When one-third of employees think their leaders are getting it wrong, what’s the magic formula for getting it right?

A couple of recent surveys I came across have had me thinking about the nature of leadership. Being responsible for leading others has always struck me as being a rather precarious position to be in, since people have an alarming tendency to think for themselves and to not necessarily regard everything I have to say as genius.

More by following the adage 'don't do to others what your bad bosses did to you' than any management science, I managed to lead teams during my (what seems like forever ago) corporate career. But not everyone can get away with it, judging by the results of a couple of recent studies.

One of these, Lessons for Leaders from the People Who Matter by Harris Interactive© which was conducted for DDI UK, revealed that over one-third of employees find their leaders ineffective. Respondents believed that their leaders lack empathy with their staff and have poor leadership skills, while 37% said they are only sometimes or never motivated by their leader to give their best.

Worryingly, not only are some bosses not doing well, they should also come with a health warning as, according to the research, 60% of employees feel that their boss damages their personal self-esteem.

The study found that many workers fail to get sufficient feedback on their performance and feel that their ideas and input are not sought. This is particularly problematic since nearly half of respondents (45%) think that they could do a better job than their manager.

When empathy, confidence and trust go missing in action, it leads to dangerously low levels of engagement by staff with their organisation and can have enormous repercussions for a business.

As Simon Mitchell, director at DDI UK and one of the report's authors says: "These findings should be of enormous concern to any business. They show that leaders are failing in their obligation to employees and, therefore, their organisation. The consequences of managers and bosses with poor leadership skills are enormous, and the impact good leaders have in terms of employee motivation and productivity is significant."

Another survey, this time by Edgecumbe Consulting Group, suggests that only a third (36%) of UK managers believe in their senior leaders. The survey of 201 managers in medium to large UK-headquartered organisations highlighted a lack of faith in the skills and capabilities of senior leaders to tackle the challenges their organisations face.

While 32% of respondents believe their senior leaders are bad or very bad at working in teams, 30% think their senior leaders are bad or very bad at leading.

So what's the magic formula when it comes to leadership? What's interesting about this topic is that it seems to be a subject about which everyone has an opinion – or at least something interesting to say.

From E.M. Kelly comes the reminder that leadership isn't about standing back and expecting others to find their way. "Remember the difference between a boss and a leader; a boss says "Go!" - a leader says "Let's go!"

Underlining that leadership is also about teamwork, leadership coach Mark Brouwer advises that "a man is only a leader when a follower stands beside him", while John C. Maxwell, a prolific writer on leadership, is of the view that "a good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit."

Even though he was a military man, former US President General Dwight D. Eisenhower was wise enough to know that fear was not a particularly helpful motivator for inspiring your subordinates, when he said: "You do not lead by hitting people over the head. That's assault, not leadership."

Of course, the prerequisite for being a leader is to actually have followers. It helps therefore to have a vision that those you lead can understand and pursue alongside you. So when a leader sounds like the 19th century French politician, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin – "There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them." – it's safe to say that they've lost it.

To my mind, being an effective leader is all about building relationships. And, as with any relationship, without that underlying sense of trust, leaders will fail to engage their subordinates. Building trust requires investing time today in setting out a shared vision and the common goals to obtain better results tomorrow.

Good leaders have to allow for mistakes as part of the learning process but also devolve to their people responsibility as well as accountability. Things will not always go as planned and when the unexpected and unwanted occurs, it is the leader's role to ensure that lessons are learned and improvements made. As someone wise once said, "there is a significant difference between a leader and a cheerleader."

How people feel motivated and take criticism will depend on the nature of the relationship they have with their boss and, in my view, leadership is about forging relationships and not focusing solely on transactional behaviour like giving instructions. Because the truth of the matter is that whether one works in an SME or a multinational with 10,000 staff, good leadership at every level is critical. Employees aren't engaged with large corporations; they're engaged on a daily basis with their immediate colleagues and managers. If the relationship isn't right at the micro level, it's never going to be right at the macro level.

So if you're a leader and wondering how your team would respond if they were part of the studies referred to earlier, it's probably a good idea to ask yourself if you are helping or hindering your subordinates? Are you part of the solution and firmly lodged in the camp of good leadership or are you a serious contributor to your team's problems?

According to Simon Mitchell, the findings of their survey showed that "leaders remain stubbornly poor at these fundamental basics of good leadership," and that "it's important that managers are aware of their own blind spots in these areas."

As the wealth of leadership programmes on the market suggests, there is plenty of guidance out there when it comes to learning how to be a better leader. And, as Mitchell says, "the good news for businesses and employees alike is that many of these leadership skills can be learnt."

It's also worth bearing in mind that once the stage has been set, the vision has been shared and the individual has been motivated, sometimes the best thing a leader can do for his subordinate is to get out of their way.

Because, to quote General Eisenhower, "Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it."

Author of 'Everyday Heroes – Learning from the Careers of Successful Black Professionals'. Available online from www.everyday-heroes.co.uk and on order through booksellers. ISBN 978-0-9569175-0-8