 I have been leading some manager workshops over the past year to help them learn how to be leaders to their teams. There seems to be a common thought process that occurs (it happened to me too) when you take over your first team: “I am the leader of the team and I need to have all the answers.” Giving your team all of the answers is not helping them grow and it is actually the opposite of what you should do as a leader.
The challenge is that you are doing what you think you should do. “My management moved me into this role because I was really good at my last role and I need to prove myself by giving my team the answers so they can get things done.” Is that what your leader did for you? Leading a team doesn’t mean that you continue to do all the work, nor do you give them all the answers.
Your focus is to get things done through others and help them become leaders. The people who are the doers are your team members. You are now doing different things like influencing, coaching, and thinking. For most new leaders that list of things isn’t easy to put on a “to do” list and so they feel like they aren’t “doing” what they should be doing.
A leader has many responsibilities, but let’s just focus on what you need to do for your team. Your role is to set a vision for where your group is going, give them feedback on how they are doing, coach them when they struggle with things, motivate them to deliver results and set an example for them so they learn the skills they need for the future. A wise leader once shared with me that I was no longer the superhero, now I needed to put my cape away and create new superheroes instead.
A leader will have a to-do list that may look like this: “Did I coach someone to move forward when they were stuck on something? Did I tell someone thank you for the work that they are doing? Did I delegate something to one of my team members so that they can learn it? Did I share some feedback with a team member to help them learn from an experience?” It is a different kind of to-do list, but it is very important.
This is a big shift for new leaders, but it is important to make it sooner rather than later. It can have a big impact on the perception of you as a leader and impact your ability to take on more responsibilities in the future. Are there things on your to-do list that someone on your team should be doing, so you can focus on being a leader with the time to think, influence, and coach instead?
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