Taking a role in any Management or Leadership position brings new challenges that are totally different to the ones we were used to while developing our skills as reliable professionals.
Being aware of those new challenges, and the corresponding new skills that we must develop if we want to succeed, make the first steps towards our new career as Managers or Leaders in our organization.
Way too many great professionals get stuck at that stage, what prevents them to continue showing their value and progress towards higher levels in their career growth.
I'm providing in the attached video the two main MINDSET changes we have to go through when we move into a position which involves managing or leading people.
How do these two mindset changes relate to you?
In a scale from 1 to 10, how would you rate yourself as having ADOPTED those two mindsets?
Is there anyone in your environment / team who could benefit from you bringing these ideas to him or her?
To your growth and success.
Eduard.
Video Transcript.
Are your newly appointed Coordinator, Team Leader, Manager in your organisation who is probably frustrated because, despite of your initial efforts, results don't seem to come your way?
Or maybe you're in that leadership position for some time already, who is disappointed because your results stagnated, and you're not able to meet your organization's expectations?
Well, if those situations resonate with you, I will have to say that you don't need to worry because you are in a process: the process of becoming a better manager and leader in your organisation.
To explore how that process looks like, I would like to invite you on a journey; a journey that somehow parallels my own journey in life.
Hello, my name is Eduard Lopez. And I come from starting off as a junior engineer working for IBM to developing my career in large multinational organisations, where I developed my skills and reached different leadership and executive positions. Today, I work with managers and leaders from all over the world, helping them to develop those skills and achieve results beyond their expectations.
If you join me in that journey, I will be sharing with you tips, pieces of advice, suggestions, examples of good and bad decisions that I made in life, examples of what made other people succeed or fail, pieces of research... In summary, a lot of material that will support you in that transition to becoming a great manager or leader in your organisation.
So today it is the first video, the first video in the series, that I have titled "I'm a New Manager, What Do I Do Now". Because this transition, and the story of this transition runs very similar to all of us. And it's similar to what I'm saying now:
You have developed over the years a set of skills which put you in a position of becoming a very reliable and trustful professional in your organisation. Maybe you have developed skills to become the best engineer in the engineering team, or the most creative designer, or the most reliable accountant in the accounting team; whatever it is. But you have developed a set of skills, which put you there. And because of your good performance, somebody from your organisation come to you one day and say: "Congratulations, you have been doing a great job. We are going to promote you. Starting tomorrow, you are going to become ... the manager of our engineering team, or the coordinator of our designing team, or the team leader of our accounting team". And it's in that moment where your transition starts, it is in that moment where you have to start implementing things that you've never done before.
And what do we do? The first thing we do is we panic! We think that we are not ready. We think that we need more support. We think that we need to study more, to attend more courses, more webinars. The reality is that the first thing that we need to do is to work on ourselves, and we need to make a change in our mindset.
The purpose of today's video is to leave you with two fundamental changes in mindset that you have to go through. Without those changes, it will make very difficult anything you will do down the road.
Let's review these two pieces of changes that I would like to share with you.
Mindset change #1: You have to recognise, and accept, that there is a set of skills that you don't have, and you will need, to be a great manager of leader.
Because the mistake that many people make is, well, "I developed a set of skills that put me in a very good position in my organisation; when I'm appointed team leader, manager, leader of a department by using those skills, I will succeed". And this is a fundamental mistake: if you use those skills, it will make a terrible manager or leader out of you.
As I used to say,
If we manage people, we have to become experts at managing people.
So you have to recognise that the skills that you will need to become a successful manager or leader are totally different than the skills that put you in a position before getting promoted. This is the mindset change #1.
Mindset change #2: The core of your success, the centre of your success will move from you to your team.
When you are a professional, a successful professional, your results depend mostly from you, depend on you, on your skills, on your knowledge, on your attitude, on your effort, on your expertise... on something that is on your control. When you become responsible for a group of people, your results depend on the performance of that group of people not on you directly.
So, do you know how to treat your team? Do you know how to grow your team to become a peak performance team? Because if your team is not a peak performance team, your results will not be a peak-performance results. Never. Despite all your efforts from you personally.
So these are the two changes in mindset that all the leaders and managers need to make to complete that transition. Mindset #1 is you have to accept and recognise that there is a new skill set that you will need to succeed as a manager or leader. And, mindset #2, the centre of your success is going to move from you to your team.
Well, if you would like to keep that conversation together, please go ahead, subscribe below, and you will be hearing from me on a weekly basis with this new type of conversations that will support you on the transition to become a great manager and leader for your organisation.
Thank you very much for listening today.
Take care. Talk to you soon.