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Let’s say you did a little soul-searching, and you feel confident that this doesn’t apply to you. So what do you say when someone asks why you want to be a leader? What is the correct answer?
I know I’m supposed to say something inspiring about how there are no wrong answers.
But there are. Before I tell you my take on this, I need to emphasize that you need more than just saying the right things.
Intro
Welcome to Lead It Better, the podcast made to help you become a more impactful leader.
Whether you have years of experience or just getting started on your leadership journey, you’re in the right place to pick up practical, actionable advice. We’re gonna discuss not only how to best deal with leadership-related questions and situations but explore why a particular approach might work better than others.
My name’s Marton, and for the better part of a decade, I’ve been helping aspiring, new and experienced leaders develop their skills and leadership strategies.
This is episode 1, and this week we’re gonna talk about the most foundational of questions: what is leadership? And more importantly: what does it mean to you?
Why do you want to lead?
Whenever someone reaches out to me saying they want to be a team leader or a manager, I only have one question: why?
I ask this because the single most important thing in leadership is your motivation. It’s certainly more important than any skills you might already have or still need to develop. Coming from the right place gives you a solid foundation to build on. And if you don’t have that, there will come a time when you’ll get miserable, and what’s much worse, the people you’re responsible for will get miserable. That’s a lose-lose.
The most common answer I get to that question is: “I like to work with people.“
If this is you right now, I admire the sentiment, but I’m sure you’ll agree that it sounds a bit too vague. If you like working with people, why not become a nurse or a social worker? What is it in leadership that you’re drawn to? What does leadership mean to you?
This is a difficult question because it requires a good amount of introspection: being alone with your thoughts and digging deep. But it is absolutely worth it.
In some cases, I’ve had people come back, realizing that they do like working with people, collaborating, brainstorming, and solving problems. But they don’t want to be responsible for people, they don’t want to make unpopular decisions that might jeopardize their relationships in the workplace, and they’d rather go into a subject matter expert, project management, or a technical role.
Let’s say you did a little soul-searching, and you feel confident that this doesn’t apply to you. So what do you say when someone asks why you want to be a leader? What is the correct answer?
I know I’m supposed to say something inspiring about how there are no wrong answers. But there are.
Before I tell you my take on this, I need to emphasize that you need more than just saying the right things. You need to believe them, or else you might be literally talking the talk without walking the walk, and that’s just a recipe for disaster.
Ok, so here it is. In my experience, the more your answer is about the team, the people you’d like to be responsible for, and the overarching goal of the team, the better leader you will be. The more your answer is about yourself, about what growth opportunities you see in pursuing leadership, the worse your team will be off. I’ve seen some exceptions, but only a few.
And if you need clarification on why this is, just think of it this way. Would you rather have a boss focused on themselves and what they can get out of their leadership position? Or someone focused on you and your teammates, trying to figure out how they can make your life easier?
I know. Digging deep and then putting what you feel to be true into words is difficult. So if this is the first time you’re trying to do this, don’t get frustrated if the answer doesn’t come easy. Also, the answer you come up with now could change or get more precise as you develop as a leader.
I won’t lie; the first time I decided to go into leadership, my “why” was simply that I thought I could do a better job than my then-team leader did. I believed the team deserved better and was convinced I knew what that better looked like. Now maybe I wasn’t right about it, but my focus was still on my teammates and doing better by them.
Nowadays, there’s more nuance to it.
When I’m serving as a leader to a team, I aim to be the best leader that team could have. Now the specifics of what a particular team needs from their leader will depend on the team; no surprise there. But how you approach figuring out those specifics, the foundation of your leadership strategy should be the same.
The top 3 things
So here are the top 3 things that I consider a foundation for a good leadership strategy and what good leadership means to me:
- providing a vision
- serving the team
- keeping the team safe
There’s obviously a multitude of other factors and actions. Still, almost everything can be derived and inferred from these three interconnected aspects of leadership.
1. Providing a Vision
This may sound lofty, but I do believe that what separates team coordinators from people leaders is having a vision of where you wanna take your team. You need to be able to formulate, communicate and gather buy-in for an objective towards which your team can strive and around which your team can come together. It’s gonna be a mix of your business context and the people you’re working with.
And whether you know the people you’ll lead or not, it’s a puzzle you put together with them. That’s where keeping them safe will come into play because they need to trust you enough to reveal their needs and challenges.
Ideally, your vision should be something they can achieve as a team rather than individuals (or not just as individuals). Once completed, it should provide a sense of team pride that pulls them even closer together to go after even bigger goals.
I know that it sounds vague and daunting if you’ve never done this. So let me give you something to get you started. Do you and your team have some kind of a target? Maybe you’re a customer support team with customer satisfaction scores. Perhaps you’re an accounts receivables team with collection targets. Whatever measurement the business uses to define your success, you can take that and make it a bit larger than life.
If your target is getting 90 out of a 100 and no team ever made it past 92, part of your vision could be to enable this team and go for 93. You could say that you want to create a team of ninjas who know their stuff inside and out and are the experts in their fields. It’s kind of a ‘shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars’ situation. Although your vision is now hung on a business target, what will get your team together is how you get there.
