A hot temper. Moodiness. Micromanagement. These are common traits of a bad leader.
What’s the number one reason talented employees quit? Gallop polls show that 50% of employees cite their managers as the reason for leaving. A bad leader can cost your company. And poor leadership at the highest levels of a company can be detrimental to a business (Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes and Turing Pharmaceuticals’ Martin Shkreli, as two recent examples).
While we often write about successful leaders and positive leadership traits, I think it’s about time we start talking about the opposite end of the spectrum. Here are 6 common characteristics of poor leadership that should be red flags to all companies.
6 ways to be a bad leader
1. Lack of transparency
Everyone appreciates honesty and transparency, and the same holds true in a professional setting. Even if you’re trying to prevent worry or stress, employees know when you’re not giving them the full picture and it makes their jobs more difficult.
Your team will appreciate knowing where they stand within the company and the greater goals you’re trying to accomplish. Oftentimes this leads to more focused and driven employees, who take pride in being part of a team working toward mutual goals.
2. Insulting employees in front of their coworkers
We all make mistakes. We are human, after all. But how a supervisor reacts to an employee’s mistakes is a direct reflection of their leadership style — good or bad.
We have all witnessed a leader get upset when issues arise. That’s natural when s/he is invested in the business. Good leaders know cooler heads prevail, offering constructive criticism in an appropriate one-on-one setting. But a bad leader berates employees in a group setting. Instead of helping employees learn from mistakes, his behavior only alienates people and causes resentment.
3. Micromanaging
I bet you are thinking of a specific manager from your past, as I am. Micromanaging may be my least favorite characteristic of bad leadership. Nothing says, “I don’t have faith in your work,” like a boss that is constantly looking over your shoulder.
Employees are only able to grow and develop if they are allowed to do so. Supervisors should provide direction and then empower their teams to get the work done. Your employees will become more confident and productive knowing they have your trust in their abilities and the space to be creative.
4. Lack of empathy
As leaders, we must understand that our jobs are important, but so are our employees. Understanding the challenges that your team faces, both professionally and personally, is key to creating happy and productive employees. When supervisors work to alleviate barriers, they create a supportive culture among their team.
5. Inconsistency
Last-minute changes, mixed signals, and overall inconsistency can lead to confusion and frustration within your team. Leaders who blow up at one person but listen intently to another foster fear among employees, who become unsure of how to approach you. That leads to lack of communication, which is never good for business.
Lack of consistency leads to a lack of trust and slows productivity. Employees that are unclear on direction or expectations spend time and energy worrying about how to approach their supervisors instead of how to get the job done.
6. Closed-mindedness
Feedback can be hard to hear, especially from your staff. But an unwillingness to listen to your team and take their ideas seriously will create tension.
Leaders that dig their heels in and refuse to consider new perspectives make employees feel undervalued and unable to control their own destiny. Not only does this cause employee dissatisfaction, but also leaders miss out on potentially good suggestions to improve business.
Here’s a rundown of paid digital advertising options, including display ads, AdWords, and sponsored social media posts.
We are strong believers in content marketing. Build it, and they will come — or, in content marketing speak, publish quality content, and customers will come to you. But, as I often write about, content marketing takes time to bear fruit. There’s not much you can do about that.lick
Except paid digital advertising.
By investing in paid digital advertising, you can boost the reach of your posts, display ads and videos. Pair quality content with a comprehensive digital advertising strategy, and you will be in a position to drive more traffic, create more brand visibility, and close more deals.
Your peers understand this. Within the first quarter of 2017, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Pinterest saw a 61.5% increase in paid media spend. And that’s only going to increase through 2018.
So where do you start? Here are four ways to get started in using paid digital advertising to help take your content marketing strategy to the next level.
3 paid digital advertising platforms for beginners
Display ads
Display ads are the paid advertisements that appear in front of users on website pages in the form of graphics. Unlike text-based ads, display advertising relies on elements such as images, audio and video to communicate an advertising message. Display ads are commonly referred to as banner ads, but they don’t always take exact banner form. They can come in all shapes and sizes and can appear anywhere on a webpage.
Benefits: Because digital ads are visual, they can be customized with your logo, message, or even an offer to help increase brand awareness. You have the ability to use graphics, video, audio, and your company’s branding to really stand out and attract their attention. Display ads also allow users the ability to target a specific audience. You control which sites they appear on, which geographic area they appear in, and which demographic or niche market they appear to.
