by D. P. Noe

Created on: September 26, 2010

Without effective leadership in place in an organization, it can be the major factor that hinders employee performance. Effective leaders realize that most employees want to find success at work and steer their employees to achieving success. If you have different employees all swimming in different directions, employee performance will suffer and their organization will fail to see successful outcomes.

When effective leaders see employees struggling to achieve, they need to make a quick assessment that individuals all have the same understanding of goals and that expectations are clearly spelled out. It there is not a mutual understanding of the goals and expectations that are in place by all employees, it will be difficult to develop of group of high functioning employees.

When leadership recognizes that employees are not performing to high standards, they need to look at their communication style and why there has been a problem clearly communicating the goals and objectives of the organization. Often a breakdown in communication style is responsible for ineffective performance by employees.

Another factor that hinders employee performance, is a lack of skill or a knowledge base that is efficient to perform their job. It can be a simple lack of experience and the manager needs to take the responsibility to provide coaching, education and development opportunities when needed.

If there are barriers or policies that hinder employee performance, leadership needs to become the change agent and remove the barriers and change old and ineffective policies that should have been discarded as outdated and not useful to the organization.

When leadership assigns a project and expectations are not clearly spelled out, the outcome will most likely not resemble what the manager had in mind. Assignments need clear direction from the beginning to the end and what the final outcome needs to look like. Projects need time frames and deadlines, or they can go on and on and never see completion. It is the leadership responsibility to make sure that all time frames and deadlines are clearly spelled out, or it can be the cause that hinders employee performance.

Another major factor that can hinder employee performance is leadership style that does not hold individuals accountable for achieving their goals. If leadership fails to hold employees accountable, in the end it is the leader that is responsible for the lack of performance. This is why the leader must make sure that they have established measurable outcomes for each project or task that they have assigned.

Lack of leadership visibility can also have a negative impact on employee performance.. Leaders need to walk around and see for themselves what is occurring in the workplace, not hide in their office. Effective leadership includes asking employees how they are doing and what barriers they want to see removed. The best ideas for improvement often comes from the employees themselves and leadership that cuts themselves off from their employees is missing many opportunities to improve employee performance.

Leadership needs to take the bull by the horn and eliminate factors that are hindering their employee performance. It is leadership's responsibility to be the director that puts processes in place to ensure that employees can perform their jobs to the high standards any organization would expect. Without strong leadership at the helm, negative factors will not be eliminated that hinder employee performance.

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