Good leaders are those known to arrange structural determination with team goals, delegate tasks efficiently, exhibit empathy with their team, make communication significant, bring out the best in their team, coach and build a team, so that it is more effective at achieving the vision, and so forth.

Leaders play a great role in either empowering or demotivating the employees, in scenarios whereby the company experiences poor leadership, there are higher possibilities of causing devastating results to the company.  Bad leadership leads to poor employee retention and disheartens the remaining employees, causing them to be much less productive than they would otherwise be.

Red flags

According to Fraterne Manishimwe, CEO of a local tourism company, managers that are selfish and only look at earning more, or getting higher positions are not great leaders. They are not concerned with accomplishing the company’s mission or arranging the team’s goals.

He says another red flag is too much supervision, as such leaders leave no room for the team to offer their input, a thing that averts creativity and drive to learn new things. They also fail to delegate certain tasks, they rather decide everything on their own.

Manishimwe also says that poor leaders are also sceptical about making changes, either because of the money required for the new product or fear of changes not turning out successful.   

He also notes that high turnover in some workplaces is due to bad leaders and a toxic environment. "Bad leaders are not willing to take accountability for anything, they place blame on their employees rather than figure out what went wrong in the first place. Blame culture kills productivity,” Manishimwe says.

Charles Shyaka, General Manager at 250 Startups Incubator Kigali, says that narcissistic tendencies are also a red flag. This kind of behaviour comprises ascendency, aggression, and arrogance. It is even worse when the leading style is driven by the person’s need for power and respect, and support from others.

He notes that when such leaders require something from you, they could become intimidating and make you distrust yourself and your eventual worth to the company.

Shyaka also says that poor leaders steal the shine from the team, for instance, if the team excels in working on a task and a client appreciates it, the manager takes all the credit and doesn’t even commend the team for the great work done. When such happens, morale is lost as the team fails to give their all since they don’t expect any credit. 

"Bossy managers are hard to work with, instead of communicating effectively, they prefer ordering people around to be respected or valued as the head of the company. Such leaders just intimidate employees. They are feared and can’t be looked up to,” he says.

Shyaka also points out that poor leaders overwork their staff, are not able to communicate effectively, and create a stressful work environment and annoy co-workers, and so forth.

Such managers also don’t offer career-advancement opportunities for workers to grow, interfere with the work-life balance due to asking them to work overtime, drive top talent away, lead to the decrease of the quality of work, and make employees emotional.