Sponsored social media posts
Social media is a natural place to begin if you’re looking to get into paid digital advertising. A good starting point is Facebook. The social media giant’s social ad revenue was more than $9.16 billion in Q2 2017 alone. And it doesn’t stop there. Twitter brought in $548 million in social media advertising revenue in the same period, and Snapchat is expected to reach over $895.5 million in ad revenue in 2017.
Benefits: Running paid social ads allows you to reach a large audience at a low cost. You pay based on the type of ad you’re running. For example if you’re looking to drive brand awareness, you’ll incur a CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions). And not only are the ads relatively inexpensive to run, they’re not expensive to create. You get all of this plus the ability to target your specific audience, reaching people that are interested in learning about what you do.
Google AdWords
Google AdWords places your website as one of the top results on a search engine results page (SERP) when a user searches for certain keywords of your choice. When a user clicks the AdWords link or calls your business using that link, you incur a charge. Otherwise, impressions are free.
Google’s most recent update involves changes to the so-called “3-pack,” or the listing of three related local businesses on a search results page. Many consumers rely on the 3-pack to discover businesses in their area that offer the products and services they are seeking. And businesses get the benefit of many additional leads and customers when they appear in the 3-pack. This can be particularly significant for small businesses.
Benefits: The biggest benefit of Google AdWords is its speed. You appear in a top spot in a user’s search results, meaning you are one of the first things a user sees when searching for a specific product or service. That’s another good point: Google AdWords allows you to focus on people who are searching for what you have to offer, so you don’t pay for a bunch of wasted impressions. AdWords also gives you real-time reports to track your ad’s success. A dashboard shows information related to each campaign, such as the ads clicked, keywords entered by website visitors, cost of clicks and much more.
Research: Quora offers amazing insight into what thought leaders in the supply chain and logistics industries are focused on. Just by tuning into the conversation, you can gain extremely valuable knowledge.
Connections: This social media platform gives you a perfect space to connect with peers in your industry and with potential buyers, as well.
Reputation building: Quora is one of the best tools out there for reputation building. It allows you to participate in and contribute to conversations that can shape the future of your industry. Using this platform effectively gives you the opportunity to become a resource for others in your industry and for your target buyers — and there’s no better reputation builder than that.
Plenty of business are already using Quora extremely effectively, seeing ROI and more. But supply chain and logistics companies have yet to jump on this untapped opportunity. Let’s take a look at a few success stories.
2 B2B companies successfully using Quora
Kiip
This mobile advertising network has a unique business model that “redefines how brands connect with consumers.” Back in 2014, the marketing team did a series of experiments — one of which was answering questions on Quora — to figure out which growth strategies would be most beneficial for the business model. Read about Kiip’s Quora experiment here.
Kevin Fishner, Kiip’s director of growth, said that his goal in answering Quora questions was to “build our brand presence in the mobile advertising space while driving quality leads to our site.” He offers the important insight that there is a fine line between offering valuable answers and blatantly pitching your product.
“If the question directly pertained to Kiip,” Fishner says, “I’d drop a link at the bottom of my answer. If it was a more generic mobile advertising question, I’d use insights from our campaigns at Kiip and leave it at that.”
Fishner points out that answering questions thoughtfully takes a significant time investment. But in the end, this investment is worth it for your business in all kinds of ways.
As you join the Quora conversation, keep Fishner’s insights in mind. Promoting your brand isn’t always about pitching your product. Becoming a thought leader can be just beneficial, if not more so, for your brand and, ultimately, for your bottom line.
IMPACT
Impact is an inbound marketing agency based out of Connecticut. Earlier this year, IMPACT blogger Carolyn Edgecomb wrote about how the company used Quora marketing to build brand awareness. Like Fishner, she points to following core advice for using this platform: “Hustling or selling is exactly what you shouldn’t be doing on Quora. Instead, aim to spread knowledge.”
Based on IMPACT’s experience on the site, she suggest that “by regularly engaging with other members, you’re able to gain key insights from leading experts, target your audience, and even repurpose your content while answering and asking questions.”
For IMPACT, Quora was less about generating ROI and more about “increasing brand awareness and establishing thought leadership.”
Supply chain and logistics companies can take inspiration and insight from these two Quora marketing success stories. The field is largely open. Start looking for questions you can answer, become a part of the conversation, and aim to become a thought leader.
I repurposed some of our popular content into a video using Lumen 5, a video automation tool.
Have you heard of Lumen 5? It’s a cool website that turns your blog posts into videos in a matter of minutes. You simply enter a URL of an existing post, and it automatically selects text and creates slides with relevant photos. You can edit the text as necessary and swap out photos from a vast library, then select music to go along with the slideshow. And you can even swap colors and add your logo for a little bit of branding.
