they have the same end result in mind for a particular project at any given time. If one project is more important than another in the grand scheme of things, your employees need to know that. They’re not mind readers and shouldn’t be expected to be so.

Not keeping up with changing markets

When your organization finds itself on stable ground, it can be very easy to fall into a trap that stifles innovation and productivity. You always need to be on the lookout for emerging technologies and new factors that demand your attention. If you’re too focused on the factors that made your business a success, you could potentially find yourself left behind when the market suddenly changes and heads in a new direction.

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Editor's note: This is sponsored blog. All text was provided by the sponsor company.