No matter how good you think you are, if you are insecure then you won’t be as effective.

When you are a secure leader, you won’t feel threatened by anyone else. To become a highly effective leader, you must be secure within yourself and the only way to do that is to develop yourself, work on yourself and focus on your personal growth every day.

1. Being Secure

To ensure your leadership continues to be stable and improve, you need to have that security within yourself. When you are continuously growing into a highly effective leader, you will feel yourself rising above those around you. When that happens your insecurities and stresses start to disappear.

In different articles we have discussed our area of innocence, and this is where insecure leaders and live their lives most of the time.

When they are in this area you hear them blaming others for when things go wrong, they become jealous when they see other people, leaders doing well, and they accuse others when they feel they have been stabbed in the back.

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This is all the usual politics that goes on in most organisations around the world. But, when you are working on yourself every day and you feel you are in total control of your life and career, you won’t need any of those politics, and that is when you will be standing out from the rest.

Secure leaders don’t need problems, so they erase them out of their lives. Insecure leaders like to cause problems because the only way they believe they can move forward is to play games.

Within themselves they know they are not growing because they don’t know how to. There are some of the problems that insecure leaders cause:

Poor communication between the insecure leader and team. I’ve worked with insecure leaders who believe that if they keep developing their people, they fear they will get ahead of them and threaten their position.

So, they only share the knowledge and information required with their people so they can just carry out their job. They have a fear of helping someone else in their team or department look good, and that could be their peers, their people, or even their own boss.

Insecure leaders will never be happy to share their knowledge and communicate in a way that will help to develop their team.

2. Trust

Lack of trust between the insecure leader and team. With the poor communication between the leader and the people, this creates distrust. When there is distrust between a leader and their team, then it is impossible to lead or increase their influence positively.

There is also a lack of trust between the leader and their own boss, which makes life in the workplace even more awkward. An insecure leader will always be the first to take credit when things go well and will always be the first to blame their team when things don’t go well.

So, what happens is, the people will follow their leader’s lead and will also withhold knowledge and information sharing between each other.

They will also be looking to blame others when things go wrong. Therefore, the culture within the team is toxic which can only lead to more distrust between the whole team.

With lack of trust and poor communication between the insecure leader and their people, this causes low morale within the whole team. Instead of inspiring the people to be their best, they worry the people because they are uncertain about what is happening.

When you don’t trust your leader, this uncertainty causes you to give minimal effort for the team because you don’t know if your hard work is going to be recognised. You don’t know if you are going to be respected, and you don’t know if you are going to be helped.

When you don’t know these things, your morale drops, and you feel like an individual rather than a team. This adds to the already toxic culture within the team and increases the tension between team members.

3. Accountability

Insecure leaders believe they are the ones who should have all the ideas and all the answers. They believe they should be telling the people what to do and how to do it, and being this way causes a lack of teamwork with the people.

The insecure leaders would prefer to keep it this way so they are not threatened by the people who may have better ideas and more knowledge than they do.

The insecure leader wants to be in total control, more like a dictator rather than a leader. They do this because they don’t want any of their people making a challenge towards them, especially in front of fellow leaders or their boss.

I have mentioned this earlier but insecure leaders are not willing to hold themselves accountable or take responsibility. When things go wrong the first thing, they will do is blame somebody else, and that could be one of their own people, their boss or somebody on a different team in a different department.

They will even blame the CEO or managing director of the organisation they are working with. When they do this, the people they are blaming will have to put in the effort and waste their time defending themselves.

Whereas if the leader took responsibility and held themselves accountable, they and the team could move on quickly without wasting much time and energy.

4. Development

Insecure leaders will never put together a development plan with their people because they will see this as a threat to them and their position. They will think things like, “If we give our people leadership development training, they might become better than me and take my job.”

They will make sure that their people have all the competencies to do the job they are paid to do, but they will never develop them into leaders.

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They want to keep at just the right level of competency so there is no way they can be promoted, or worse replace them, which is very sad for the people on their team, for the organisation they work with and for the industry they are part of.

Not everybody knows this, but insecure leaders are one of the main reasons why people will leave their jobs and look for something better. It is not because of the work they do or the people they are in a team with, it is because of the relationship they have with their boss.

I have personal experience of this on several occasions and I can tell you that there is nothing worse than coming to work knowing that you have a 1:1 with your insecure leader. Or coming to work knowing you have a team meeting that is chaired by your insecure leader.

What usually happens is they cause the best people and the people with great potential to leave, which will hinder the performance of the team and organisation. But most of all, it will have a burden on the person’s mental health.

Secure leaders are comfortable in saying they don’t know something when they really don’t know. Insecure leaders will say they do know something when they really don’t know. When secure leaders say they don’t know, they are helping the other leaders and people around them to do the same.

I welcome hearing how this post has influenced the way you think, the way you lead, or the results you have achieved because of what you’ve learned in it. Please feel free to share your thoughts with me by commenting below.

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All the best,

Tom (Lead, Grow, Influence)