Practice What you Preach

As the leader, be it of a major company or of a small team, you must avoid all hypocrisy. What you say, you must do; so to speak. But it goes much further than that. You must live the life that you preset to your followers. The fastest way to lose the respect of your team is to be obviously hypocritical.

A real life example of this is my current job as a cook. The owner had pushed back payday another day, from Friday to Saturday, and still expected her workers to work just as hard. Now one day is not a big deal, it's only one day, but it shows the level of respect we garner for our work. She is the one that gets the checks and the only way we employees get paid is by her bringing the checks in and giving them to us. When we get paid is completely up to her, the checks are given to her by the payment company on Thursday of every other week, and we have to wait until Saturday to receive payment. We have to wait, because she doesn't want to sign the checks or we're just not that important.

Over time a general attitude of "I hate this place" has formed throughout the store, and it isn't the managers, but rather the owner that started it. She wants us to work hard, but isn't willing to pay us promptly for it. In the past payday was on every second Friday, now we have to wait, and work ethic has suffered.