5 Weak Leadership Habits That Teach Good Employees to Stay Quiet, Wait, and Give Less

Want more influence as a leader? Stop the behaviors that make good people lose trust and eventually leave.

EXPERT OPINION BY MARCEL SCHWANTES, INC. CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, EXECUTIVE COACH, SPEAKER, AND AUTHOR @MARCELSCHWANTES

How can you tell when a manager is weakening a team? Do not start with the engagement survey. Watch the people. Better yet, reflect on the following questions:

Are they reluctant to speak up? Do they wait for permission before making simple decisions? Have the best people stopped bringing new ideas to the table? Do employees seem to be managing around the boss rather than working with them?

Those are hard, hold-up-the-mirror questions

Those are hard, hold-up-the-mirror questions. More often, weak leadership shows up in repeated behaviors that slowly teach employees to protect themselves, keep their heads down, and give less than they are capable of.

And managers still have enormous influence over that experience. Gallup reports that managers account for about 70 percent of the variance in team engagement. In 2025, just 31 percent of U.S. employees were engaged at work

Refreshed leadership advice from CEO Stephanie Mehta

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If you lead people, here are five habits of weak leadership worth eliminating.

1. Not developing your leadership skills

One of the oldest management mistakes is still alive and well: Take a talented individual contributor, reward that person with a promotion, give them people to manage, and hope leadership somehow appears.

Knowing the work is not the same as knowing how to lead the people doing the work. People management requires judgment, emotional intelligence, communication, coaching, accountability, and the ability to develop other human beings. Don’t promote contributors to management as an automatic reward for technical excellence or strong individual performance.

Source: www.inc.com