Leadership Secrets: How Being A Teacher and A Student Helps You Win

The Biggest Dichotomy of Leadership

You can never know everything. There's no point pretending that you do.

Leadership is about trust. It is your responsibility to guide your team to achieve the goals that have been set. To draw out the strengths of each person, supporting each other to win.

This is one of my favourite quotes. It comes from the book "The Dichotomy of Leadership" by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin.

Every leader must be willing and able to lead, but just as important is a leader’s ability to follow. A leader must be willing to lean on the expertise and ideas of others for the good of the team. Leaders must be willing to listen and follow others, regardless of whether they are junior or less experienced.

It's empowering when people feel heard. Knowing that they can share their idea or perspective and that the person in charge is listening.

What's equally enabling is for them to know that you are supporting them. That you trust them to make decisions.

Pushing your ideas and not considering your team's thinking is the fastest road to being a bad boss.

People hate not having a choice.

How Do You Lead and Follow

Your experience gives you perspective, it doesn't always make you right. The longer you have worked in a field, the most important it is to seek out new information. Connect with new employees, people new to the industry and share your stories.

Be curious and ask more questions. Here's the key. Ask questions with the sole intent to understand. Not to respond. You are not grading an assignment. You are looking for how someone else things, and why they are making the connections that they do.

Be vulnerable. Admit when you don't know or aren't sure. People think that this is a sign of weakness, it's not. Everyone knows it is uncomfortable for someone to admit they don't have an answer. Explain your thinking. Share what you are factoring into your decision. Tie your rationale to what you are trying to achieve.

Mistakes happen. Stop trying to avoid it. New leaders will avoid delegating in fear of someone making a mistake. The less you trust your team, the less effective they become. Explain what the objective is. Make sure that you are all aligned on how to get there.

Comments

This 1 Thing Increases Your Career Capital More Than Anything Else

The Art of Better Decision Making Have you felt scared to make a decision? Maybe you get preoccupied with making the 'wrong' decision? Did you know that 68% of people have admitted to not doing because they thought it would be harder than it actually is. Getting comfortable with making decisions is one of the biggest challenges new leaders face. You will be placed in situations where there isn't enough time to get all of the information. Or even harder, you will be placed in situations where you'll never get more information than what you have. The good news? Making better decisions is something that you can improve by being deliberate with your learning and how you choose to approach it. This is the approach I take to decision making. These have been test and is what I have used over my 15 year career to teach and develop teams. - Accept that you will make mistakes. There is rarely a perfect answer. Getting comfortable with ambiguity is a leadership muscle you need to

Grace Under Fire

Leadership is not a title, and it is not only something reserved for your professional life. One thing that has greatly helped me over the years is finding what is the same rather than focusing on why situations are different. There will always be differences and nuance with whatever you are dealing with, I challenge however, that there is more that is similar or relatable to something else than what is different. True leadership is about how you react, how you handle the circumstances in front of you. True leadership is also how you carry it. For every decision, position or action that you see publically, there are two to four times more that most people never see. Professionally or personally we all carry a lot, we are all going through something all the time. Being a leader means that you have to do more. It is your responsibility to still take care of your team, your peers, your friends, your family. You have to be a guiding light, a steady hand, a source of confidence and comfor

Ego

Ego is one of the hardest things to deal with as a new manager. You are in a new situation, you are most likely leading people for the first time, you are probably a bit younger ... and you just feel like you HAVE to prove yourself. This kinda makes sense right? You were obviously promoted because you knew your stuff and were really good at your old job, so now it MUST be your job to make sure everyone knows how good you are. WRONG! This is the number one mistake most new managers make. I totally get why, we have created this hierarchy in our corporate structures that makes people believe a good supervisor = a good manager = a good director = a good VP. This. Is. Completely. Untrue. The reality is that it takes different skills to be a good leader; and excellence at one level does not automatically mean excellence at the next. To be a good leader, you have to always be trying to check your ego. Yes you are smart, you probably have good ideas, you p

Search This Blog