Leaders who didn't know their own minds
One manager told us honestly that he was barely hanging on. It was impossible to do everything he felt he had to do in his management job. I asked him what he thought was the reason for this. He replied that the employees had become too good and that he was afraid of being exposed as less competent than them. As a manager, he therefore had to study endlessly to remain the best, and he feared that his lack of professional weight could be noticed by his employees and ruin him as a manager. At the same time, he had discovered that some of his employees were a little too passive and inefficient and that he had to do some of the tasks that they should have done, but he simply didn't have the time or energy to do anything about it. As a result, he was stressing around with a constant guilty conscience and a suppressed irritation towards his co-workers.
If you're a manager, it's likely that you don't know how bad you are. Unfortunately, managers are often worse managers than they think they are. They are often the problem, not their ineffective employees. At the same time, it's quite likely that as a manager, you walk around with a fear of being "revealed" as less competent. But you don't have to feel that way. With simple steps, you can achieve much more as a manager and get rid of low self-esteem. So why do so many people do nothing about it?
Written by: Mats Kristensen
Article published in HR-magasinet
MATS KRISTENSEN is CEO and partner in FRONT Leadership, which delivers onboarding and leadership training to the business community.
He teaches HRM at BI Norwegian Business School, is co-author of the HR book and network leader in Norway's largest leadership development network, LUN.
Precisely because you don't know what you could have known about leadership. You don't know that you could simply become more effective. Nor is there anyone to advise you on what you can actually do to meet the challenges thrown at you in your everyday management life. As a manager, you usually also have an experience-based relationship with leadership, having seen and been "exposed to" more or less random leadership from others. It is far from certain that these are good role models to emulate.
Leaders are heroes
In reality, leaders are among the very best of us. They have performed and delivered over many years, often competing for exciting leadership positions. They have really had what it takes to succeed in their previous role - as a subject specialist. That's precisely the main problem. You've had what it took to get you where you are today, but it's extremely rare that the same thing is needed to succeed in the future. As Marshall Goldsmith says: "What got you here, won't get you there." In other words, a manager should do something different from the specialist, but the challenge is that managers spend too much time on the opposite - the tasks of the specialist.
But not superheroes
When it comes to leadership, most managers are simply on shaky ground. Most managers have neither five years of higher management education nor ten years of relevant management experience. Despite this, they are expected to have "superpower" and intuitively master most things - preferably from day one. In many ways, a leader must perform even better than a top athlete. They are expected to strike gold - every single day - without any coaching or skills development. But inside, the leader feels more and more alone and perhaps also afraid that it will be revealed that such superheroes do not exist in reality.
Read also: 8 tips for managers who are downsizing
Trade versus people
Managers struggle with the same thing everywhere. In my active work with management and leadership development in more than 100 different companies and through dialog with around 1,000 HR directors in Norway's largest network for leadership developers, I find that history repeats itself time and time again. As a manager, it is highly likely that you are far more concerned with professional weight and the professional tasks to be solved than with people and relationships. At the same time, if the employees you are tasked with leading are to perform at their best and realize their full potential, your leadership skills are absolutely crucial.
Brilliantly simple solution
Many years ago, I had the pleasure of working with Jack Welch who was the CEO of GE. One day he said two short sentences that changed everything.
"Before you become a leader, success is all about developing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about developing others".
That's the recipe for his success. It was also the recipe I gave to the manager who thought his employees had become too good. He had to stop trying to be more professional than his employees and instead focus on what he could do to make his employees even better at their jobs. The specialists and other employees need a manager who sees, understands, considers, supports and develops them so that they can achieve more than they thought possible. They often benefit more from discussing professional issues with other specialists than with you as a manager, even if you know a lot about the subject and have been very successful in the past.
Huge gain
It pays for employers to help their managers let go of "old talents" and professional specialties. It pays to help managers become specialists in managing people. Both employee wellbeing and efficiency will increase significantly, and this is reflected in the bottom line. The leader who truly embraces the leadership challenge inherent in their role has a bright future ahead of them. Everyone deserves a great leader, but very few have one. Being that great leader will be a position of gratitude. As a leader, you can be the one who makes your employees feel that their work is both meaningful and significant.
Read also: The employee interview 2.0 - a farewell to the old interrogation
Three simple steps
You're just three simple steps away from shifting your focus from subjects to people and making it last:
Book a development program which means that managers spend as little time as possible learning as much as possible - it is not very profitable to gather managers for leadership development in a two-day seminar in a hotel, which they only remember parts of afterwards.
Leadership development must be integrated in everyday work life with the latest technological tools so that managers develop a little every week - on the job and at work. What they learn will be implanted as well as a spinal reflex.
To ensure learning impact and continuous progress, it is important to have a system for measuring behavioral change in the participating managers, as well as continuous feedback from both employees and other managers, goal setting and an ever-increasing learning content in the form of text, video and assignments.
The goal is unconscious
Companies that take these three steps will gradually move from having unconsciously incompetent leaders to having unconsciously competent leaders. The goal is for you as a leader to make the right moves, almost without thinking about it. It should not take more time, but become a good habit to be a good leader, for the benefit of your business, your employees and not least yourself. The alternative is for you as a manager to continue to wear yourself out in a kind of super specialist role. You'll end up with employees who are less engaged, less emotionally connected to their jobs and who perform worse than your competitors. As a manager, you'll find it increasingly difficult to attract, retain and develop the talent your business needs for the future. You'll become a group of people with little effective interaction and synergy across the board, working far too haphazardly. It's too bad, when it takes so little to become a cohesive team that helps each other towards a common goal and great success.
