What does it mean to practice leadership? Is it just keeping up with daily habits and patiently instructing others? Or is it something more? You won’t be surprised at all to hear to hear me say, it is something more. When you put leadership into practice you are leading. It can be in any circumstances with any group of people and under the direction of any project, work, or need. Leadership is very simply the act of getting people to want to do something they wouldn’t have otherwise wanted to do. I wish more people would understand that and I’m always shocked when I see someone doesn’t.
How do you practice your leadership skills?
Recently I was sitting in a meeting with a very skilled and ambitious young woman, we’ll call her Misguided Mary. Mary has her whole life and career out in front of her and she has done an excellent job setting herself up for success to this point. She is a top performer on the team and many look to her for answers, recommendations, and to hold critical projects. Mary is valuable beyond measure and her boss knows it. (When you think of The Value Hierarchy, she is all the way up to the peak of influence in her current role.) So, when she said that she aspires to lead people in the near future I wasn’t surprised. However, the conversation that followed did catch me a little off guard.
‘I want to develop leadership skills.’
OK great! I started asking Mary a few questions. What part of leadership do you feel like you need to develop? How do you see yourself developing these skills? How will this fit into your other work? The response I got back was something like a verbal blank stare. Mary said, I need to practice leading people.
In case you haven’t heard me say this in a while, you’re leading people and influencing people and their choices every single day. No one needs to just practice leading people. You already are. There are areas you need to grow in in leadership. I have no doubt of that either, but it isn’t as simple as practicing leading people because you are doing that, you need to define and refine the goal. Now, this was especially true of Mary. She led people all the time. She was the leader of the day-to-day type work giving suggestions on how to be the most efficient. Mary was also the leader for the team in projects, she’d identify gaps, raise them to leadership, and then fill them quickly.
Is there a course for that?
After some back and forth we discovered that what Mary was looking for were opportunities to practice organizing people to get work done. She was thinking of leadership in a very traditional sense of supervising a team and basically wanted to practice being in that role. There is nothing wrong with that goal or plan. I don’t know that it was the exact right fit for this specific instance but an option.
We brainstormed ways Mary could practice leading a group of people both within her current role, and outside the organization as well. All of these options came in the form of tackling new and exciting problems with a group of people in areas that she had some intimate knowledge. After a while she sort of stopped me and said, is there a course you think I should take first? Or maybe there is a book you’d recommend?
I wanted to both hug her and shake her shoulders a little bit at the same time. No Mary. There isn’t a course or a book that will help you to practice leading people. If you wanted to understand how your words impact those you’re leading. Or if you wanted to learn more about what it means to lead with compassion through difficult situations, I have books for those. Want to know your leadership style? There’s a course for that. Need to be better at getting vulnerable with a team? There’s a course for that too. There is a course, book, podcast, blog to learn nearly anything you want to know. At some point though, you’ll need to end the academics and simply act.
I honestly don’t know where Mary will go from here. The jury is still out. I hope that she is able to put all that great potential into practice and build the confidence she needs to own the skills she already has, get clear on her own gaps, and tackle them with the same fervor that she does all of those problems on her team.
Practice how you’ll play
Did you see a little of yourself in Mary? Maybe you don’t recognize the skills you already have. Perhaps you’re still building your confidence in your abilities. Maybe you know the end game but you’re not sure how to get there. Your next step is to practice. And no, practice won’t make perfect but if you practice with intention you’ll continue to evolve, and continuous improvement is so much better than perfection.
What can you do today?
Start a list of your skills and your gaps when it comes to leadership. If you’re finding that the gap side of the page is filling up too fast, ask others who know you well to fill it in with you. Your boss, co-workers, friends, and even spouse can help you identify your skills in listening, decision making, understanding detail and the big picture, compassion, celebration of others, and other important aspects to leadership.
Choose two things to work on. One from each side of the page. It’s best to keep a foot in both camps when it comes to strengths vs weaknesses. Find an item from the gap side to work toward filling and a skill you can double down on. This is leaps and bounds ahead of where Mary sat in asking to practice leading. I think that going this route would have helped support her confidence too. Knowing you’re going to focus on listening more and double down on problem solving for example forces you support others in their problem solving which is exactly what you want.
Then tackle it. Make it your mission to build on these two areas every single day in a variety of situations. This doesn’t need to be a formalized project and it doesn’t require that you have a team, formal or otherwise, reporting to you. You are simply practicing leading in a very natural and organic way. Taking the action will teach you more than simply reading ever would.