- Secret meetings. If someone asks you to keep a secret she is not a leader.
- Avoid conflict. It’s easy to avoid the hard conversations and rather tell the other person what they want to hear, or avoid the meeting altogether.
- Don’t fire nice people. It’s easy firing assholes, much harder firing people that are kind and decent.
- Tell different people different stories. The greatest giveaway of a non-leader is a person who doesn’t speak up in a group, but prefers one-on-one meetings. That way he/she can never be caught out for telling different stories.
- Speak behind people’s backs or when they’re not in the room.
- Use rudeness as a tool to get attention, cloaked as brutal honesty.
- Pay yourself a big bonus but not give staff a raise.
- Take the glory for good news, pass the buck for bad news.
- Keep information to yourself, make yourself indispensable.
- Hold other people down, make them insecure, keep them in their box.
- Chop and change your mind.
- Rule by fear.
- Say one thing and do another. Buy Ricoffee for staff but drive a Ferrari.