When you are a member of a team your ability to use your skill to deliver results is very important. However, once you start leading a team, the skill set that helped you deliver results does not help you succeed in leading others.
It is very much different from what you were doing earlier as you have to lead individuals who have to accept you as a leader and you need to understand what drives them and how you get the best out of them.
You must be able to connect, motivate and inspire the team to deliver on the objectives the team. This is a process of continuous personal development.
But people in leadership positions often avoid this long and challenging work and hunt for tools to be used to assess employees and take action based on this. This approach often diverts the leader's attention away from the relation between the leader's behaviour and the employee's response. These tools may seem to work initially but a blind application without understanding the basis can leade to lowering the employee morale with the employees feeling that the managers do not appreciate their work and are uninterested in their work. The managers in turn start feeling the burden of the reporting requirements of the tools and find it cumbersome. This in turn makes them blind to their contributions that weakened the commitment and accountability.
Tools can be useful and must be used judiciously. But they cannot take the place of introspection, feedback, efforts towards behavioural change for greater effectiveness. Their greatest advantage to improve accountability in employees would be in creating a motivating environment. While tools can be used, its primary purpose should be to help leaders and their team to note the quality of work experience and not to be used as a replacement for essential work. This helps leaders to recognise how their assumptions shape their behaviour and adopt mindsets that produce better outcomes.
Think of practices to increase leadership proficiency. Take an idea and translate it into behaviours one can repeat systematically to create the expected result.
Start with the problem you wish to solve. what is the outcome you would like to achieve that would be meaningful?
Articulate why it is important to you. Being clear on the purpose and motivation increases the creativity and persistence you apply to get the work completed.
Seek quality information to base your approach. When you do not know the best ways to encourage proactive problem solving, you seek information from your mentors, coach or search for information from various publications.
Identify measures of success. How will keep track of the progress? Keep track of the frequency of suggestions by team members, offer ideas to improve the action and most important take ownership for the decision. Finally seek feedback from direct reports.
Ground yourself with intention. Commit to learning to support proactive behaviours. DO not jump in with answers if no one else comes forward.
Choose behaviours to implement.
- Share your experience - Discuss problems and seek ideas.
- Ask the right questions. Ask people to contribute ideas instead of offering solutions.
- Put yourself in other's shoes. When you are unhappy with a team member, put yourself in his place and try to understand his view.
- Acknowledge achievements. Recognise proactive behaviour.
Seek feedback. Ask team members for feedback especially to get better at proactive problem-solving. Commit to refrain from criticising ideas but analyse the pros and cons of each idea.
Review and celebrate progress. One indication of progress you are making would be if team members are solving problems regularly. You should be spending more time clarifying desired result and less on overseeing their work.
Everyone desires for a leadership role. But one should be ready to put in the hard work. Interest and commitment to continuous learning will keep you fresh and vital. You don't have to wait to be trained and you can start leadership development practices any time you want.
Anyone Can Learn to Be a Better Leader
by Monique Valcour HBR 2020/11
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