I. Leader v.s Manager
People often use these terms interchangeably.
The key difference is that "Manager" is a title/position of a senior in a company while "Leader" has a much broader meaning. I believe anyone can be a leader regardless of your role/job title in life. In coaching, we have a term of "Leader Within" about self-leadership - it means that there always has a leader existing inside each of us. And you can learn to develop the Leader Within You.
According to "The 5 levels of Leadership" by John Maxwell, holding a managerial position is the lowest level of leadership (level 1). Starting from level 2, people choose to give you permission to lead them and you can start building up your leadership from there.
I have a high standard of a good leader mainly because during my corporate life, I had opportunities working with leaders at level 4 and even level 5. Those experiences gave me a benchmark of what kind of leader I wanted to be when leading a team.
My general approach is that:
If you want to become a great leader, don't act like a boss you don't want to work for.
I appreciate my experience with both good and bad managers. Good managers taught me what makes a good leader and bad managers taught me what not to do to avoid poor leadership. They are all valuable lessons.
II. A great leader doesn't need to be the smartest in the room.
Years ago, I worked in a lean and high performing team without a middle manager for nearly 8 months. During that period of time, we all reported directly to a Senior Director and we were doing fine: all campaigns launched on time, met all key metrics of revenue and user growth.
So what was missing there?
When we finally had a new manager onboarded, what made me really impressed about them is that they sat down with each of us and genuinely learned about our work.
All they did was asking powerful questions and taking notes. They went really deep in different topics by showing their curiosity like a student, humbly asking us to show how we did, challenged us on how we think of a topic, championing us on our work and showing trust on our expertise and deliverables.
Some people might argue that a good leader needs to know more your team members in term of knowledge and expertise but in reality, a leader should play a much bigger role.
Back to my story, I must say that as a team, we really felt empowered and motivated more than ever. I felt really proud of my work and it strengthened my confidence to keep making decisions based on my expertise.
The role of my manager then became a glue that connected us as a team and built team culture. Before that, we were busy delivering what required in our scope. It was kind of working in silos.
On top of that, they created space for us to shine. At the same time, they co-designed with us a strategic plan that not only leveraged our expertise but also uncovered new opportunities for us to grow as team based on what they learned from talking with us. They showed us a big picture. Brilliant.
Not until I became a coach, I could really say that they used a lot of coaching in their approach and it worked so well in that case.
A great leader doesn't need to know everything. Empower your team to shine and grow.
I think this approach works well for a team that has high performing/senior individual contributors. For a team that has more juniors that need extra hand-holding, it's probably better combining coaching and trainings.
III. Key Lessons I learned in my first year as a people manager.
1.You need a permission to lead.
It's trust from your team.
Trust is invisible but you have to earn it and it doesn't come from your given title.
2. Know what motivates people
People go to work because of different motivations. Normally it will fall into 3 big categories: Wealth, Health and Relationship.
Powerful questions to ask people: "What's important to you"?
You can't motivate people if you don't know what motivates them.
3. Build a team culture
It has 3 components: Values, Attitudes and Objectives.
Invest in the first 90 days to establish a team structure and onboard new team members.
4. Grow people
Become an executive sponsor
Create a safe space and help people grow
Let team members be heroes, give credit where credit is due
Protect your team resources
5. Handle the pressure of delivering results
General approach: deliver short-term wins and invest in long-term big bets.
Short-term wins motivate a team to work harder by seeing quick results.
Big bets inspire people with a clear vision of the next big things.
Balance them in the plan and execution.
6. Time management
At peak, managing people alone can easily expand to a full-time job. If I can put down a number of hours, I think at peak, I might have worked up to 70-80 hours/week in total.
It's easily to feel overwhelmed when managing a team while delivering other scope of works (strategy, budget management, public speaking, stakeholder management and more),
and having a personal life.
Find a balance.
7. Practice 4 levels of listening
Level 1: Listening focused on Yourself
Level 2: Listening focused on Others
Level 3: Listening focused on Context and what isn't being expressed in words.
Level 4: Combine 3 levels as mentioned above
8. Develop public speaking skill
Don't trust people who say that you don't need it.
Go watch "How great leaders inspire actions" video by Simon Sinek.
9. Keep calendar open for 1:1 meetings
I always keep my calendar open for 1:1 weekly and biweekly meetings for 15-30mins with direct and indirect reports.
It's very time consuming but it gave me a full picture of how a team collaborated. Sometimes I had one single item updated 3 times from 3 members but they were all different point of views.
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