Rachel Parnes* says working on your leadership skills are more than just a fast-track to promotion, they also help improve the whole organisation.
Who was the best manager you ever had? What made them so great? Was it their knowledge? Organizational or logistical skills? Experience?
Sure, maybe they had these, but that’s probably not what you remember them for.
You probably remember how they fostered and led a team and helped you grow into the professional you are today.
Great managers do more than hit deadlines and produce results.
They build better teams.
A truly great manager cultivates their direct reports, helping them grow into better professionals and teammates.
Leadership skills are the #1 soft skill for futureproofing your career for a good reason, but for managers, they’re more than that.
Developing leadership skills won’t just prepare you for a promotion; they’re also the best way to become a better manager—and the best way to improve your organization as a whole in the process.
Let’s talk about why leadership is a skill that any manager should be sharpening.
Why managers need to be leaders
In his LinkedIn Learning course, Essential Lessons for First-time Managers, Dave Labowitz explains the fundamental connection between management and leadership:
“Think of management and leadership as yin and yang, the two parts of a whole,” he explained.
“Management is about measurable business outcomes and numbers, while leadership is about the people who create those results.”
“For example,” Lebowitz continued, “if you need one of your team members to create a document for you, you’ll need to exercise your management skills to explain the project and deliverable clearly.
“Your team will need to know what you need and how it will be evaluated in order to give you what you’re looking for.”
“But,” he clarified, “they’ll also need to be motivated to do good work and engage in the process.
“Otherwise, the product will end up substandard.
“The relationships that make this possible are created through the application of your leadership skills.”
As managers, it’s easy to fall into a pattern of only thinking about the immediate: after all, there’s always a fire to put out!
This impulse must be resisted.
Your job isn’t just about the tactics of putting the current fires out.
It’s about building a better firefighting team.
Building that team means becoming a leader.
The leadership skills that level up managers
To grow from a tactical manager into a strategic manager, you need to develop two skill sets: the ability to lead people, and the ability to lead ideas.
Here’s how both work, why they’re so important, and how to develop them:
Leading people
The greatest myth about management is that it’s reactive.
Too many managers believe their role is to be there for their team…only when their team reaches out.
They shouldn’t dictate how their team members develop professionally, they think; they should just provide advice and resources on whatever their team members tell them they want to do.
These managers have their hearts in the right place, but they’re potentially mistaking what their team members really want from them.
“My experience as an HR manager taught me that all workers want to learn and grow,” Laurie Ruettimann said in her LinkedIn Learning course Be the Manager People Won’t Want to Leave: “the best managers are the ones who see that and clear a path, find new opportunities to encourage development, and support continuous learning, for this job, or the next.”
Managers don’t have to demand your team members develop in certain ways in order to proactively guide their professional development.
They need to work together with their individual team members to discover those team member’s skills and find ways to nourish them.
How do you do that?
Start by practicing what Gemma Leigh Roberts calls “strengths-based coaching” in her course on the Manager as Coach.
She breaks down the process step-by-step:
- Have open conversations with each member of your team detailing why you want to help them develop their unique professional strengths.
- Work together with the team members to identify these strengths.
Agree on a top three together and discuss how the two of you can focus on building them.
- Make time to focus on new strengths and development areas.
“I recommend spending 70 per cent of the time focusing on signature strengths, 20 per cent of time building new strengths, and 10 per cent of the time enhancing development areas,” Leigh Roberts explained.
- Track progress during your coaching conversations.
Leading ideas
To transition from managing people to leading them, we recommended focusing on your team member’s long-term development; in other words, not just what they need right now, but the skills and experience they’ll need to grow.
Learning to evolve from managing ideas to leading them forward involves the same process.
“Managers (typically) focus on the tactical; leaders are strategic,” explained Sara Canaday in her course on Transitioning from Manager to Leader, “Leaders are on a much different track.
“They influence and inspire, They strategize and set the agenda.
“They cultivate talent, engage their stakeholders, and build powerhouse teams.
“The mindset is different.”
What do you want your team to achieve, and why? How do you want to contribute to the growth and development of your organization? How can you develop the right team to make that happen?
In her course on Leading with Purpose, Lisa Earle McLeod stresses that every organization’s leader should develop a clear purpose statement for the entire organization.
Earle McLeod shared three steps for developing this purpose statement.
Work through each one with your team:
- How does your team make a difference?
- How do you do it differently? What makes your team unique?
- What do you love about your job?
Once you have your purpose statement, you have the idea you will lead with: how can your management fulfill this purpose? How can you lead your team to their best work?
Whether you’re planning your future career or you just want to do more for the team you’re managing right now, developing your leadership skills is one of the most valuable investments you can make.
*Rachel Parnes, Senior Marketing Manager at LinkedIn.
This article first appeared at linkedin.com.
