29 Apr TSLH #017: 5 Tips To Switch From Individual Contributor To Leader Of A Team
Read time: 5 minutes
First of all, you may have noticed that issue #16 of The Saturday Leader Heroes only sent this Thursday, April 27. My apologies for that, I ran into a problem with the online tool I am using. It’s fixed now!
This reminds me that all the things we take for granted are in fact rarely granted. Take the example of switching roles from being an individual contributor to the leader of a team. If you make that switch thinking that nothing will change for you in the way you work, you’re up for big challenges and disillusions.
As you take on a first leadership role, it’s critical to understand how to switch gear in your first 90 days in order to make that change a success for you and for the team you are leading.
I am giving you 5 tips to get you started here and put you on the right track of good leadership.
Define your leadership philosophy and explain it to people. Strong leadership starts with you and how you lead by example. What will get you to authentic leadership is not the title you hold, but the behaviors you will demonstrate.
It should start with you and understanding what values guide you, what you believe in, and how you want to leverage your core belief system to lead your team. Start with asking yourself a few questions:
- What do I stand for?
- What is important to me in my leadership role?
- What values do I want to demonstrate and live by?
- What behaviors do I abhor and that I don’t want to tolerate in the team?
- How do I want to lead?
If you have never done that work on yourself, I really recommend that you give it some serious thought, because this is what could make the difference between success and failure in your leadership role. This is a perfect opportunity to work with a coach if you don’t have one yet.
Once you have done that work, it’s not enough. You need to communicate your values, beliefs, red lines and most importantly you need to demonstrate through your actions that you really lead by this philosophy you are communicating. This is called walking the talk.
As I have written before, this is also a time where you should not only communicate about your values, but you should also be curious about the values that the people have on the team. A great exercise to do with your team is to discover and agree on what the shared values of the team are and how the team wants to behave. This is about looking for the common ground that all people on the team share and that can cement the team as a strong collaborative and productive group.
Get Into Action Now: Discover yourself – Communicate your leadership philosophy – Walk the talk – Be curious about other peoples’ and the team’s values – Agree on shared values and behaviors for the team.
Find a common purpose for you and the team. This has to do with the vision you want to craft for the future and sharing it with the team. Depending on your role, that vision can really range from what you aspire the team to be to what you want the entire organization to become.
A great place to start when looking to define a common purpose or vision is to look at your past. A few questions for reflection:
- What have I done in the past that fulfilled me and that could serve me as I open the next chapter of my career?
- Is there a central theme in my life or career that could be a backbone of my vision for the future?
Now that you’ve thought about your past and what got you there, start thinking about the future and how to build it in a way that will be inspiring for people. Questions you may reflect on here are:
- What is my vision for my team in the next year? In the next five years?
- What are trends in our industry that could help take our vision forward?
- What change should we anticipate and start discussing as part of the vision?
You should then communicate your vision to your team. And now that you have done that, you should engage your team in that process too and see what input they provide as to what their own vision for the team or organization is. This could provide new or different perspectives or highlight challenges that you’re not aware of.
Get Into Action Now: Reflect on your past – Dream the future – Communicate your vision – Ask people on the team about their vision – Create a common vision.
Create a safe space for people on the team to experiment, challenge, and learn from mistakes. Part of your role as the leader of a team will be to challenge the status quo, to look for ways to improve the organization, the team, processes, etc. Doing so will require trying new things, experimenting, making mistakes, even failing at times.
If you want your team to align with you on challenging the status quo, a critical condition to create is a safe space. This means an environment where the team takes actions and risks, understands that this will occasionally mean mistakes will be made and failure will happen, and knows that these situations will be seen as strong opportunities to learn.
As a leader, it’s very difficult to take a team out of its comfort zone or challenging the people to do things differently. This is because nobody really likes change. The main challenge for any organization today is that change is no longer a one-time event that happens every 5 years. Change happens everyday nowadays. The only way to get your team comfortable with change is to create a safe space for them to discuss and experiment.
