6
I M P R O V I N G Y O U R R E S U LT S B Y U N D E R S TA N D I N G S O M E C R I T I C A L C O M P O N E N T S O F
Y O U R L E A D E R S H I P R O L E
In your transition from Bud to Boss, you will have to confront many new issues that were not part of your responsibilities before you became a leader. Suddenly you are the leader and all of these issues land squarely in your lap. To be successful, you have to find a way to deal with them—you cannot just ignore the problems that come your way. And the sooner you learn to deal with them the better. We know you can handle the challenges, and we have some perspective to share with you that we think makes the list a little less daunting.
In the last chapter, we discussed many of the common concerns of new leaders. As we said, the list of common concerns comes from what we have heard new leaders say to us in our workshops and consulting work. In another exercise, we ask people to list what they see as the critical components of the leadership role. Since everyone doesn’t see leadership the same way, everyone doesn’t see the components of leadership the same way. From these conversations, we have collected a list of frequently mentioned components and combined them into what we call the critical components of your leadership role.
4. Getting things done/creating results 5. Inspiring people to action
6. Setting goals
7. Communicating up, down, and across the organization 8. Developing others
9. Building a team 10. Resolving conflicts
11. Holding people accountable
We realize that other people might combine some of these items or add others to the list. And we are okay with that. We are not trying to develop an all-encompassing list. We are trying to break the complex skill set of leadership into more manageable pieces to make it easier for you to learn these skills.
In an effort to simplify things even more, we further divide the critical components of your leadership role into two very broad categories:
1. Components that are mostly about task accomplishment 2. Components that are mostly about interacting with people
Using these two categories, we would list the components this way:
Mostly About Task Accomplishment
Mostly About Interacting with People
❍ Getting things done/creating results
❍ Setting goals
❍ Helping people decide to change
❍ Coaching team members
❍ Delegating tasks
❍ Inspiring people to action
❍ Communicating up, down, and across the organization
❍ Developing others
❍ Building a team
❍ Resolving conflicts
❍ Holding people accountable
c r i t i c a l c o m p o n e n t s o f l e a d e r s h i p 37 We do not believe that the way we have these components listed is the absolute and final word on how to categorize them. As examples, some people say that setting goals and getting things done have a great deal of Interacting with People skills in them. Other people say that holding people accountable has a strong Task Accomplishment piece. We can see arguments that validate both of these perspec- tives.
How you see these issues is probably related to your personal bias or focus toward accomplishing tasks or building relationships as your highest priority. As a result of these personal biases, you might break the list down a little differently than we did.
We will discuss the challenges of personal bias more in later chapters. For our purposes now, we listed the components like most people in our workshops respond to the exercise of assigning a task or a relationship perspective to each of them.
Discussing where each individual component lies on the list is not the main point we want to observe from this exercise. Mainly, we suggest that you look at the overall breakdown and note that most of what you have to do to succeed in a leadership role has more to do with a focus on people than on tasks. Regardless of how you would personally divide the list, we’d guess that you also came to the conclusion that most of the components fit on the Interacting with People side of the table.
The skills of interacting with people are a bigger portion of your leadership responsibility than is your personal ability to accomplish tasks.
If you are like many leaders, you became a leader because you are good at getting things done. You are probably willing to work hard for long hours in the interest of making things happen. Now, your focus has to shift to getting things done through and with other people rather than doing it yourself. This change in focus is a common struggle and a point of frustration for many new leaders.
Since you already know how to get things done on your own, you might get frustrated with people who do not get things done as quickly or to the same quality that you could do them.
You might feel the pressure to take over a task so that you can
‘‘just get it done’’. Rather than coach someone else on how to do
it properly. Maybe you hold onto tasks that you enjoy doing rather than giving them to someone else. Or, you might feel stressed by the constant interactions, communications, and work necessary to get things done through others. You might simply feel better when you do it yourself.
Resist the urge to hold onto tasks or to take them away from the people on your team. Instead, focus on developing your skills at connecting with, inspiring, and coaching others. Because we recognize this part of the transition can be difficult for many people, we have concentrated our efforts in those areas as we developed the suggestions that come in later chapters.
Your Now Steps
1. Go back to the list of the components of your leadership role and rate your current skill level in each component on a 1–10 scale.
(A score of 1 means, ‘‘I really need some help with this one’’ and a score of 10 means, ‘‘I have got this component figured out.’’) 2. Add any areas with a rating of less than 5 to the list of your top
concerns that you developed in the previous chapter.
7