How to Address 6 Leadership Weaknesses Effectively
Bradford R. GlaserEvery leader has weak points, even the ones with strong track records. About 71% of leaders report much higher stress levels once they take on a leadership role, and 1 in 6 will eventually burn out. Teams can tell when this happens – engagement starts to drop, talented team members look elsewhere, and productivity takes a hit even when everyone on the team works harder.
This piece covers six common leadership weaknesses that happen in most industries. Each one has ways that you can work on it, and everything is based on recent research and company data. These changes do take genuine commitment and everyday practice – but not a personality overhaul!
Here's how you can turn these common leadership weaknesses into your greatest strengths!
- Discover your leadership style
- Understand the characteristics of each style
- Learn to flex your leadership style
Table of Contents
See Your Leadership Through Their Eyes
Leaders have a somewhat inflated view of their own performance. Most of them would rate themselves highly on how skilled they are as managers. Their teams give very different ratings. This difference between how leaders see themselves and how their teams actually experience them creates a barrier to any growth.
360-degree feedback was designed to solve this problem – it pulls in honest opinions from every level around you (the ones above you, next to you and the ones who work under you). Each group gets a different view of how you lead. Your boss sees how you handle stress and make tough calls. Your peers watch how you work with others and communicate day-to-day. Your team members live with your management style directly and feel how your decisions affect their work every day. The data shows this. Leaders who keep asking for feedback and actually use it to improve perform about 3 times better than leaders who don't bother with it – it's a massive performance gap.
Plenty of leaders avoid this – it feels vulnerable to ask for this input, and most don't want to hear the hard truths about themselves anyway. Anonymous feedback systems make this whole process way easier because they'll be far more honest when they know there won't be any consequences for speaking up. What you end up with is the unfiltered version of what they actually think – not the cleaned-up one that they tell you to your face.
Self-awareness takes some time to develop before changes can happen. You can't fix a problem if you don't even know that it exists. You need to nail down the exact areas where you're falling short before you can do something productive about them. Awareness on its own doesn't mean much unless you convert it into some behavior changes and concrete steps forward.
How to Delegate the Right Way
Leaders who have a hard time with delegation usually make one of two classic mistakes. The first is when they try to hold on to every assignment and wind up as the bottleneck for their entire team. The second happens when they pass off responsibilities and then vanish completely. Either way causes problems – one will burn you out, and the other leaves your team without direction or support.
The 70% Threshold helps you break out of this pattern. If one of your team members can do a job about 70% as well as you can, it's time to delegate it. This number makes sense because if you hold out for flawless results every time, delegation will never actually happen. Your team members have to try and stumble a bit – that's how they develop the skills and confidence to take on bigger responsibilities later.
A lot of leaders hold onto tasks that don't actually need their involvement. They write every email to stakeholders themselves. They go through everyday reports that another person could review. These tasks feel like they matter when you're in the middle of doing them, and maybe they do to some degree. But they eat up time that should be spent on work that actually needs your attention and skills.
Trust takes practice for everyone involved. Every time you delegate a job to one of your team members, you're showing them that you believe they can do it and giving them a chance to build new skills and show what they're capable of.
The "it's faster if I do it myself" excuse sounds convincing when deadlines loom. Training someone takes more time upfront – that's real. Next month, next year and three years from now will look the same if you don't change this. If everything always gets done by you, then everything will always need to be done by you. This pattern won't break itself, and it leaves you stuck doing the same work indefinitely.
Delegation doesn't mean that you hand off an assignment and disappear completely. Your team still needs check-ins and support as they work through it. The difference between oversight and micromanagement depends on your intent and how you go about it. Oversight gives your team room for their work and makes you available for questions or direction. Micromanagement assumes that the work will fail from the start and hovers over every step.
How to Break This Bad Habit
Most micromanagers aren't trying to be controlling jerks – they're usually just worried about problems arising. Leaders like this feel responsible for everything that happens on their watch, and they believe that staying on top of all the small details will stop problems before they start. When you always watch over everyone's shoulder, you create more problems than you manage to stop.
Asking your team for updates three or four times in a day probably means you've crossed the line. Another sign is when your team members refuse to make even minor decisions on their own and have to check with you first. Catching yourself redoing work that already meets the requirements just because it's not quite how you would have done it signals a micromanagement problem.
The questions matter as well. Try to ask "What support do you need?" instead of "What did you do this morning?" A change in how you phrase this gives your team the room that they need to work through problems on their own. And it shows them that you have confidence in their ability to get work done.
Researchers have actually studied this, and the data tells the same story every time. Excessive oversight drives up turnover rates and crushes productivity. Talented employees will leave a job where trust is replaced with non-stop surveillance. As for the employees who stay, most of them just switch into autopilot mode and wait around to be told what they should do next. This defeats the entire point of why you build a team in the first place.
Getting better at this requires working on your emotional intelligence – more specifically, the self-regulation part of it. Self-regulation helps you stay in control of the anxiety that drives you to micromanage everything. The next time you get that urge to step in and take over, wait just a beat. Ask yourself what you're actually afraid of. Nine times out of ten, the fear in your head is way bigger than the real risk.
Pick out one project and give this a shot – set your expectations with the team at the start, then step back and let them handle it. The odds are that everything will work out fine when you don't hover over every little detail!
How Leaders Control Their Own Emotions
Leaders who have a hard time controlling their emotions will wind up hurting their teams even when that's the last outcome they want. Google and a few other big businesses have started testing for emotional intelligence in their hiring process because they've seen how much it matters for team performance. When a leader can't stay composed under pressure or dismisses what their team members are feeling, it creates problems that spread throughout the organization and damage morale in ways that are hard to repair.
