2020 is upon us. New gym memberships, new diet plans, and new promises to take on for ourselves to start the new year. All is great—good luck to us all on all these!
For many leaders and managers like us, we need to start transforming our management paradigm right now. Though it sounds pretty catchy to call this post the “must ‘becomes’ for leaders in 2020,” we all know that the best time to start a shift to the better is right now.
As managers, we have a great stake in the development and growth of our direct reports. Depending on your position in your organization, your influence as a leader may extend further past the boundaries of your organizational umbrella. It’s our responsibility to be the beacon of growth and development of those individuals around you.
In this post, I’d like to talk about five traits each manager needs to become, right now, to evolve from the old norms of “management.” Many of you may have already ventured towards these paths of managerial mindsets. Heck, to some of you these may be “old news,” but if you’re at that point of maturity in any of these concepts, you very well know how important it is to be reminded of them constantly. You know better than most of us that we’ll never “arrive” to becoming the best leaders we can be—we’re always “becoming.”
Five things managers need to become in 2020:
Challengers - Yes, it’s feels so satisfying to always have the answers for every problem. It’s great to feel needed, that feeling of being looked up to. Indeed, we were most likely promoted to our first leadership role because of the knowledge and ideas we brought when we were individual contributors, but where will you draw the line? What will happen to your team when you’re on a vacation? How can you be promoted to a more senior role if your current team needs you at the helm to perform at a high level? Please, for your sake, your team’s and your organization’s, start becoming the challenger. Don’t just show up to put out the flames and have the answers for your team. Challenge your team to find the answers themselves. They’ll need to experience this to grow. Create a mechanism where they can bounce ideas off you and each other to validate their decisions. As a challenger, you should not just throw them off the ship to see if they’ll sink or not. Ask a lot of probing questions. You’ll realize that the satisfaction of seeing the glow on their faces, as they come up with their own solutions, is much more gratifying than simply feeding them the answers yourself. As your team grows, this process also opens opportunities for your own professional growth in the future. You can see that growth in three scenarios: first, senior leaders in your organization will see your abilities to grow teams—thus trusting you with much bigger teams to oversee. Second, senior leaders will see that your team will just be fine even without you, so they assign you with a much bigger assignment to work on. Lastly, you don’t have to spend so much time on the day-to-day operations of your shop. This gives you much more time to grow yourself—more time to learn and expand your knowledge, more time to spend with your family, and far less stress on a daily basis.
Entrepreneur - As an entrepreneur, you’ll be in a better mindset to bestow more ownership unto your direct reports. Regardless of the size of your organization, work it as if it’s a start-up. In most start-ups, each of their employees and partners are aware of its financial situation, its market value, and its customer-satisfaction ratings. With this type of structure, each individual acts like an owner of the business. This provides a lot more stake for each person to ensure the success of the organization. As an entrepreneur, managers need to be more transparent about all the dealings of the organization. Quint Studer has a great analogy of this in his latest book, “The Busy Leader’s Handbook.” In the book, Quint talks about the differences between homeowners and apartment renters. The renters are not aware of the financials of their landlords. They don’t know how much the mortgage is, or how much tax they pay. Renters tend to not take as much care of their dwellings as homeowners. Renters just know that the landlords will take care of any fixing that needs done—besides, they’re off the hook after the lease is up anyway. Homeowners, on the other hand, are constantly trying to improve their home. They do the maintenance and all other work. They want to make sure that their investment is in good shape. Employees who act as owners will do the same. They’ll take care of the office equipment and supplies, they’ll work more efficiently to optimize use of resources, and, most important, they’ll take care of your customers. Managers who are entrepreneurs will engrain this mindset to their teams.
Innovative - Managers who are always looking into what’s possible tend to be the evangelist of growth in their organization. Earlier this year, the IT support team in my organization started a “Suggestion Box” program. This is separate from our enterprise-wide “suggestions program.” Creating a simple mechanism internally to gather and sort employee suggestions was one of the best things we ever did in 2019. Doing it at a much smaller scale, just within our section, allows us to be very tactical and specific with the suggestions. Meaning, the suggestions directly impact our service and provide value to each team member. Many process improvement initiatives were birthed from this suggestion box. Improvements that cut down on number of calls and call times. The suggestions even cut down the amount of time our customers would need to wait to get their IT issues resolved. On top of the operational improvements spawned from this initiative, we also received and executed on suggestions that provided value back to our community. The team ended 2019 with two community volunteering events. Managers as innovators can realize two direct benefits: first, they multiply the number of ideas (and possibilities) to growth their organization. Second, they see budding leaders within their team, who get a chance to flex their leadership muscles as they spearhead these different initiatives.
Instructors - This goes hand-in-hand with challengers. Instructors teach direct reports. They don’t simply delegate tasks to them. They actually delegate the entire authority to them. Many leaders think that delegating—with a laundry list of instructions and pre-made decisions—is actually helpful in developing their teams. It doesn’t. They’re simply teaching them to follow directions. Instructors provide the task and the tools needed to complete the task. As long as the instructors are clear with their end goal and that the mission/vision (North Star) of their organization is well-defined, trusting their team members to pave their own path to the finish line creates sustained growth within the organization.
Learning Machine - In April 2019, I started a quest to read \as much books as I can read. This started from listening to podcasts a few months prior. In December 30th, (just a few hours before I wrote this post) I finished reading my 18th book. Leaders need to be continuous learners. Learning machines don’t just consume knowledge. These types of managers consume, process, implement, and share knowledge. Consuming can be from reading, listening to podcasts, talking to a mentor, or taking an official course. Processing can be in a form of doing more research on a particular topic or engaging other leaders with the idea. Implementing can be in a form of new ways of doing things at work or at home. As an example, I started journaling after reading “Miracle Morning Millionaires” by Hal Elrod. Sharing knowledge can be through one-on-one coaching or at scale by blogging, writing articles, writing a book, or during speaking engagements.
Again, we will never achieve any of these traits as leaders, but we can certainly be constantly becoming them. The key is to be intentional in becoming proficient with these traits as managers in 2020. (Another key) is to be humble enough to recognize that we’re always in the state of learning. Being in this state of mind positions us well to be these five things.
Crowdsourcing FTW
Please share some examples on how you have or will become any of these traits. “I’ll be an innovator in 2020 by doing [BLANK].” Or if you have another item to share, please do so. Five seems to be a nice number to do a list with, but there’s an ocean of different managerial traits that ensures personal, professional, and organizational growth. I look forward to learning from you!