Often, what happens in organizations is that processes are so rooted that nobody questions them. These are the standard sentences you may have heard: “We’ve always done like this!” or “This is the process.”
Well, F word to that! Regardless of whether these processes work or not, chances are the people on your team will be on autopilot and probably never stop to consider whether there are better ways of doing something. Or worse, some people may voice their opinions but these voices are not listened to, so people “learn” to be silent since their opinions don’t matter.
One thing you can do as the leader of the team, especially early after you arrive, is to take a step back, assess the processes, talk with the people on the team, understand the pain points, what they think could be done better. If you have created a safe space, people will feel comfortable to challenge the norms and be innovative.
You can create a safe space by doing a few things:
- Discuss what everybody needs to have a fruitful discussion. It can be confidentiality, not judging, letting anyone talk and not comment, agreeing to reply with questions rather than comments or critics, etc.
- You should make it clear to your team what you will communicate yourself as the leader of the team. For instance, in one team I led that initially lacked trust in their leaders, I told them this: “Anything I will want to discuss with my manager or any other executive, I will let you know first, so that everyone has a chance to give me feedback and highlights things that should remain confidential or things that I am overlooking.”
Get Into Action Now: Create a safe space for the team – Show them that making mistakes is good and leads to learning, not punishment – Take a step back and reflect on processes that could be improved or innovations your team could spearhead – Engage the team through discussion and experimentation – Learn by trying and making mistakes.
Create trust on the team to empower people. The best leaders strive to create an atmosphere of trust and respect. By doing so, they strengthen the people on the team by making each person engaged, accountable, and collaborative.
Creating trust is a key condition to having a high-performing team.
Often though, leaders, especially first-time managers, assume that as the leader of the team, they are supposed to know and do everything, they are expected to be in charge of every project, they need to solve all problems.
Well, you can try this and very quickly, you will be engulfed in a behavior I call “the savior”. And this will impact you and your team in 2 ways:
- You: You will feel stress, anxiety, tiredness, fear of failing, all feelings that may ultimately lead you to a burn out.
- Your team: They will see delays as things don’t get done, their morale will go down because you’re micromanaging, wanting to do everything. As a result, people on the team will be frustrated and will not be engaged nor accountable. And why should they, since you’re here to solve everything!
Don’t fall into that trap. It’s very easy to fall into it, and extremely difficult to get out of it. I experienced this myself, and I suffered for a full year because of that mistake. It took me resetting the expectations with the team entirely to get out of the savior mode.
There are 4 behaviors you should adopt that contribute to creating trust in a team:
- Develop positive relationships: Even before people trust you, give your trust, unconditionally, while setting expectations of why you do this and what you want in return. One of the CEOs I worked with in the past said it out loud to the entire organization when she started: “I won’t succeed alone, there is still plenty that I don’t know. I need your help to make the organization succeed and I trust that you can engage and collaborate with me and our teams to make us all succeed.” Wow, that was a great message I thought. Developing positive relationships is also about telling people things about yourself (they need to see there is a human behind the leader), being curious about the people, listening, caring for their needs, etc.
- Demonstrate a consistent way of leading: If you have worked on your leadership philosophy like I talked about above, and you have communicated it, walking the talk will show that you lead with consistency. You make decisions based on values and beliefs that you have explained. This creates a no-surprise environment for people, which greatly contributes to creating trust within the team. For instance, I often tell my team that respect is a red line for me and that I will address any case of disrespect swiftly. When such a case happens, I stay true to my philosophy and address the case, also communicating with the team about what I have done.
- Do what you say you’ll do: The last behavior that will help create trust on the team is building your credibility. The best way to build it is to do the things that you say you will do. When I started with a team a few years ago, it was obvious that one key challenge the team had is a lack of people on the team to do the work. Because I knew how to get additional resources in the organization, I talked to the team and told them “I will get you the resources you need to do your work.” and then I worked with my manager to get these resources. Because I was able to stay true to my word, I created credibility for myself and people trusted me more although I was very new as their leader.
