Never too soon to show leadership
As with all personal development, the transition to becoming a leader should not be a sudden step-change. Employees don’t usually enter a meeting room to be informed of their promotion and immediately shift from taking direction to giving direction. If we consider the transition to be more gradual, when would be the appropriate time in your career to start thinking about leadership and incorporating it into your work? The title of this blog is a spoiler for my views. I think it is worthwhile to start on the path to leadership from the beginning of your career and this week’s post will cover what I mean by leadership, how you can deploy it and why it is valuable.
To start we should probably loosely define leadership. This is not because the term is particularly complicated, but rather it covers many different areas. I also want to move away from the initial thoughts on leadership that focus purely on the CEO or senior staff. For me leadership in its broadest definition would be any efforts that are focused away from business as usual and daily routines set by someone more senior. Examples include improving current processes or prioritizing tasks based on a criterion that you have devised. Projecting a set of values that help breakdown silos or increase the effectiveness of meetings and engagements. At the bare minimum it is considering problems that arise and taking the initiative to brainstorm potential solutions. Expressed in a single sentiment, showing leadership is when you take on the ownership and responsibility for making something better.
Leadership is often tied to career advancement. Each move up the traditional corporate hierarchy comes with additional responsibilities. As the responsibilities increase, so does the requirement to show leadership. Your ability to demonstrate and practice leadership at an early stage of your career can help shape future prospects. You build trust and confidence in your abilities, you develop new skills and it enables you to network within your organization whilst performing at the top of your abilities.
When I look back at the earliest parts of my career, the most interesting and satisfying pieces of work were always the ones where I could show leadership. These were also the times that I felt my career accelerating. You don’t need to be asked to show leadership; part of showing leadership is sensing the gap for yourself and jumping in. That said, it is worth noting that to get the full credit for your effort and align it with organizational goals the best practice is to let your manager know what you are doing in advance, why you are doing it and give them an opportunity to make suggestions and offer advice.
I have a personal example from early in my career. I joined my second employer immediately after they had made a large acquisition. My role was created when the Finance team expanded to cover the workload from the distribution business of the newly acquired company. The content, clients, terms and systems were unfamiliar and the teams who had been previously responsible had not been part of the transaction. There was a significant knowledge gap and it’s not unfair to say that when I joined, we didn’t know what we could sell, how much it was worth and who we could sell it to, which are all critical information points for a distribution business.
Looking back at this situation I had two choices. I could have followed my job description, communicated issues as they arose and waited for instructions. Alternatively, I could take ownership and responsibility for solving the issues directly. I chose the second path and loved every moment of the experience. I roamed significantly beyond my job description to be as effective and useful as possible. One small example included taking home VHS tapes with promo clips of every piece of content in the acquired library. After watching hours of footage and making notes, for a limited time I had a better working knowledge of the content than anyone in the company. This helped address one of the biggest problems we were facing. Due to the volume, age and lower quality of the content, we weren’t getting much interest or engagement from our sales team. Working with Sales, I was able to focus their attentions on the better parts of the portfolio. As the work continued, I became the go-to-guy whenever an issue arose and I was invited into meetings with senior leaders as the strategic direction was being discussed. I was twenty-four years old and getting to see how decisions were made and working on projects that stretched my thinking. Looking back at this time and other similar experiences, showing leadership was rewarding in the moment and made the job more interesting, but it also gave me some guiding principles of how to be effective at work.
Given that VHS tapes are consigned to history and landfill, what can I extract from my example that could give a jumping off point for those at a similar stage in their career? Earlier I said that the bare minimum of leadership is taking the responsibility for solving problems as they arise. There are many different methods to problem solving that I won’t go into here. The goal is to exploit leadership opportunities to make something better. The muscle we want to develop is how to use the information available to generate solutions rather than rely on others to do the thinking.
To avoid any misunderstandings, here are a few clarifications. Showing leadership should enhance not detract from your existing role. Showing leadership does not usually mean you are free to pick and choose your work. It doesn’t mean you are the sole decision-maker on a project, unless someone delegates this responsibility to you. If in your rush to show leadership, you duplicate work already being performed somewhere else, you are unlikely to receive much praise. Showing leadership is entirely consistent with the number one rule of making your boss look good. You must be careful when solving for one problem you don’t create a problem elsewhere.
So, pulling this together, if you see a problem emerge or something that could work better, showing some leadership and assuming responsibility for improving this area is usually a good thing. You are likely to enjoy the process and you will be signaling your value and skills within your organization. Give the problem some genuine thought and ensure that you communicate what you are doing as appropriate. Solicit feedback and socialize your thinking with key stakeholders. As a mindset it is worth thinking of your job spec as minimum requirement and a jumping off point from which you can build and shape your career. When a senior leadership role comes round you will have accumulated some significant experience to lean on.
Next week’s post is an observation about brainstorming and decision making. We often feel vulnerable when an idea we put forward is challenged. I want to discuss how we can get past this to improve the quality of discussions.