Making the Transition from Manager to Leader

To pick up on this point for young leaders and this transition from two elements. One is a transition from a manager to a leader. The other is the transition into leading any small group of people from leading one’s self. What predictable patterns emerge along the lines of what you’ve just suggested?

I think the first thing is, you walk into the role and of course, everyone is waiting for you to cast a position, to show a direction. Of course, that’s extremely important for a leader to be able to paint a rich picture of what it is you want to achieve to be able to be clear on the vision and somewhat flexible on the strategy to get there in the first instance. It’s difficult if you don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle to be able to bring that vision together. That leaves you to say, you’ve got to be prepared to be vulnerable. To be able to stand up to say, I don’t have all the answers. The natural answer is not to say that, to do the opposite and say, I’ve been given this job because I was the best and brightest. I was the chosen one for this role. I automatically have to come with all the answers, and I have to start to hand those answers out to everybody in the organization, so they can act on them. When in fact to play it against yourself, one of the great opportunities is to say, I come with great ideas, I come with ambition for us as an organization, but I don’t necessarily come with all of the answers.

In fact, I will admit in some areas I don’t have a natural strength in some of the things I may need to come to all of the answers. That’s okay. By purely demonstrating that, you’re also making it okay for other leaders in your group to say the same thing, which then allows them to contribute to each other. It creates a permission, if you like, a visible permission that they can actually interact and help each other on those strengths and weaknesses to come to a better solution and work more effectively as a team. Also, accepting the fact that when you come into these roles, there’s never clarity. I think this was the other thing that a lot of people feel that from day one, you have to have clarity over all of the elements. The truth is, you rarely if ever have absolute clarity over everything. Ambiguity is a feature of dealing with leadership challenges and if you look at today for example, where we are with Covid-19 today, the world is full of ambiguity. Now, if you’ve stepped into a leadership role accepting that ambiguity is going to be part of your way of leading. You realize that we’re going to be in complexity and that’s how we’re going to have to live and work and compete. You’re okay with not having all the answers to that ambiguity, but you’re willing to hear perspectives on it to come to some conclusions based on whatever assumptions you all agree make sense, then you’re likely to move ahead as a leadership group with much greater solidarity and much greater trust in one another. Also, a level of comfort that there may be failure involved in that but that’s okay because you’ve accepted ambiguity as just a part of leadership.