The STOP technique is a pretty simple tool, but it works very well when tensions start to rise. The basic idea is to stop whatever you're doing the second frustration kicks in or you feel that urge to respond right then. Take a breath at that point – it gives you a small buffer between your gut emotion and your response. Use that pause to see what's actually happening and how you feel about it. With that fuller picture, you can move forward with a response that's much more measured and deliberate.
Workplace situations are a great example of how this happens in everyday life. A team member questions your call during a meeting. Instead of jumping to be defensive, you take a second to understand where they're coming from – maybe they have real questions about the project timeline or the budget. That extra beat to get what's going on means you can respond in a way that keeps the dialogue open and everyone involved instead of shutting the whole conversation down.
Emotional contagion is real, and feelings actually spread rapidly between team members. When a leader walks into a room feeling stressed or frustrated, the entire team will pick up on it within just a few minutes. Productivity takes a hit because everyone starts working through their own reaction to that leader's mood, and nobody stays focused on the work that they're supposed to be doing.
Great leaders show emotion – they're human after all. The distinction between great leaders and mediocre ones has nothing to do with suppressing their feelings – it's whether their emotions get shared intentionally or those emotions take control. Leaders can be honest about stress or disappointment while still keeping their ability to think straight and stay present for their team.
The ability to read the room matters just as much as dealing with your own emotional state does. If the team seems quiet or unusually tense, it's time to adjust how you deliver information to them. Emotional awareness like that can make or break whether your message actually gets through to them. Teams usually listen much more closely when they feel understood and respected by whoever is leading the conversation.
Simple Tools for Better Team Communication
Leaders who have a hard time communicating with their teams end up with team members who feel confused and frustrated. Telling a team member "nice job" without explaining what they did well means they won't know how to repeat it. Vague feedback causes a big problem in most workplaces. Telling a team member to "be more proactive" gives them zero direction on what to actually do differently.
The SBI Model is a framework for feedback that actually helps. SBI stands for Situation, Behavior and Impact. Telling a team member, "Great work on the presentation," won't teach them much. Compare that to "In yesterday's client meeting, you answered their budget questions with the data from our Q3 report, which helped us close the deal." With this level of detail, they know what it was that worked and can repeat it next time.
When leaders assume everyone just "gets" what they mean, miscommunications multiply fast. A common word like "urgent" – your whole team might think they get it. One person drops everything and starts right then. A different team member plans to get to it tomorrow. The disconnect wastes time and creates friction between team members who all thought they were acting correctly.
Poor communication costs businesses millions of dollars each year. Most of that money gets lost through duplicate work, missed deadlines and mistakes that wouldn't have happened with more specific instructions.
Your team probably includes members from all different backgrounds and age groups. Some of them like their messages short and direct, and they can work just fine with the basics. Others are going to need some more detail and context before they're comfortable enough to act. Younger team members might want quick online updates throughout their day. Others would rather sit down and talk in person about the major topics.
Turn Your Conflicts into Better Outcomes
Plenty of leaders will put off tough conversations because they don't want to make a bad situation even worse. The worry is understandable – what if they bring up the tension and damage a relationship or turn a small issue into something much bigger? The problem is that unresolved problems don't vanish on their own. Leaving them alone just lets them sit there and fester.
Studies are showing that teams who ignore their conflicts can see a performance drop by as much as 25% – and that's a massive hit for everyone involved. The tension just sits beneath the surface, and over time, it gets much harder for the team to work together well.
The way you take care of these conversations matters just as much as whether you have them in the first place. Coming in too aggressively will make them shut down and get defensive toward you. Going too passive just lets the problems continue without any change. An assertive conversation works best because it deals with what needs to be handled while still respecting the other person.
Lead with what you saw or heard and make sure it stays neutral so it doesn't sound like you're pointing fingers. Then talk about how this impacts the team or the work itself. Give them the room to share their side – the odds are you're only seeing part of what's actually happening. Once you've had a chance to talk it through, you can work on an answer together that makes sense.
A lot of leaders hold back because they're afraid of damaging their relationships. From what I've seen, the opposite usually happens if you handle it correctly.
Once you pick one of these six weaknesses to work on, the rest of them are going to get much easier to manage. Better communication makes delegation much less painful. Stronger boundaries give you the room to make better decisions. Every improvement supports the next one, and they help you become the leader your team actually needs.
Take the Next Step Forward
Leadership development is not something you finish and check off your list. It's a process that continues throughout your entire career, and it feels much more freeing to accept that fact instead of fighting it. The weaknesses we've covered in this guide are extremely common, and they can be improved with practice and self-awareness. You don't need to overhaul your entire leadership style overnight or try to work on every weakness at the same time.
Pick one area that feels most pressing for you right now. Maybe tough conversations make you uncomfortable, or you have a hard time delegating tasks because you don't trust your team to take care of them. Just work on that one area first, and don't beat yourself up about how long it takes. Small improvements compound over time, and as you get better at one skill, it tends to create a ripple effect across the other areas of your leadership, too. Leaders who make small, steady progress wind up with more sustainable results than leaders who attempt an overhaul and burn out halfway through.
The best leaders know that if they want to continue to grow, they have to stay open to learning and have an open mind. Great leaders will actively ask for feedback instead of just waiting around for others to give it to them, and they view their weaknesses as areas where they can improve – not as permanent character flaws or personal defects. Changing how you view your own weaknesses can really shift how you think about your leadership role and how much progress you actually make.
If you're looking for a place to start, get a feel for how you lead right now. The What's My Leadership Style assessment takes about 10 minutes, and it'll show you which of the four main leadership styles you usually use. When you're done, you'll have a better sense of what you're already strong at and where you might need to improve a bit. Then it's way easier to adjust how you lead depending on the situation and on what your team needs from you.
