Imagine you’ve been working towards securing a senior leadership role for 2 years and suddenly you have reached your goal. You find yourself stepping into that role you have aspired to with all the responsibility that comes with it.
“Wow the hard work paid off”
But you quickly realise that the role is not what you thought it would be.
One of the challenging things you will face within your working career will be stepping into a key leadership role. People often struggle shifting into that first opportunity due to insufficient development and support, a lack of visibility of what the role entails, personal pressure to succeed, and a lack of confidence to ask for help. This article aims to highlight the challenges leaders face at the next level, giving you some tips to overcome some common pitfalls, setting you up to succeed and thrive in your new role.
Building Trust
The most impactful thing you can do short term is build trust with each of your team members, and in turn, show them that they have your trust. Highlight the importance of trust in the relationship and what it means to you as a leader, then look for opportunities to build trust where you can.
One of the easiest ways to build trust is by having and showing integrity. Role model the behaviour you expect from your team, deliver on your commitments, doing what you say you will do, when you say you will do it regardless of how big or small, always honour your word.
As a leader you will have access to information that isn’t yours to share, keep this in mind as trust is a combination of words and actions, remember every action is visible to somebody.
Admit when you have made a mistake, and fix it if that makes sense. Taking ownership of mistakes shows your people that the environment is safe, that failure or mistakes are an accepted outcome of striving for results, and that they can be discussed openly without personal risk. Leaders who own their failures also teach their people how to get back up and try again, and teaches the importance of trying creative and innovative things where success is not always a given.
Showing appreciation and gratitude builds trust, highlighting the value each person brings to the team encourages ongoing engagement and connection to purpose.
Communication
Alongside trust, the greatest thing you can do for your team is be an effective communicator. Sounds simple right? According to a Harvard Business Review article, a poll of over 2,000 people, including more than 600 managers, revealed that nearly 70% of leaders struggle with employee communication, highlighting a significant gap in leadership effectiveness.
Building a high performance culture requires regular two way communication between stakeholders. Even when you think you have communicated enough, you need to do more and you need to communicate in different ways, across different channels, at different times! Great communicators also listen – they observe the signs that are on display every day from their audience, recognising when messages are understood. They check in to ensure understanding and listen when they receive feedback. So how are you meant to get this right and ensure you have covered off everything that needs to be discussed?
Prepare! Be deliberate in your actions, disciplined in your approach, and cater to the needs of all your team. Build a communication framework that allows you to plot regular interactions that cover different components of your operational needs. Regular meetings with your leadership team need to be scheduled, including one on one discussions that are structured and focused. Organisational goals, plans, and results need to be communicated regularly, and might need to be adjusted based on your audience. Setting up a framework that includes regular scheduled sessions, allows you to build a strong operating rhythm, you can plan your month accordingly and build out the content each week, ensuring communication is regular, consistent, and readily accessible by your people.
For some, shifting into a leadership role and having to step up your communication game is challenging. The best tip here, is to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Utilising a framework or set of communication templates helps build your skills in this domain, and it is true what they say – ‘practice does make perfect’. Follow this approach and before you know it you will be framing difficult conversations, providing hard feedback, and presenting organisational information without blinking an eye. Remember, being a great leader means having those conversations that others shy away from.
Understand Motivation
Not everyone will be driven by the same motivations within the workplace. As a leader, your challenge is to get to know your people, know their currency and understand how you can utilise this to help bring out the very best in them. Some of your team will love public recognition, others would rather step off a cliff, if you get this wrong for either option, your ability to motivate performance will diminish over time. Investing the time to listen to your team will ensure you understand what makes them tick, providing you with the secret to motivating them and optimising results.
Building Effective Relationships
Whilst we all want to be seen as friendly and approachable leaders, there are times when you will have to make hard decisions and people you are leading will have to do things they don’t want to do. You need to balance the relationships you have with your people, ensuring the professional respect that comes with the authority of your role is not compromised by relationships that have slipped too far into the ‘friend’ zone. This can be particularly difficult when you have transitioned from the role of peer, to the role of leader however it is a critical step in owning your leadership role. Set appropriate boundaries that ensure roles are clearly defined within the environment. This goes both ways, make sure you don’t take advantage of relationships, rather have a consistent approach to delegating responsibilities and tasks.
