Congratulations, you’ve been promoted to a leadership
position in your organisation. As you
start your journey in your new role here are 5 pieces of advice.
Know Who You Want to Be As A Leader
Take time to reflect on the leader you want to be. What behaviours would that leader show? How would that leader treat others? How would that leader communicate? What skills would that leader have?
Create this vision for yourself and use it for guidance in
times when you are unsure.
Be Yourself
When you first take on a leadership role, it’s natural to
try to emulate leaders that you admire. That’s
a good strategy – learn from others BUT also use your own strengths. There may be some behaviours that you would
like to emulate, but you don’t feel comfortable when you do. Instead of “pushing through” understand your
own strengths and use them in a way that is true to who you are.
Know and Use Your Strengths
I’ve had clients who viewed certain characteristics as
weaknesses. For example, I had a client
who believed that their introversion was a weakness because their peers were
extroverted. However, when they did give
their own opinions and recommendations, these were well thought through and
dealt directly with the problem at hand which was appreciated. Understand if what you view as weaknesses are
your true weaknesses or if you perceive them as weaknesses. Understand if these are actually strengths,
and how you can best use them.
Keep Learning
Becoming a leader doesn’t mean that you know everything that
you need to know. Understand your true
weaknesses and take actions to work on them.
Ask for help when you need it.
Being open to learning not just from your peers, but from your
subordinates as well. Spend time
reflecting on whether you are behaving like
the leader that you want to be.
Continue To Develop Your Communication Skills
As a leader you now have interactions with larger groups of
people within your organisation. You
will interact with different people who have different ways of communicating
and understanding. As a new leader, you
need to learn how to communicate with more stakeholders at different levels of
the organisation. Some appreciate
detailed information, whilst others appreciate getting to the point
immediately. Understand what communications are required from the various
stakeholders and what the best method to communicate it to them (face-to-face,
emails, reports, etc).
Also, important here is how you give and receive
feedback. Understand the best way to
give honest and constructive feedback to your team members. When you receive feedback that is not as positive
as you expect, use this as an opportunity to learn so that you can develop your
leadership skills.
If you want to partner with a coach to help you navigate
your new career path, get in touch to schedule a call to see if I would be the coach to partner with.