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If you’re a manager or supervisor here are some more basic mistakes to avoid.

  1. Hurrying Recruitment

When it’s time to hire someone, and you need that person on board sooner rather than later, if you’re not careful, you can rush into a recruitment that you later greatly regret. I know, because I’ve done it. I can recall times when I saw in a prospective employee what I wanted to see in that person, instead of realistically assessing their skills. Then very soon that person had to be let go, with a lot of grief for that person and a lot of wasted time and money for me and my organization.

If you’re not particularly good at the hiring process, get help from someone who is. That’s a lesson I have finally learned. Proverbs 11:14 tells us: For lack of guidance a nation falls, but victory is won through many advisers. A smart manager recognizes his or her own areas of weakness or incompetence or lack of experience and looks for help there.

  1. Not “Walking the Talk”

Years ago I was hired to do some customer service training for a large company. The manager wanted his people to have consistently good telephone skills because most of their contact with their customers was by phone, so this was important. But I noticed that this manager’s telephone manners were the worst! When I suggested that it would make a big difference to his employees if they saw that he was changing his bad habits, he just laughed and said that he had been that way for years and he wasn’t about to change now. Well, I knew that my training would have limited success if the employees didn’t see him walk the talk.

As Christ-followers, it is even more important that we walk the talk. I often think of this verse from 2 Corinthians 8:21: For we are taking pains to do what is right, not only in the eyes of the Lord but also in the eyes of man. Remember, you can’t expect your employees to have a better work ethic than you do.

And one more thing: your attitude matters. I always say that managers don’t have the luxury to be in a bad mood, because your attitude—more than anyone else’s—is contagious and when your attitude is negative, it will spread like wildfire through the whole team.