Episode #467: How To Be A Successful New Leader

We have been toiling away long and hard, being accountable, going the extra mile, starting early and finishing late to get the numbers and hammering those KPIs. Then we get promoted to become responsible for others as the team leader. Usually, we get no formal leadership training for the new role and are left to work it out by ourselves. How do we keep moving up the ladder of success? There are a number of things we have to study, in order for this new role to become the catalyst we need to deliver our career aspirations.

1. Stop Doing and Start Leading

This sounds easier than it is, because we are often player/managers and have our own clients or parts of the business we need to take care of. The danger is we find getting productivity from others who are less smart, motivated, skillful and determined is so difficult, we concentrate on what we can control. That means we keep doing our tasks, because we are very good at them and we wind up being a key result producer within the team. The organisation however keeps raising the bar, the rest of the team are still dawdling along and we find a finite limit to how much we can produce individually. The results start to miss the targets and we get fired.

Somewhere in this mix, we missed the bit about getting leverage from the team. The orchestra conductor is often the preferred metaphor for what we should have been doing. The conductor doesn’t play any of the instruments and just waves a baton around, while the rest of the team does all the work. The conductor also spends a lot of time understanding the ability and potential of the musicians and works hard to make sure the teamwork is operating at the highest possible level. This means lots of coaching, conflict management, containing of egos and discovering how to create an environment where each person can motivate themselves to be the best they can be. The numbers tell the tale of leverage. Even if we individually work sixteen hours a day and the team of ten people only work eight hours a day, they by comparison are doing eighty hours a day as a unit.

So what are we doing with our sixteen hours a day? Are we helping the team of ten in this example maximise their ability and production or are we doing our email and running our own business in parallel? Yes, we may still have some of our clients, but we need to make sure we keep that activity to a minimum, so that we can concentrate on training the team and lifting their capabilities. Ideally, over time, we move all of our clients over to the team and we apply our efforts to invest in our team members.

2. People vs Process

Compliance rules are there to keep the organisation safe and keep us from going to jail. There is a tricky balance in place though. If the rules are too tight, then experimentation isn’t given enough oxygen. If supervision is weak and there is too loose an environment without proper controls, then the organisation can get bankrupted. We have all seen some of the famous cases in the finance world where the adrenalin fuelled trader destroyed or seriously wounded the firm. How do we balance stability and creativity?

There are many paths to the mountain top and we need to encourage our team to come up with them. If we are constantly micro-managing, telling everyone what to do, the X factor of staff creativity is diminished or disengaged. Our ego is often the problem, “we are the boss, so all the good ideas have to come from us right, otherwise why are we the boss?”.

We might also start to worry, “if they have too many good ideas, the big bosses might replace me with one of them”. What we don’t understand is that every organisation is crying out for leaders and if we can be recognised as a “leader creating machine”, we will get handed bigger jobs and more responsibility. The other thing we don’t consider is if there is no one in the ranks to replace us, then we are staying right where we are now, because the big bosses like stability.

3. Become The Genius Coach

On the way up, we were very good at what we did and were totally self-sufficient. Now that we are the leader, we have an important job, which is to help our team members become better than they already are. If everyone keeps doing the same things, in the same way, we will keep getting the same results. Any differences in outcomes will be through the changes we make. The problem is everyone loves change, but they personally don’t want to change. They want the boss to change, the organisation to change, the market to change, but they want to stay exactly as they are.

This is not a fertile ground for coaching people to make changes and become better. This is when we discover the importance of persuasion ability. We didn’t need it before because we were only responsible for ourselves. If we don’t work on our listening skills and persuasion skills nothing much will change. This is not something we gain through osmosis. We have to get busy and study how to become a better coach who can listen and persuade.

If we only work on these three aspects when we become a leader for the first time, this will make the difference between getting fired and getting on. We must see that what we did to get promoted is not what we need to be doing now. The quicker we understand and act on that the better. The key word is to “study” what the new role requires in this Darwinian “up or out” business world, if we want to survive and succeed.