To be a good leader it is good to know how people identify the qualities of bad leaders. This way, you can avoid these leadership qualities to improve your own style. This article explores the qualities that you must avoid.

The following are a number of critical areas where employees complain about bad leadership:

As a leader, you must always be aware of the way others see you and what they come to expect of you. Many leaders are focused on the organisation and its objective and neglect the “means” for the “goals”. This is a short-term attitude since over time staff can no longer understand or even appreciate the leadership.

In this article, a number of critical areas are identified that leaders must pay particular attention to so they can stay inspiring and be in control of the direction of their organisation.

Some managers think that they need to be in control of every single aspect of a project they are leading. They simply can’t let go. They want to have a say in everything. They want to check the quality of every little task, they even want to do it themselves to make sure it is perfect. Perfection seems to be extremely important to them, so important that they end up spending vast amounts of time, potentially alienating their team. Even considering all of this attention, they may end up with a low quality service or product since they stop listening to others.

You have been assigned to function as the team leader. You are fairly new to managerial role and now find yourself in charge of leading and tasking other members of the team. Your technical ability is very good and people can easily relate to you. So you are confident that you can successfully lead them. There is only one area you are concerned about and that is tasking. So far you have been given tasks by others, but now you need to allocate different chunks of the work to different team members. What is the best method to use to address this problem systematically?

As a project manager, you may need to interact with a range of people. These could be the staff, technical leads, managers, clients, customers, suppliers and so on. These entities have different interests in the project and each may have his or her own agenda.

These people are known as stakeholders. Stakeholders are those who can influence the direction and outcome of the project. To successfully manage a project, you need to identify these stakeholders and learn how to handle them.

A project manager must be able to handle risk well to be able to guide a project to its completion. As the complexity of projects has increased over the years and as products and services have become more technologically sophisticated, the need for risk analysis has significantly increased.

A project manager is probably not able to address every single risk, but needs to take steps to identify them and plan to handle them should they occur. A useful way to categorise risk is through two distinct dimensions: