BCA

Stepping into a management role isn’t just a change of task — it’s a fundamental shift of identity.

“To be successful, first-time managers must make the transition from a person who gets the work done themselves to a person who gets work done through others,” says Kim Leahy, global portfolio manager of Center for Creative Leadership’s Maximizing Your Leadership Potential (MLP) program for managers of individual contributors. “It requires a different definition of success, a new level of self-awareness and an additional range of skills.”

Your definition of success must now include the success of others. Rather than focusing on your own performance, you need to be asking, “How does the group or team accomplish its work?” “Are they effective as individuals?” “Do they collaborate?” “Are team members committed and engaged?” “How are individual motivations and needs connected to the work and the organization?”

At the same time, you should take stock of your own strengths, weaknesses and patterns. “Who you are drives how you lead,” Leahy explains. “Even though the emphasis is no longer on your individual performance, you need to understand your behaviors, preferences and tendencies — and consider that the most effective way to lead others may not always be your default approach.”

For example, you might be a person who thrives on the pressure of a tight deadline and, as an individual contributor, earned a reputation as someone who will roll up your sleeves and get the job done. As a manager of others, these same practices and preferences could lead to poor planning, micromanaging or inadequate use of resources. If you assume everyone operates the same way you did as an individual contributor, you won’t see or leverage the array of talent on your team.

Build a foundation of four leader competencies

To make the transition from an individual performer to leading a team, you’ll want to build a foundation of what CCL calls the “Fundamental Four” leader competencies: self-awareness, learning agility, influence and communication.

Other key competencies for leading others at this stage of your career are:

•Delegating.
•Building and maintaining relationships.
•Resolving conflict.
•Leading team achievement.
•Coaching and developing others.
•Confronting problem employees.
•Embracing change.
•Innovative problem-solving.
•Adapting to cultural differences.

“In today’s flattened and downsized organizations, many skilled people are put into team leadership or management roles with little preparation and support,” says Leahy. “But these emerging leaders are crucial for the implementation of the organization’s day-to-day work. When they understand what is required to manage others and learn — in a practical way — how to be effective leaders, they can be powerful agents for organizational success.”

From Leading Effectively Newletter, Center for Creative Leadership

Five Leadership Skills You and Your Organization Cannot do Without…

Leaders today live in an age of remarkably complex challenges. They range from expanding into volatile international markets, to dealing with the fallout from natural disasters, to navigating their organizations through a broken global economy while preparing for future opportunities. Complex challenges, our research has shown, don’t yield to quick fixes. They don’t respond to standard approaches or conventional knowledge. In fact, 92 percent of executives surveyed by CCL said the challenges their organizations face are more complex than they were just five years ago. On average, they take two years to solve.

Our research also tells us this: you and your colleagues at every levelof your organization do not have all the skills needed to lead effectively in the future. CCL surveyed more than 2,000 leaders from15 companies in the U.S., India and Singapore. We asked these leaders to rate 20 leadership skills in terms of how important they are rightnow for success and how important they will be for success over the next five years.

The upshot: the four most important future skills – leading people, strategic planning, inspiring commitment and managing change – are weak points among today’s leaders. There exists, in other words, a glaring gap between the skills leaders have now and the ones they will need in just a few short years. At CCL, we call it the “leadership gap.”

In a world of increasingly complex challenges that demand leadership traits many of us do not yetfully have, there’s no time to waste in developing ourselves and the men and women in ourorganizations. Based on CCL’s research and practical experience over the past 40 years, we believethe leadership gap can be closed by focusing on these five areas:

Teamwork and collaboration

Managing change

Communication

Learning agility/growth mindset

Judgment

Printed with permission of Center for Creative Leadership. The complete white paper from which this Executive Summary is taken, is available in its entirity on the Center for Creative Leadership website… www.ccl.com.