In a fast-paced startup environment, you might find that one day you’re writing code at your desk and the next day there are magically five other developers reporting to you. And within the next month those coders each have teams of five beneath them. In the span of 42 days your scope has gone from one to 26. This is potentially great news for your company as it likely means they are experiencing rapid growth and have accelerated hiring in order to scale demand. On the other hand, you have never managed people before, unless you can count the summers in college when you were in charge of the lifeguard schedule at your community pool. When you think about it, being responsible for a team can’t be that difficult; you were an excellent developer so you can tell the teams below you what needs to be done, and you assume they were all hired because they are qualified, so you can just let them do their thing and come to you when they need you. After all, managers are just an unnecessary layer of the org structure to show career progression, just another title, right? Not to mention the fact that you currently don’t have a manager (although they are trying really hard to fill the role), so you will just have to figure it out on your own. How hard can it be? Approve time off and overtime, do some interviews, and make sure they are all on track with goals. If it was any more involved than that, the company would surely provide some support and training for you. Boom, you’ve got this management thing down.
Setting expectations
Hopefully you’re smacking your head, or at least shaking it incredulously. Perhaps the above scenario seems enhanced for dramatic effect, but versions of this scene repeat in companies of all sizes and in all industries around the world. New managers have the best of intentions; it is doubtful that anyone sets out to be ineffective. But to do the job well, to be a great manager and leader requires more than pushing approvals through a workflow and tracking progress on goals. This would be very clear to new managers if they were provided with support, training, and expectations of their role as a manager. By not doing this, the decision it seems some companies are making, whether consciously or through desperation, is to have teams led by ineffective managers. This is a bigger mistake than they realize, considering research from Gallup showing managers accounting for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement, and Corporate Executive Board, now Gartner, reporting that 60% of managers underperform in their first two years. That’s just not okay.
Suckers are born, not leaders
In the absence of training, coaching, support and clear expectations, new managers form bad leadership habits that are difficult to break and detrimental to their teams. The age-old scenario mentioned above, where the highest performing individual contributor is promoted to manager with essentially ZERO support is often based on the assumption that they’ll be a natural because they are talented and bright. Think about this in other terms – would you assume that a brilliant pediatrician could close her practice and begin working as a dental hygienist without any training? Or that a talented pastry chef could put down his rolling pin and pick up knives to become Chef de cuisine overnight without guidance and support? Perhaps there would be exceptions, and there are certainly transferable skills, but on the whole, this is utterly preposterous. Why then, would anyone assume that simply because someone is a stellar developer, marketing strategist, or sales rep that they would just pick up a team and be a great manager? Leadership is a talent comprised of critical skills that must be learned and practiced – just like chefs, artists, doctors, teachers and athletes. And many times, high performing individual contributors rarely use some of the important skills that define effective leaders.
Mind the gap
According to Training Industry research, the most common leadership training topics (often called “soft skills”) offered globally include:
- Coaching
- Communication
- Negotiation
- Teamwork and collaboration
- Diversity and inclusion
- Leading innovation
- Providing feedback
- Emotional intelligence
If you are surprised to see skills like communication, negotiation, and teamwork and collaboration on this list for leadership training, don’t be. Although it would be valuable for anyone to increase skill in these areas, there are two points to consider here. First, what would you think is the difference between being a manager and a leader? A leader is someone who inspires, who brings out the best in people, and creates a safe and supportive work environment. Notice, no mention of direct reports. That’s because being a leader has nothing to do with title or position in the org chart. A leader can be an intern, a mail room clerk, a security guard, or the CEO. Not all leaders are managers, but all managers should be leaders. The gap is in the focus on people, and unfortunately many managers seem to think this is something they can argue their way out of or refuse to believe; perhaps why we see Emotional Intelligence on the list above. This leads into to the second point, which is the manager mindset. One of the most challenging components of the transition from individual contributor to manager is the shift in focus from yourself to your team. The manager mindset forces you to think beyond yourself, and when approaching communication, negotiation and teamwork and collaboration, for instance, from a manager mindset, the behaviors and skills required are quite different.
It’s alive!!
If you are in an organization that has not caught up with leadership training needs – fear not! You don’t have to sit around waiting for it. Further, while skills that make effective managers and leaders are universal, we all have various strengths and learning opportunities based on our unique experiences to date and should therefore focus efforts that will be highest value for enhancing your authentic leadership style. For that purpose, we offer this exercise that helps leaders identify their gaps in leadership skills. Since we are celebrating Halloween this week, we’ll get in the spirit and call this exercise Leaderstein because you will be taking parts from different leaders and piecing them together to create your ideal, authentic monster leader (metaphorically, not literally – that would be gross).
- First, think about some effective leaders you have experienced or been influenced by (they can be real, fiction, living, or dead). How have they been role models of an ideal and effective leader? What specific skill does he/she exemplify? Take a minute to give it some thought and write down the skill and leader who represented that for you; try to list five skills.
- Next, assess yourself on a scale of 0-3 against those five skills; give yourself a zero if you have never used or been trained in the skill, or up to 3 if you consider yourself an expert in that skill.
- Finally, for any of the skills that you rated below a 3, think about how more learning and practice would impact your leadership style, and what needs to happen to increase the rating.
Once you have identified the top five leadership skills of your Leaderstein, it is time to bring it to life! Begin with the skill that showed the biggest gap between you and your “Leaderstein”. To make it more achievable, break it down to component parts – take communication as an example. Communication is comprised of speaking, listening, asking questions, being clear and concise, building trust, transparency, etc. Focus on one component area each week and set small goals for learning and practicing. You may have internal learning resources that you can take advantage of, and of course there’s always the internet for free and low cost skill building courses such as Coursera, Udemy, Skillshare, Alison, edX, LinkedIn Learning, and FutureLearn.
And for goodness sake, don’t forget the power of coaches and mentors to help your Leaderstein assimilate these new skills into your everyday life.
The role of manager is big and important, and to be effective requires a focus on building and practicing new skills. Don’t let your employer stand in the way of killing it as a leader (pun intended).
What now?
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