Articles
Develop Leaders Like You Mean It
Leading people is one of the trickiest, most challenging, and ultimately most important things any supervisor, manager, or executive can do. Yet many organizations promote good performers into leadership positions without any apparent consciousness that management and leadership are professional disciplines unto themselves, and that people need training and support if they are going to learn to be good at it. At the same time, people who are promoted because they were good at their last job may have little talent for the one to which they've been promoted. Where most new or advancing leaders struggle is in:
- Learning to communicate effectively
- Trying to take individuals and groups to higher levels of performance
- Managing conflict and change
- Learning to delegate instead of "doing it myself"
So many times I've seen potentially excellent leaders fail because the organization promotes them and then essentially ignores their development needs. I hear stuff like, "Well, she's smart; she'll figure it out", or "I know we should be developing him, but there's just no time". When we do that we're leaving the leader's--and ultimately that part of the organization's--success up to blind luck. That's a terrible waste of your human capital investment.
Leadership in Denial
When I work with leaders, whether newly promoted supervisors, managers with a few years' experience, or key executives, there's always a point when we discuss a key factor in any leader's success: The fact that accepting a position of increased leadership is, at its core, a call to personal growth.
I don't mean just improving professional skills--it's more than that. As responsibility, influence, the number of folks depending on us, etc. increase, so does our need for emotional and spiritual growth as well. Because "accepting leadership" results from the conscious or unconscious desire to express myself differently than I already do--which requires that I be more fully "who I am" than I was before.
When I tell new leaders this, they tend to give me a blank look, like "What's the matter with this guy?" Often, they need to struggle with their new duties a while before they come back and ask for help--or are sent back by someone else.
When I have this conversation with experienced managers and execs who've been around the block a few times, they often smile sagely and nod, and tell me just how right I am. But when I ask them what they're doing in support of their own growth, they answer with some variation of, "Boy, I know I should really make time for that, but..."
So What?
It's great to develop professional skills, to get that MBA in your spare time, learn how to interpret financial reports better, and all that “stuff”. But I think it's just as important to develop the things we're personally passionate about, or have talent for, or will help us manage the emotional and personal demands of leadership.
Leading people is not a "task"--we need to engage our hearts, intuition, compassion, humor, toughness, and sometimes even love. We need to think through our own dramas more clearly. We need to be honest and courageous in the face of our ambitions and fears, and manage our egos in the face of our imperfection.
Leaders need to set a clear vision of the future and then engage people in getting there. We need to be able to tell the uncomfortable truth when somebody's underperforming--even when that somebody is us. We need to be able to coach people to success. When we avoid doing these things--and we all avoid them sometimes--we're being more accountable to our own comfort than to the business or organizational outcomes we say we're committed to.
So whether you're working on your own leadership or thinking about promoting somebody else, ask yourself if you (or he or she) is ready for the next set of challenges--or even the current set. If the answer is "No," or "I'm not sure," the next question must be, "Then what am I going to do about it?"
