Well-Intentioned Behaviors: 5 Ways You Can Hurt Your Team

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In this edition of the Manager Lab, we're going to be reviewing the article, Five Well-Intentioned Behaviors That Can Hurt Your Team by Nihar Charya. It's from the April 2024 Harvard Business Review. Well, if you're like me, when you decided to become a manager, whether a frontline supervisor or an executive leading multiple departments, you had to.

Undergo kind of a major shift in your job description, shifting from a self-oriented mindset to an other-oriented mindset, one that serves and elevates the potential of others in your charge. But what happens when a manager's desire to help begins to cause harm to their people? And that's what this article is all about. Now, of course, most people can spot a toxic leader and connect the dots on why and how they're causing damage.

But it's much harder to recognize when well-intentioned leaders are actually hurting their teams because they're not aware of their negative impact and team members aren't really always that comfortable pushing back. So if you're a manager with a strong desire to be helpful, be aware of these five common ways that you might inadvertently hurt your team despite your best intentions. Number one, seeking constant agreement. On any team, as you know, conflict is inevitable.

The old adage, if you have two humans in a room, there's going to be conflict. Yet many managers see it as disruptive to team cohesion and a threat to their ability to lead. But in their seemingly helpful desire to have everyone just get along, they can end up damaging the team's morale. So effective team leadership then requires accepting when individual values, strengths, and aspirations may actually be at odds with each other.

And then learning how to leverage people's differences rather than shutting them down or just wishing them away. Number two, overprotecting the team. In addition to avoiding intra-team conflict out of a desire to be helpful, many well-intentioned leaders shield their people from intra-company issues that they believe could derail their motivation. Such leaders may consider themselves protectors of their people and helpful advocates, but may in fact be doing their teams a disservice.

Your people need honest and transparent communication, transparent coaching to grow, not you rescuing them. Be careful about excessively moralizing your job and seeing yourself as a hero to your staff, protecting them from all things evil in the organization. Such an approach may feel magnanimous, but instead stifles their learning of how to collaborate and how to influence well, how to deal with conflict, things like that. So it's not always helpful to protect your team in such a way.

Number three, getting results without learning. In today's fast-moving world of business managers that get results are typically the ones that have a penchant for action and swift decision-making. But in the desire to keep momentum high and constantly achieving more. Leaders may leave little time for reflection, insight, and alignment of purpose. And when managers dismiss these activities in the name of winning, they risk eventual team derailment.

Even the most human-centered leaders forget to make time for communicating the why and the how behind the work. They want to spend much more time on the what and not the why. In your next one-on-ones, really try to integrate learning, be reflective, and work purpose into every execution-related discussion. So questions like, what was the most critical action that led to these outcomes? And is there anything we should be doing differently?

Or why is this project important to you and how can we make it more aligned with your goals? So that's number three. Number four, being too involved or not being involved at all. Both are problematic. Micromanagement is one of the most common behaviors of toxic leaders, but even the most benevolent leaders end up micromanaging their people when they refuse to delegate completely and give their team members the all-important autonomy.

Such managers try to be useful resources to reduce worker burden. Not understanding that their help is actually causing more unwelcome work in the process. On the other extreme, some managers can view themselves as helpful by completely empowering their team, even to the point of hardly ever, excuse me, hardly ever being around. But in this desire to help by giving the team autonomy, such leaders can harm their people by being absent or aloof.

So if you want to empower, if you want to delegate from a distance, Make sure to still lean in when needed, especially when you need to coach, when you need to give feedback, and when there is lacking performance so that you can come in and really turn that around.

Number five, and last, being everyone's friend. Many managers believe that treating their team like family or being friends with all of their direct reports is the best way to be helpful and supportive. But personal affiliation isn't the same as effective teamwork. Seeking to be friends with your employees can cause undue confusion and strife. At worst, it can cause perceptions of favoritism, forced loyalty, and even really an unethical crossing of boundaries.

So what really boosts employee engagement are opportunities for development and a sense of purpose. Managers can do well to focus less on being a fun person to hang out with and more on being a source of learning, offering practical insights, and removing obstacles for team member advancement.

So the bottom line is leaders who want to support their teams are certainly a greater asset to an organization and its people, but their helpfulness can unexpectedly harm their team. So be aware of these specific tendencies to make sure your support isn't counterproductive. I do sincerely hope that this review will lead you to becoming a better, more effective manager. And until next time we meet in the Manager Lab, do good work. Music.