Expectations and Accountability
When your people don’t have clear goals or a good understanding of what they are expected to delivery, they will struggle to be productive. If they don’t understand what they are working towards or have a clear sense of why their contributions matter, they will fail to prioritise effectively which will impact organisational outcomes in the longer term. Ensure you create a narrative that connects your goals to the strategic direction of your organisation, constantly referencing your organisational plans. This embeds the practice in your team and sets them up to do the same with their direct reports. An engaged workforce that understands their purpose, will be far more productive and deliver better customer outcomes and results for your organisation.
Create an open and accountable culture where conversations including goals, outcomes, and responsibility are held regularly. Discuss progress openly, providing feedback in real time, and allowing the team to contribute to the analysis of progress. Set realisting timeframes that are achievable, and celebrate success when you achieve your goals. Ensure your team hold you to account, modelling behaviour helps create an environment of trust and supports a culture of accountability across all roles.
Strategic Thinking and Decision-Making
As a newly promoted leader, you now have a different set of challenges in relation to people, HR, performance and organisational results. Those tasks that you were really comfortable with in your prior role, are no longer your responsibility and its important that you let them go. Your role is to deliver with and through others, supporting your direct reports to lead their teams by developing their skills and capabilities, supporting growth, and challenging them to be confident decision makers.
You’ll become a master of prioritisation and delegation. By listening to your team, you’ll have a list of challenges impacting your short term objectives, and the ones that can be put off for another day. Understanding and reprioritising this list should be the first thing you do every day.
When deciding which challenges take priority, you should have a clear idea of your 80/20 activities, these are the activities that can be broken down into:
- The 20% of your tasks that produce 80% of the results (highly productive)
- The 80% of your tasks that produce 20% of the results (highly unproductive)
Give the highest priority to the tasks that – when completed – removes a large percentage of your other problems, or moves you significantly further toward your objectives/goals. Go down the list every morning and prioritise accordingly. You will come up with a system that works for you, however don’t leave it to chance. Be disciplined and deliberate with your approach, ensuring you set yourself clear goals and realistic timeframes. Delegation becomes an important tool to support your success, however it requires a time investment to manage appropriately.
When the time comes to make significant decisions or solve problems relating to the management of your teams, it’s time to build trust and delegate. You have capable adults reporting into you, it is not your job to dictate how they do things, it is your job to collaborate, delegate and guide your team to make the best decisions for the collective. As the leader of leaders, a large proportion of your role involves the coaching and development of your direct reports, and the best way to do that is to involve them in the big decisions, allow them to fail safely, and as a team, learn from the mistakes.
Driving Performance and Accountability
If you can manage to stay consistent with the first principles of masterful leadership, high performance will be a byproduct of the work you’re doing. A productive operational cadence, effective and impactful communication, strong and trusting relationships and a collaborative culture will get you further than any dictatorship ever could. If you find yourself telling (barking orders) more than asking (collaborating), you might be better off reflecting on your leadership ability first.
Coaching and development objectives should be team-driven. You need the ability to frame difficult conversations effectively, run impactful coaching sessions, set energising goals and expectations, and identify the hidden superpowers of your team members and help them use these to their advantage. Your focus is to guide each team member to build their own unique and inspiring leadership style.
There is nothing intricate or complicated about being a great leader. Great leadership is a blend of purpose, empathy, transparency, candour, vision, and integrity. By integrating these first principles, inspired by thought leaders such as Simon Sinek, Ray Dalio, Brené Brown, Richard Branson, and others, you can create a positive, productive, and innovative team culture. These principles emphasise the importance of understanding and motivating people, maintaining ethical standards, and continually striving for personal and team growth. Without them, you’re cooking up a recipe for disaster.
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