Succeeding as Manager or Leader involves continuous development of yourself, and this means identifying and improving critical areas that may hinder you in your efforts to achieving better results.
Apart from developing new skills, there are other pre-dispositions in your personality that only you can point out and address. They are not formally written in any professional contract. They are part of your mental paradigm.
We explore in this video four of these areas, and I challenge you to identify your gap (your current situation versus your ideal) and start taking action to close it.
To your growth and success.
Eduard.
Video Transcript
At one point in time or another in your professional career, you are going to face a crossroads, in the sense that you will see two options: one being continuing developing your expertise at what you do, and becoming a subject matter expert; the other one, jumping into a management role.
Both paths, both options, will bring you huge challenges.There is no question about that.
In my personal opinion, if you choose jumping into a management or leadership role, you will experience higher level of challenges because, the only reason being, is that you have to work on yourself, and this is not an easy task.
Succeeding at management entails a continuous and persistent effort on you. And this is personal development; that is, identifying the gaps, deciding actions, and putting the actions in place to improve ourselves.
I don't know. You may have many different areas in your personality that you would like to improve, and you think that you have to improve,, because they are preventing you to achieve what you want.
But my purpose today, in the video, is to identify four areas that I consider important, and that they're also common to many people who decide to jump into this management role.
Let's review them one by one.
The first area is Confidence.
Confidence in the sense that, for sure, when we do something new, we are going to make mistakes. That's clear, we will make mistakes. You will make mistakes.
But your level of confidence will dictate how you approach every situation, and what will be the results that you will achieve.
If you are overconfident, if your level of confidence is very high, you make take risks very... without being cautious, and you may create a huge impact in the organization; negative impact, by the way.
If your confidence level is pretty low, you may not have, or you may not take any decision, even if everything around you is telling you that this is the best thing to do.
So, at any situation, you will find that there is an optimum level of confidence. So it's up to you to identify where are you in relation to that optimum level of confidence. Do you think that you are on the lower side, or on the upper side? So, there will be a gap: you, today, versus the optimum level of confidence required to perform at your best at that specific situation.
It's your initiative. You have to decide if you want to close that gap, and to close the gap is not an easy task. It depends on many factors. My recommendation would be not to work alone and to get as much feedback as possible from few trustful people you have around you; they may help you to give you specific examples on where you are, and what you could do to adjust your confidence level.
So, this is the first area. It's your confidence level.
Second area is Authenticity.
When we start doing something new we may fix our attention with senior leaders, mentors, people who we trust. And we think we can learn a lot from them.
So the tendency is to replicate or copy what they do. The risk here is to copy more than what we should, and copy also their attitudes, they behaviors, their personality, and we lose being an authentic leader, and we just try to do something their way.
So, we know all of these managers or leaders who we feel they're not authentic. They try to be liked by everybody. They have many different faces and nobody likes to work with that type of person.
So, same as with the confidence, assess where you are, what your authenticity level is today, and see if that is helping or hindering you in achieving the results.
Because if you are not perceived as authentic, you will not get authentic support from your team, from your followers.
So, this is the second area, authenticity.
The third area is the resistance to learn.
In whatever we do, we have to learn new things, and learning means putting yourself in a vulnerable situation, admitting that you don't know many things, and making the effort and spending the time and the focus to make things happen for you to learn new things.
We have very clear examples on the sports area where we see how hard it is for the sportsman to be great at what they do, to learn or to perfect a new skill.
So, many leaders, many managers don't want to make the effort, to take the time, to learn these new things that they have to do, they have to learn, and they resist.
They resist to learn to give better feedback, learn how to inspire people, learn how to listen without judgement, learn how to communicate better in front of large audiences... because all these process make them vulnerable and they don't want to put themselves there.
So it's again your decision what to do. Do you want to keep doing what you already know, or you will make time and effort to learn new things, and you will put yourself on that vulnerable situation where you are learning when you are changing to something else?
So this is the third area that is resistance to learn. Where are you in that area?
And the fourth one is your ability to develop trust.
We have seen many managers who just pay attention to their boss and they just please their boss and do what their boss is saying, but they forget that they are there because they have to serve all the rest of the stakeholders, not only their boss.
So they neglect to develop relationships and trust with the rest of the stakeholder. And this is actually a factor that will hinder in their efforts to achieve better results in what they do in their department, in their area, in their organization.
So what are you in your ability to develop trust with other people?
Identify who are my key stakeholders and make a plan, or a conscious effort, to develop trust with all of them.
So these are the four areas that are critical for your success as a manager or leader in your organization. It's only up to you. These are areas.. I say "unspoken areas" because are the hidden part of your personality; it's not written anywhere. Your confidence level is not written anywhere, your ability to create trust... but you should know what you are versus the ideal situation that would help you to succeed at what you do.
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Thank you very much for listening today. Take care.