Stepping into a leadership role is a great challenge. A good start as an effective leader is understanding your motivations, strengths, and opportunities.
Learning how to be a great leader will impact the success of your organization, your team, and yourself. Becoming a leader is a journey where it's good advice to put a strategy to work. Research shows that having a 90-day plan will increase your chances of success.
However, statistics about failure or inadequate success experienced by executives in new leadership positions are now well known. Estimates of outright failure in the first 18 months range from 38% to over 50%. Many more executives fail to be as successful as was predicted in the hiring or promotion phase.
What should you know?
You are responsible to lead the change.
It’s part of your role to understand where the market is going and the environment you are in and connect it with the company strategy and your stakeholders (customers, your leaders, other areas, and your team).
This journey is not more about you. It is about how you help your team to do the job that is required.
It is about how you help and serve your team to work at their best individually and as a team and what you do for your team to help them succeed.
How you challenge your team to explore and go deep into new ways to do the work.
Help your team understand their stakeholders and how they can add value.
Being a leader is a service role, not a status role.
How to start?
Be sure to cover the baselines with your leader, stakeholders, and your team.
Align expectations: What is the job that has to be done, and what is the timing.
Validate if everyone in your team has the tools and resources to perform and do their work.
Validate work preferences. How much support does the person need, and how often should you meet.
Know your people’s strengths and how they can add more value using those strengths.
Know how every person in your team is unique. Try to understand how this person sees themself, the background, the family, the challenges, hobbies, and dreams.
Validate people’s development and career interests and how you can help them to reach their goals.
Ask how the person wants to be recognized and their motivations.
Ask for feedback and recommendations: What things are working well, what things should be different or what things they should stop doing.
Spend time identifying how you can support them. Identify what people need from you that they may not want to ask for.
As you start this new journey in your career, you have an excellent opportunity to create a positive impact. There will be moments when you feel discomfort, but it's needed if you want to lead. Don’t be afraid to show others who you are and what you bring to the table. Be humble to admit that you don’t know everything. Listen. Ask questions. Never stop learning. Remember that you have to decide to lead.
“Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become.”
― Heraclitus