Top 10 Signs You Are a Complete Distraction to Your Team

January 8, 2014

At the expansion stage, it is very easy for teams (of all functional areas) to become incredibly distracted. There are so many shiny objects that can derail teams from focusing on the few, most important things that matter.

And sadly. Most of the distractions come straight from the top.

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If a company has unfocused and scattered CEOs/senior managers that will inevitably trickle down to the rest of the company, and sooner or later 90% of your employees will be running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
You are probably reading this thinking, “Nope. Not me. I’m not that leader.”
But how can you really be so sure?

10 Signs You Are Distracting Your Employees and Hurting Your Business

  1. You pull your employees aside for impromptu meetings throughout the week.
  2. You email/text your employees way more than you have verbal conversations with them.
  3. You don’t have well-defined annual and quarterly goals that you hold your teams accountable to.
  4. You have well-defined annual and quarterly goals but you’ve readjusted the goals repeatedly.
  5. You organize calls and meetings and there is no clear, documented agenda that everyone has prior to the session.
  6. You have not defined what the definition of success is for your different teams.
  7. You don’t give your managers the ability to self manage and make decision on their own — they need your approval for almost everything.
  8. If you think of an idea of something your business could be doing differently, you will email the idea to anyone, at any hour, and expect them to implement it ASAP.
  9. You think that you are best friends with 90% of the people in your company, and they know everything about your personal life.
  10. Your annual turnover is very high compared to industry standards (this study says 11% is the norm for high tech).

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Still not convinced, or not sure if you really are prohibiting your team’s growth? Consider having a company-wide employee satisfaction survey heading into 2014.
At the end of the day, no one is perfect. We can all be distracting from time to time. But the more conscious we are of our own behaviors and how them impact others, the more successful we will all be in the long run.