Are you being tormented by your boss? Do you cringe at the thought of going to work in the morning? Perhaps you’ve quit and stayed. If this is the case then there’s a good chance that you’re suffering from left-brain leadership.
Left-brain leaders focus on logical thinking, analysis, and accuracy. Right-brain leaders, on the other hand, focus on aesthetics, feeling, and creativity. Here’s a chart that shows the difference.
Left-brain leaders tend to be from engineering, computer science, accounting, banking, science and many other hyper-logical disciplines. Right-brain leaders tend to come from sales, marketing, and HR.
If you have a left-brain leader, chances are you’re experiencing one or more of the following behaviours:
- Relying only on logic for decisions.
- Denying that emotion has any place in business.
- Being a perfectionist.
- Micromanaging you.
- Assigning responsibility without authority.
- Being a stickler for process.
- Not explaining the context behind decisions.
- Expecting you to work faster and faster as volume increases.
- Keeping you in the dark because you just don’t need to know.
- Berating you or criticizing you, especially in public.
Left-brain leaders really need to learn the emotional side of business. They need to learn how to communicate, how to connect and how to motivate and that logic isn’t always the way to solve a problem.
If you’ve got other examples of how left-brain leaders torment you, I would love to hear them through comments.