My very first vision statement was not too different. I told my first team (on an introductory team meeting, no less) that I aim to make our team the best out of the 8 teams on the floor. Best in terms of targets and measurements, yes, but also the most knowledgeable. So if there’s any out-of-process stuff happening, everyone’s first thought should be: you know who we should ask? Those ninjas. I’m sure they know what to do.
Was it super cringy the first time I laid this out? Oh, hell yes.
Did my team start to take me seriously when they saw that I walked the walk? That my actions and decisions, and priorities were filtered through this goal? Yapp.
Did we make the best team? I mean, it took us a year, maybe a year and a half, but yeah. And we were proud to call ourselves a team. Not just because we were damn good at what we did but because of the year-long journey that got us there.
So how did we do it?
This is where my second point, serving the team, comes into play.
2. Serving the team
Because when something’s a team effort, micromanaging it is out of the question. So what do you do? Your job is to ensure everyone can pull in the same direction. You’ll obviously have people who pull a bit harder and others who’re just there to be done with their nine-to-five. Still, once everyone faces the same direction (i.e. your vision), your job is to ensure everyone else can do their job.
Let me repeat: your job is to ensure everyone else can do their job.
This does not include checking up on everyone to see whether or not they’re doing their job. Don’t get me wrong: you have to deal with a lack of contribution to the team’s efforts, but you don’t do it by micromanaging and looking over people’s shoulders.
It really comes back to: serving the team. To give you a few ideas:
- you serve by looking ahead, trying to figure out what could go wrong and proactively taking care of any obstacles (whether they appear on an individual or a team level),
- you serve by reacting to all the problems that are beyond the scope or capability of any individual team member,
- and you serve by enabling your team members to deal with everything that is their responsibility.
This last one can encompass many things, but to oversimplify it: most often, you’ll face one of two situations. You either have a team member who knows the job and has the experience but comes to you because they feel stuck or need a decision made, or you have a team member who’s still learning and has no idea how to proceed.
Remember, we said that you serve your team members by enabling them to deal with what’s on their plate. So your default answer should never be “let me do that for you” or “let me show that to you”. You’re there to facilitate their problem-solving, not to be the solution. You’re there to help them figure out where they could find the missing piece to their work puzzle, what documentation they need to look up, who they need to talk to, what training they need to attend, and so on.
Obviously, there will be exceptions. If time is of the essence, if the stakes are high, you might not be able to sit down and facilitate; if the process depends on your approval, well, you’ll need to make a decision; if you’re the one doing the education, you better do a great job. But as I said, these are the exceptions.
Now, if you’re not the one showing and doing, will there be mistakes, failures and messes that you might need help cleaning up? That’s also serving your team. Because all that is necessary for them to be able to do their job.
And this brings me to my third point, keeping the team safe. And by that, I primarily mean providing psychological safety.
3. Keeping the team safe
How do you do that? The most obvious situation is where you own all the blame when something goes wrong. If there’s pressure coming from higher up, if there’s pressure coming from clients and stakeholders, you’re the one who gets all the heat and keeps it off the team. Sidenote: while you take all the blame, you also pass on all the credit.
Now, in my experience, many managers feel that that’s the end of their responsibilities when it comes to psychological safety, and they overlook their own behaviour.
To give you a few examples: your team needs to feel safe enough to admit mistakes and openly communicate disagreement. This requires trust and for them to know implicitly that they won’t face any kind of negative consequences. Yes, mistakes must be corrected, but they must not be punished. If constructive feedback is voiced, you need to be thankful, even if that’s difficult. And you must never be resentful.
Recap
Hopefully, by now, you see why these three things are interconnected: your team needs to feel safe with you so you can effectively support and enable them to deliver on your vision. These are the top three things for me because everything else that might be a part of your responsibilities will depend on these being in place and working well. They are foundational.
I challenge you to name something that’s not made possible or made more manageable by these three. As I said earlier, the specifics will differ every time. Different people and/or different business objectives will require you to adjust your leadership style and priorities. But all of your actions will still flow from the foundational ideas of what leadership means to you.
And it might mean something else to you. You might have a different approach or a different standard of what good leadership looks like.
The only thing I’m asking you is to check whether your definition is aimed at and focused on your team or yourself. Are you in it for the right reasons? Or, if you’re not sure yet, are you at least happy enough with your reasons for now? Be honest because these questions impact your day-to-day life as a leader – even if you don’t answer them consciously.
Getting to know yourself takes time and effort. If you’ve listened this long, I hope you accept my two cents: go for a long walk (or several) without music or other distractions and let your mind wander. Epiphanies are not guaranteed, but their chances are much higher.
What’s next?
Ok, so what’s next? Let’s say you know what leadership means to you, or at least you have some ideas that you’re happy with. Where do you go from there?
If you ask me, it’s finding your own voice as a leader. Being conscious about how you are perceived and what effect you have on people and how that, in turn, affects your ability to move forward.
This is what I’d like to discuss with you next time. If you’re interested, make sure you hit subscribe and share this episode if you think it would be helpful for someone you know.
Thanks for listening; I’m genuinely grateful for your time and attention.
Talk to you soon.