Super user friendly. Really quick. Did I mention that the most basic functionalities are free?
Video and automation: Two of my favorite words!
I’m always looking for ways to repurpose some of our best content or just present it in a new way. So when my colleague came across Lumen 5 the other day (true story, they are not paying me for this plug), it seemed like an easy tool for doing so.
If you read this blog regularly, you know that I believe all businesses — even supply chain and logistics businesses — should be considering video as a part of their content marketing strategies. Most don’t have the time or budget to do something professional. So automation tools like Lumen 5 offer an interesting opportunity to delve into video without a big investment.
Something else we’re big on at Fronetics? Automation. It’s tricky with marketing because marketing requires a lot of strategic thinking, analysis, and creativity, which really can’t be automated. So any tools that do help automate any part of your creative or editorial processes are a good find.
All this being said, I did do quite a bit of editing and perfecting of the video below. But I was pretty impressed with the original video that Lumen 5 created from my post before I started working on it, too. Features like the text select and image suggestions speed up the editing process, so all in all, I probably spent 20-30 minutes making a video. Not bad!
Video: How Often to Post on Social Media
For our inaugural Lumen 5 video, I decided to use one of our most popular posts, This Is How Often B2B Companies Should Post on Social Media. It’s a question that we get all the time, and I felt the content worked in both the more robust blog post format and the hyper-shortened (about 1 minute) Lumen 5 video format.
Here it is:
What do you think? Do you use any video tools that are free/cheap and fast?
Terrorism is a reality that, unfortunately, requires our growing attention in the supply chain world.
The British Standards Institution Supply Chain Services and Solutions publishes an annual report that analyzes global trouble spots for supply chain operations. This year’s report focused on the continual rise in terrorist attacks and how it will continue to affect the supply chain.
In 2016, there were 346 attacks in just one year — that’s an 8.5% rise on the previous year, averaging 6.7 attacks every week.
Terrorism, in its broadest sense, describes the use of intentionally indiscriminate violence as a means to create terror or fear to achieve a political, religious, or ideological aim. This violence can take on many forms, including cyberterrorism, and can have dire consequences to the supply chain.
“The direct impact from acts of terrorism and the indirect effects from terrorist organizations’ exploitation of the supply chain have been, and will continue to be, critically felt across Europe,” said David Fairnie, principal consultant in supply chain security at BSI.
In 2016, supply chain terrorism attacks were more widely distributed than in any previous year, with 38% more countries suffering attacks. The top 10 countries for supply-chain-terrorism incidents accounted for $664 billion worth of global exports. That includes $96 billion of exports to the United States. Clearly, a significant volume of international trade is at risk for disruption by terrorist groups.
I recently spoke with Randy Russell of the Russell Group, an agricultural lobbying firm that works with farmers and manufacturers from the supply chain, to ask about his thoughts on terrorism and the impact it can have on the supply chain, especially related to our food and water supplies.
“Terrorism is a global problem that strikes locally. The net result of the horrible tragedy of 9/11 was a wake-up call to all Americans about the threat of terrorists groups. We have invested billions in intelligence and homeland security to ensure that a large-scale attack doesn’t affect two major areas in the U.S., our water supply and an outbreak amongst our food supply, especially our cattle industry.
“No country is completely safe, but we are exponentially better prepared to stop such attempts because of a well-coordinated effort. Remember at the heart of of terrorism is the hatred of democracy and the freedoms it is built upon. Their whole approach is to create fear and doubt within the boundaries of those who embrace freedom.”
We know the nation is doing its part to keep us safe, but how are we keeping our businesses and brands safe as well? The need for brand safety has never been higher. Sarah Golding, president of IPA and chief executive at CHI & Partners, called for the industry to do more to protective itself, stating that an estimated 20% of the $32 billion spent on digital video and display advertising is fraudulently billed.
So How Can You Prepare Your Supply Chain for terrorism?
Munters Lean Manager Marcelo Simiao weighed in on how he believes businesses can prepare themselves in the event of an attack:
“From the point of view of the supply chain, the consequences of a terrorist act on places such as airports, ports, and railroads are not much different from the ones caused by natural disasters. Therefore the preparations should be similar.
“The difference is that some of these areas don’t have contingency or emergency plans for natural disasters because risk varies according to regions. So, these areas should make a thorough risk analysis similar to other areas’ natural disaster plans, and also put it in place in the case of terror threats.
“Corporations should include in their risk analysis not only areas subject to natural disasters, but also the ones with high risk of terror attacks. They must include actions such as diverse footprint, secondary suppliers for the same components, emergency changes on factories set up. These actions are used to compensate losses/disruption of the supply chain flow.
