How to be a better leader: Four essential tips

For years it was taught that management has to do with forecasting, budgeting, planning and controlling. Managers were taught to manage, not to lead.

New supervisors and grizzled management veterans were taught how to assign work to subordinates, how to evaluate their teammates’ work, how to counsel people on performance problems and how to hire and fire staff members. Everything that was taught about management assumed that the manager would know what to do and was calling the shots.  These days we understand that the old-fashioned view of a manager’s duties is wholly insufficient for the new-millennium workplace.

Responsibility for a team of people and its success – not to mention each team members’ well-being and professional development – is a big assignment to take on. Leadership has very little to do with controlling, budgeting and so on. It has little overlap with assigning work and evaluating it.

The traditional view of management is task-based and mechanical. In that worldview, we don’t think about topics like “How are my teammates holding up? Are they stressed out? Are they feeling good about the future and about the energy on the team?” For years it was pretended that human energy isn’t a factor in a team’s success, even though anybody who has ever been on any kind of team knows that the team energy, also known as trust level, is the whole ballgame!

Management uses the carrot and the stick to get people to perform for a while but eventually, if they don’t care about the mission, about their leader and/or about one another, the team will fracture and lose steam. It’s inevitable! Today we know that empathetic, trust-based human leadership is not only the most effective way to lead a team but also the most profitable way to run a company.

Here are five enormous differences between managers and leaders. If you hold a leadership role now or aspire to do so in the future, think about steps you can take in each of these areas.

Mission

The traditional view of management assumes that a manager’s job is to run an apparatus — perhaps a corporate Credit Department or a team of programmers. There are clear inputs and outputs and expected results from the engine each manager is responsible for. The manager’s job is to keep the machine running smoothly.

In that worldview, the people on the manager’s team are essentially machine parts. They are interchangeable. Once they are hired into a role, their job is to perform that role (to run their piece of the machine) according to goals and standards that preceded them and that will outlast their tenure in the job. The presumption is that the machine is more important and more powerful than anyone who helps to run it.

Leadership takes just the opposite view! The energy on your team powers everything you will accomplish.

The machine can change whenever it makes sense to change it, even many times a day. Maybe your machine should change, or maybe it’s time to junk the machine and invent something totally new. People are creative. Machines in general are not.

Leaders allow people to design their own jobs as much as possible and to put their own stamp on their jobs.

A leader is not working to achieve machine-like process perfection to be repeated over and over until the end of time.

A leader and his or her team have a mission. They all know what the mission is and they know their piece in it. Maybe at one point your mission is to replace your outdated Credit Department procedures with new procedures that are faster and simpler. Apart from the fact that they have a job and need the pay check, your teammates know what the Credit Department modernisation means for customers, for themselves and for the company. A mission has a beginning, a middle and an end, no matter what the mission is. When you complete the mission, you’ll start a new one.

Maybe your mission is to produce an off-Broadway play or to invent a better mousetrap. Leadership is inextricable from a specific mission that people are excited about. Without a mission, there is no place to lead your team toward! Without a mission, where are you headed?

Who can get excited about doing the same things day after day, year after year, to no visible end except to make a few executives rich? There has to be more to the mission than that, and part of a leader’s job is to explore and exalt the connections between his or her team’s mission and each team member’s personal mission.

This is why I write about plugging into your power source at work, whether that means using a different part of your brain or getting to teach what you know or another element that important to you. We all need that power jolt at work. We all deserve it, too!

Self-Awareness

The old-fashioned, command-and-control view of management did not require that a manager look in the mirror, but leadership requires that activity of a leader every day.

A leader is someone who gets outside his or her busy brain to see him- or herself rather than being controlled by his or her emotions, especially fear.

Fear is the emotion that makes managers freak out and bring the hammer down. It makes some of them yell at subordinates or put the fear of termination into them so that people skulk around in terror that they’ll make a mistake.