- Demonstrate your trust: Let people do the work the way they want, or decide how they will tackle a problem, even if it’s very different from how you would do it, and just focus on the outcomes. Another way to demonstrate your trust is to engage the team on important decisions and give everyone an opportunity to weigh in and decide. Lastly, you can also provide people with an opportunity to make decisions that will impact the team and organizations. For instance, if you delegate a project to someone, make sure you also delegate the authority to make decisions, and stay in the background, ready to coach the person if she needs you at all.
Get Into Action Now: Develop positive relationships by getting to know the people on the team – Give trust unconditionally – Walk the talk on your leadership philosophy – Be credible and do what you say you’ll do.
Ensure you celebrate wins and successes. Every winning team likes to be recognized. People on the team need rewards, recognition, they need to feel they are the heroes of the day. The last tip I am giving you today is really about connecting with the team when there is a success to celebrate. This creates a good momentum, nice feelings of fulfilment, and this contributes to creating a spirit for the team.
Now, don’t get me wrong. This is not a piece of cake to do this correctly. Yours truly (i.e., me) is still struggling with doing this the way I would like it to be. This is a constant learning area for me. I am getting much better at it, and it takes time.
What I will tell you though, from my experience and learning, is that the worst to do is not do anything. If you don’t recognize people when they deserve it, you will disappoint many and lose trust.
With time, I found that these 3 steps matter a lot when looking at celebrating wins and successes:
- People obviously have to understand what the goals are so that when they are achieved, you can celebrate with them. I also like to celebrate small wins, or celebrate someone when they’ve gone the extra mile to help your team succeed. Don’t forget to celebrate the people outside of the team who may have contributed to your success.
- It is key to understand how people like to be recognized. It’s especially true if you work with a diverse, multi-cultural team. While a British or an American may like individual recognition in front of a group, there are certain cultures where people feel very awkward with that. You’d better know before you celebrate. My 2 secrets to know this: (1) When I get to know the people, I try to understand how they like to be recognized; (2) Before recognizing them, for instance in front of a large group, I ask them if this is OK for them that I do so. You can also personalize the recognition. Some people will like a small token of appreciation (in my company, we used to have “high five” cards that we would give to people we wanted to recognize), you can give a voucher, etc. Some people just like to be recognized in front of the group. Just know what works best.
- Make sure the recognition and success is widely communicated. When someone on my team does something that earns recognition, I not only let the team know, I also copy my manager and any other executive or stakeholder that has been impacted favorably by the success. Likewise, if someone outside of my team deserves recognition, I will let their manager know.
Whatever you do, never forget a very critical aspect of recognition, especially as it relates to small wins: If someone is doing some work for you and you’re using their work with someone else, be sure to credit them with the hard work done and any success they allowed the team to have. There’s nothing that will destroy trust and engagement more than if you don’t credit the work of others. Just make it a habit!
Get Into Action Now: Make sure people have goals they can work towards – Celebrate small wins and big wins, don’t take credit for work that is not yours – Understand how people like to be recognized – Communicate widely about team’s successes.
Switching from individual contributor to first-time manager is hard. Practice these 5 tips, make them part of the way you lead, and will be off to a great start as a leader. Don’t sweat out! You can practice one at a time. If you’re a first time manager, be honest with your team, let them know that you need time to be a good leader and you need their help. See what happens when you show that vulnerability.
I wish you a great read. I’ll see you next Saturday!
TL; DR (Too Long, Did not Read)
5 tips to switch from individual contributor to leader of a team
- Define and explain your leadership philosophy.
- Find a common purpose for you and the team.
- Create a safe space to experiment and learn.
- Create trust to empower.
- Celebrate wins and successes.
Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:
1️⃣ Work 1-1 with me to step up as the authentic leader you aspire to be.
2️⃣ Hire me to help you build a high-performing team.
3️⃣ Start with my affordable digital courses on Mastering Difficult Conversations for Leaders and Goal Setting