“Furthermore, real-time data acquisition, big-data analysis, and effective planning are the key to fast reaction times for corporations once an attack/disaster happens. The sooner the corporation takes action in order to mitigate disruption, the less its flow will be affected. If an airport is closed, it is important to be the first one to know and the first one trying to move the cargo through alternate routes/intermodal.”
This guest post comes to us from Argentus Supply Chain Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in Supply Chain Management and Procurement.
it’s no secret that the world of Procurement is changing and fast. With automation, big data and burgeoning AI systems removing more and more of the profession’s “tactical” or “clerical” tasks, companies are calling on their Procurement teams to be more strategic, more nimble, and more innovative. They’re expecting their Procurement functions to deliver not just bottom-line cost-savings, but other sorts of value, adding to organizations’ overall competitiveness.
Procurement, you’ve come a long way, baby.
But a new survey of 200 C-Suite executives from a variety of industries and functions presents a rather dispiriting picture of the Procurement function today – or at least how it’s perceived. Held by Management Consulting firm Ayming, the survey explores a wide base of opinions from some of business’s top leaders – CEOs, CPOs, COOs, and CFOs – about the value Procurement has to add, and where it’s going to be in 2020. The survey, titled Procurement 2020, has lots of interesting insights, showing where Procurement is knocking it out of the park – and where it’s striking out.
The biggest headline takeaway? 83% of executives surveyed say that their Procurement function is not entirely strategic – meaning they don’t think it’s crucial to business leadership, and that it isn’t a key input when making high-level strategic decisions.
It’s a rough verdict, one showing that as much progress as the field is making, a lot of that development – the chance to be a true partner to business at the highest level – is still unfulfilled potential. Some of the other data is relatively damning as well: only 28% of executives surveyed viewed Procurement as a core aspect of their strategy. Morethan half (51%) of the executives do not consider their Procurement operating models to be effective as they stand today.
Interestingly, this last number breaks down differently across industries:
Retail executives had the highest confidence in their Procurement function, with 43% of retailers considering their Procurement operations to be highly effective – and 18% considering them to be somewhat effective. Retail also had strong marks in terms of its strategic value from Procurement, with 79% of executives saying that its Procurement operations were “mostly or entirely strategically focused.”
27% of Manufacturing companies viewed their Procurement operations as highly effective – with 24% considering them to be somewhat effective. The Manufacturing industry also led the way in terms of strategic value, with 91% of Manufacturing executives saying that their Procurement operations were highly strategic.
21% of Technology companies, as well as only 21% of Healthcare companies, viewed their Procurement operations as highly effective.
Dispiritingly, only 15% of Financial Services companies considered their Procurement operations to be highly effective.
The numbers represent a large base of dissatisfaction with how companies are prioritizing, training and supporting their Procurement departments. 44% of CEOs, as well as 44% of CFOs, consider their Procurement functions either very or somewhat effective. 52% of COOs gave a “very or somewhat effective verdict,” compared to (perhaps unsurprisingly) 56% of CPOs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, very large companies – most able to leverage a shared service model and consolidated spend – were most likely to report that they received a very high amount of value from Procurement: 36%.
Despite the survey saying that Procurement still has a long way to go, the broad base of executives surveyed often indicated a deep interest in helping the function get there. 48% of companies surveyed have either reorganized their Procurement function in the past 5 years, or are in the middle of reorganizing it, with a full 20% planning to reorganize Procurement in the next 24 months.
There are some other interesting and divergent opinions when it comes to how companies are seeking to increase their Procurement function’s effectiveness:
68% of executives surveyed believed that if Procurement gets involved earlier in new product creation, as well as long-term strategy, it’ll be able to add more value.
82% of CEOs believe that employee training and upskilling is a key way to improve Procurement effectiveness. In contrast, a 38% of CEOs believe that Procurement-specific technology is the answer.
A large percentage of CPOs (90%) believe that upgrading technology is key to improving Procurement strategy (compared to 76% of CEOs), but across different industries there’s some disagreement about the best way to drive further value from Procurement: In the Financial Services, Transportation, Retail and Technology sectors, executives saw people and skills development as the biggest opportunity to add more value through Procurement, whereas Manufacturing executives saw reorganization as the best opportunity.
We tend to think that surveys like this are an opportunity for the field rather than an indictment. And despite some of the more negative responses, we happen to know tons of Procurement departments who are excelling and creating true strategic value for their stakeholders. But if these surveys are anything to go on, there’s much more to be done. We encourage you to dig into Ayming’s survey, as there’s a lot more data we only briefly covered here.
