It’s common for new leaders to spend a lot of their time being visible and in touch with their employees. In fact, it’s an important aspect of assuming the mantle of leadership. But here’s an odd, but understandable phenomenon.
As leaders become more caught up in their management responsibilities, there’s a tendency for them to forget that effective leadership requires personal contact with those beneath them in the organizational hierarchy. It’s not uncommon for effective leaders to abandon (or forget) what got them there in the first place. And that’s the people contact side.
One reasons leaders go from effective to ineffective is that they lower the priority of their leader oriented activities, and raise the priority of their management tasks until they actually become invisible to employees. And when that happens their ability to lead erodes.
Being a visible leader should remain a high priority since it’s a long term strategy for creating good things in the organization. Do not abandon visibility even if the time pressures to do so are great. Allocate a percentage of your day to being visible to employees and you will maintain your leadership “power”, or increase it. Become invisible and you become irrelevant to employees.
