The fifth season of Design Star started a couple of weeks ago. After watching episode 2 last night, I was struck by how obnoxious and domineering Nina, the leader of the women’s team, acted. She was a self-appointed leader, but she didn’t act like a leader at all.

For those of you who don’t watch, Design Star is a reality TV show on HGTV that holds a competition among interior designers from around the country for a spot to host their own TV show on HGTV. There are individual and group challenges throughout the season, and each week the contestants’ work is judged by 3 well-known designers and TV personalities (Vern Yip, Genevieve Gorder, and Candice Olson). I missed the first episode (my Tivo recorded the wrong channel), but there was a handy little “Previously on…” segment at the beginning of the second episode that let me know Nina won the first week’s challenge.

As the second episode opened, the designers were split into men’s and women’s teams. The first shot of the men’s team showed them talking about how no matter what, they were a team, and the team came first. The first shot of the women’s team showed Nina saying something to the effect of “I won last time, I’ll be the leader.” Immediately you could sense the tension among the group. As the episode continued, Nina ran all over the other group members, dictating how things were going to be in their designs and their purchases. Other group members tried to speak up, but Nina basically blew them off, saying “Trust me.” In the end, the women’s team lost, and Nina was one of the bottom two designers.

Nina provided several lessons for how not to be a leader.

• Force yourself on the team. The first words out of Nina’s mouth were that she was going to be the leader. It was a forceful, no-room-for-argument dictation, and just like that, no one else on the team had a chance to volunteer. Even Vern, during judging, emphasized that Nina took the lead. She didn’t just take it, she wrenched the opportunity from everyone else. From that point forward, Nina’s fellow team members were resistant to her “leadership.” When a project starts off on the wrong foot like that, it’s hard to turn it around.
• Cite your position as a reason you should be the leader. Nina saw it as an open and shut case that she should be the leader because she won the previous week’s challenge. But winning that challenge didn’t make her any better a leader than anyone else. Offering the opportunity to someone else to lead the team would have shown her to be a collaborative team member, and would have been a good way for her to lead by example. Anyone can be a leader. Claiming you’re a better leader because of your position or title is arrogant and short-sighted.
• Talk too much. Nina was so busy talking about her ideas, she completely shut out her team members’ ideas. Every time an opposing idea was offered, she immediately rejected it, talking endlessly about how her idea was going to be brilliant/beautiful/amazing/etc. Her reactions to her team members’ opinions seemed to indicate she was more interested in talking and acting on her talk than listening and collaborating.
• Be completely self-unaware. Nina was totally clueless about how other team members perceived her and her actions. They tried to reason with her, tried to make their ideas heard, and tried to offer alternative plans. She railroaded her own plans through the group to the point where they gave up. When they were waiting for the judging, the other team members talked with Nina about how they tried to make their voices heard, and to the end, she insisted she had been open to their ideas and listened. However, it was obvious to anyone watching that she did anything but that.

And in the end, the entire team lost. Nina wasn’t 100% responsible for the team’s loss, but her poor leadership was the major contributor to the lack of cohesiveness, lack of trust, and lack of teamwork present on the team.

What other ways might poor leadership contribute to a team’s downfall?

(Special thanks to Andrea Wenger for the idea for this post)