Cast your mind back to a time when you may have worked for a great company but hated your work because of your boss? Unfortunately, most of us can come up with at least one example.

Research shows that employees leave their managers before they leave the company. This is because the leadership skills of managers are the greatest source of employee fulfillment at work. Of course pay, working conditions, recognition and promotional opportunities are important too, however if even if those things were perfect you would still likely have a disengaged employee.

And, just to rub salt into the wound, it’s not just employee turnover that’s affected. Dissatisfied employees also typically:

• concentrate on tasks other than the goals and outcomes they are expected to accomplish.
• do just enough work to get by and adversely affect productivity simply because it takes them longer to produce. Simply, time is money.
• can have a collective effect on an organisation’s profitability and performance.
• can adversely affect the organisation in the way they they speak to clients and customers.
• can affect client satisfaction and increase customer attrition.
• rarely take the initiative and prefer to stay in the background.
• focus on accomplishing a task rather than achieving an outcome.
• aren’t just unhappy at work. They spread their discontentment to other employees.
• are not indifferent to company goals and mission and express their mistrust and animosity.
• tend to feel their contributions are being overlooked, and their potential is not being tapped.
• feel disconnected emotionally from their coworkers and supervisor and do not feel committed to their work.
• hang back and do the minimum because they believe their contribution hardly counts.

The solution? Get serious about what poor leadership skills are costing you in your career and your organisation. Invest in leadership development, whether it’s training courses or seminars, coaching, mastermind groups, subscriptions to professional bodies, magazines or websites or reading leadership books.  As Stephen Covey says, “sharpen the saw” regularly to constant improve your leadership skills and the benefits will come – in this case in the form of a productive, engaged team and dollars in your bank account. Lead away……