Preparing yourself for leadership
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Mar 2007
Last month outlined ideas to focus your first hundred days leading a new team, but what if you're not yet leading the team? What do you need to develop to make sure that you're going to be an effective and charismatic leader able to inspire commitment, demand discipline and achieve performance? Here are some of the characteristics or capabilities of people that make good leaders and managers. Be warned, great leadership does not follow a formula and there is as much art as there is science in developing as a leader.
Last month outlined ideas to focus your first hundred days leading a new team, but what if you're not yet leading the team? What do you need to develop to make sure that you're going to be an effective and charismatic leader able to inspire commitment, demand discipline and achieve performance? Here are some of the characteristics or capabilities of people that make good leaders and managers. Be warned, great leadership does not follow a formula and there is as much art as there is science in developing as a leader.
The best place to start is yourself: good leaders reflect on themselves and spend time away from the rush of day to day operations to contemplate their own work, their own life and goals and their own performance. They don't wait for the annual performance review or for their superior to schedule a feedback session. Good leaders understand themselves, and understanding comes from reflection and investigation. Understanding your own strengths and character means that you can consciously play to your abilities and compensate for areas in which you are less effective. That isn't weakness, because no-one is strong in every relevant area.
This self-reflection is often expanded into a strong self-awareness. Leaders that are self-aware are able to understand how other people are relating to them, how their message is being heard and understood, or how their leadership is being internalised by their audience. A great leader is in-sync with their audience and is able to adjust their actions to best suit the team, whilst not compromising their leadership message. Often these leader are also great listeners and are able to empathise with their team. They make their team feel understood and supported. Another common term used to describe these sometimes fuzzy concepts is Emotional Intelligence, a term coined by Daniel Goleman in a book of the same name. It is definitely worth a read if you're interested in developing as a leader, even though some aspects of EQ appear more to be useful framework for understanding rather than a formal and sound psychological framework.
What separates the great leaders from the ordinary managers is their ability to inspire people and their ability to create a compelling vision of some future direction. The technical skills supporting this ability are often the easier skills to master, but is the ideas described in Emotional Intelligence that often turn a leader with a PowerPoint vision into someone inspiring people to change and commit.
So what technical skills are then important? Some leadership roles demand technical skills unique to the environment in which you - it is difficult to be a football coach or captain if you don't play a good game of football! But there are some more general skills which are usually important. Top of the list is always the ability to communicate: in writing, verbal and non-verbal ways. Leader who can get her point across in simple, understandable and motivating ways is unlikely to effective.
The ability to think rivals communication for the top of the list. Good leaders make good decisions because they know how to identify the facts, analyse the options, follow the logic and evaluate the options. In short, they know how to think and they use that ability continuously. Despite the title Jack Welch's book, great leaders don't work only on instinct and gut-feel.
One particular aspect of thinking worth highlighting is a capability known as "systems thinking" described in a book called The Fifth Discipline. It is the ability to derive relatively simple descriptions of how complex systems work. A person who can only work in the complex details of day to day business won't find it easy to define direction or vision that exist above the detail; and a person that only operates in abstract gestures won't find it easy to establish credibility amongst the team members. System thinking provides a bridge: first understand the complexity in the business or the process, and then be able to describe in simple (frequently visual) terms showing the important relationships and feedback mechanisms (flow of information of logic or decisions).
Leaders understand their business. They have good business acumen. They understand where the value is created in their business, they understand how the cash flows through their business processes, leaving them with a good understanding of how and why the business is profitable. Knowing which customers and which team members are contributing the most to your team's success if critical. As a result, good leaders are often curious people. Their curiosity makes them good listeners because they want to understand people; it gives them good business acumen because they want to know how things work.
Don't wait to be the boss before you develop your leadership capabilities: start working on your abilities now. And start acting like a leader now. Make work mean something more than a pay check to yourself and to your team - have a cause. Focus on doing the greatest work that you can instead of focusing on the next promotion. Quite often the jobs and roles will follow those doing great work, making a contribution and making a difference - these are the people that are already acting as leaders.
Preparing yourself for leadership was published in Intelligence Magazine as Strategym #46 in March 2007.
Categories
Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
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leadership (7) | career (1) | personal growth (1)
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08 March
2007Hi Grant, great articl, in particular your last paragraph. Employee can ill-afford to adopt its-not-my-problem and am-not-yet-a-manager attitude if they want to grow. They pine for knighthood, but are unwilling to be chivalrous and valiant.
One question though: why does it seem common practice to elect master swordsmen over your Quixotes? One would reckon that a skill could be learnt, but a quality not?
Of course your swordsman may guarantee individual kills, but is not wont to Braveheart speeches for demoralised teams and your Quixote might rush in blindly thus taking themselves and their companies out.
— Posted by Joe
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