At some point in your career, either as an individual looking at your career path, or as a manager supporting the development of his/her team members, you will be faced with a decision on whether a leadership role is a good next step.
Most first-time leaders end up in their roles more by mistake than design, through battlefield promotions where an opening showed up and someone deemed you appropriate to fill it. Unfortunately, the statistics on the failure of first-time leaders are sobering. Survey after survey indicates that over 50% of most first-time leaders wash out in this initial role; a batting average slightly worse than getting married!
As an individual responsible for your own career or as a manager responsible for the development of individuals on your team, why take the chance with such lousy odds, when you easily improve your success ratio by asking and answering seven simple questions?
Guidance:
As a manager supporting the identification and development of first-time leaders, or as an individual contributor looking at your next career steps, consideration of and investigation into the answers to these questions will help minimize mistakes.
The Seven Simple Questions for Ambitious Aspiring Leaders (from the book, Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro)
1. Why do you want to lead others?
2. Do you understand the true role of a leader?
3. Do you understand that the skills that made you successful as an individual contributor are not the same skills you will need to succeed as a leader?
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4. Are you prepared to give up your domain expertise as the foundation for your results?
5. Do you understand the skills and personality traits required for success as a leader?
6. Do you understand that you are responsible for the output of your team and that you will be accountable for this output?
7. Can you imagine what your workday life will be like as a leader?
The Bottom-Line for Now:
As an individual looking at your next career steps, you owe it to yourself to investigate answers to each of the seven questions above. Seek out experienced leaders to interview, request the opportunity to shadow your manager for a day, find a leadership mentor and take on some informal leadership tasks (projects) at work or in your community to gain experience and context for this role.
As a manager developing others, The Seven Simple Questions offer you a framework to define a set of activities in helping individuals discover the challenges and joys of leading. Use these questions and the inherent issues to define an apprenticeship type program and ensure that anyone promoted to a first-time leadership role has experience-based answers to these questions.
(Plug) And of course, for additional support, consider the very powerful, practical, affordable Building Better Leaders Course, Considering the Move to Leadership-How to Prepare and What to Expect, where distance learning plus personalized professional mentoring will help you discover what leadership is all about.
In this situation, some good due diligence on everyone’s part will help prevent critical career and managerial mistakes.
When it comes to planning a career I would separate management from leadership. How I see this issue is:
– When I think about my career I think about roles I fulfill. The role is being a manager. I believe a good manager is always a good leader but there are people who differ here – they aren’t good leaders as we understand it but they still consider themselves as successful managers. That’s however another discussion.
– When I think about my personal development considering my career goals I think about leadership since this is a key feat for being a manager. And this is the point where I come to your questions. But at the same time I can’t forget about questions regarding management (e.g. whether I’m willing to fight for my team in office politics fights etc), which are usually much more dependent on organizations you work in.
This is a great post about an important issue. Far too many companies select new bosses based on something besides the likelihood they will do well in the role. Your questions help get at that. Readers should also know that your book, Practical Lessons in Leadership, is one of very few that offer realistic and actionable advice on how to decide if being a boss is for you..
Now that I’ve buttered you up, let me suggest a couple of questions to add to the list.
Are you willing to talk to other people about their behavior or performance?
Do you enjoy helping other people succeed?
This next one is a variant of one you’ve already got. The wording comes from a fellow who took my program many years ago: Are you comfortable with the fact that once you’re a boss, the team is your destiny?