Thoughts on leadership


Matt Baker
Commander, U.S. Coast Guard


Getting started as a first time supervisor

So there you are: an expert in your field. After years of hard work you’ve developed the technical skill to excel at whatever it is you do. Perhaps you’re a real estate agent that can sell any house, any place, any time. Perhaps you’re a research scientist with numerous patents to your name. Perhaps you’re an elementary school teacher who can inspire children to love learning as much as they love cupcakes. You’ve achieved the pinnacle of your profession.

Then, without warning, your boss decides to retire to a cottage by the beach. Your professional success is rewarded with a promotion to take her place. Now the other real estate agents, research scientists, or elementary school teachers report to you. They look to you for guidance. They bring you their problems. You find yourself spending so much time working on their challenges that you don’t get to spend as much time doing the work you found so rewarding. The people who used to be your peers now see you as their boss, and they’re subtly withdrawn from their relationships with you. It’s an entirely new workplace experience for you and it’s scary.

Congratulations. You’re a first-time supervisor!

Leading others is a whole new world. Welcome aboard.

Taking responsibility for other people for the first time can be a disorienting experience but it should be tremendously rewarding. Leadership is a developed ability, not an innate trait, so there’s no need to panic if it seems daunting at first. The process of developing as a leader never ends, but there are a few fundamentals that can get a new supervisor going in the right direction.

The first and most important thing to understand is your measure of workplace success has changed. No longer is your individual performance as a real estate agent, research scientist or elementary school teacher the primary goal. Instead you should be focused on the performance of the people you’re responsible for. You need to maintain your professional skill to have credibility as a leader of others in that field, but your individual ability is important only as far as it sets an example for your people. As the leader, if your people fail, you have failed but similarly if they succeed you have succeeded.

Leaders that understand this truth orient themselves to serve the people they lead instead of positioning themselves as the beneficiary of their subordinates’ work. This concept is known as servant leadership. There is a great deal of writing available on it. Read as much as you need to convince yourself that it is a good idea.

Accepting that your job as a leader is to serve your followers in order to better their lives and help them find new levels of work performance is the easy part. Figuring out how to do that is a leader’s work.

Leading others is a never-ending quest to learn more about people

Leadership is the study of people and how they perceive you and the world around them. Human beings are amazingly complex creatures. Every person is a point on a limitless plane of personality, experiences, beliefs and ideas that influence how they interact with others, go about their day in the workplace, and respond to leadership. A leader must work to learn more about each of their followers to understand how to be the best leader for each of them.

As a leader tries to learn about their followers, the followers are similarly curious about their new leader. As a new supervisor, you need to understand that the followers will probably start from a place of concern or apprehension about you. There is uncertainty in any new boss. Followers want to know who you are and how you are going to change their lives at work. You should be deliberate about answering those questions for them. Everything you say and do contributes to your subordinates’ impression of you. Start by sharing your vision for your work together, but over time they will want to get to know you as a person. You may not want to tell everyone about your rare butterfly collection on your first day, but you should slowly but surely share more about your life away from work so your followers feel like they know the real you.

So what should you actually do?

The ideas of focusing on follower success and continuously learning about people sound great, but those ideas are also a bit nebulous. What should a new supervisor do today to help other people succeed?

My short answer is to go read a book. There are a million leadership books out there, but the first one you should read is The Leadership Challenge by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner. I was first exposed to this book as a student in 2012 and then spent several years teaching it to others as an instructor and facilitator. Like any single book, it is not the complete answer to the leadership question, but if you make a habit of the leadership practices it suggests you’ll do well. I’ll briefly summarize the Leadership Challenge here, but you really should find the book, or even better, sign up for a workshop.

Kouzes and Posner studied successful leaders, but instead of merely asking the leaders to describe what they did to succeed, they asked their followers to describe what the leaders did that worked so well. They built their research on the first assumption I shared – great leadership is about the followers’ success. Their research identified a set of leadership behaviors they distilled into five “practices”. According to their model, great leaders model the way, inspire a shared vision, challenge the process, enable others to act, and encourage the heart. Do those five things every day and you’ll be a more effective leader than most.

There is one other author I recommend to everyone: Simon Sinek. I love all his writing, but your first read should be Start With Why, or you can watch his TED Talk to get an overview. Simon talks about knowing the reason why you’re a real estate agent, research scientist, or elementary school teacher, and the reason you share with others why they should excel at those things as well. If you don’t know your own answer to the question of why, you’ll have a difficult time convincing anyone else to follow you anywhere. But if you’re clear on your why, and you can inspire others to believe in it, you’ll be well on your way to inspiring them to great accomplishments.

You live to help others achieve more, but to do so you must look inward

Thinking about why you do what you do is only one reflective exercise you’ll need to embark on. Leadership is a journey in self-reflection. You’ll need to think hard about everything you do, say or think in terms of how others perceive you. As a new supervisor, don’t be afraid to look yourself in the mirror. The best leaders are the people who have learned the most about themselves, made peace with what they like, and worked to improve what they don’t like. An important part of this process is to find someone to help you through the process. A work mentor, a friend, or a loved one can be the person to provide the feedback that might be difficult to hear, or to help you through the moments when other people give you feedback that is difficult to hear. The combination of honest feedback and someone to help you make sense of i, is a catalyst for growth as a leader.

If you’re having fun, your people probably will too

I’ll leave you with one final piece of advice: try to have fun. I think it’s very easy to get bogged down worrying about your responsibilities as a leader. Try not to lose sight of what you and your team are out to do in the first place. Find the joy in whatever mission you all have. Sell a house, make a new discovery, teach a child. And inspire other people to sell houses, make new discoveries, and teach children. Leading other people is a unique and beautiful opportunity to help others do what they find rewarding. Share your enthusiasm with them. It’ll make them feel better and help them succeed. Their success with be your success, and their good feelings will be your good feeling.

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