Ready to learn the language of leadership?

Received wisdom states that the older you are, the more you suck at learning a new language. My take is that as long as you have the will and a sense of purpose, learning anything new is absolutely doable. But you must know that the route to learning is not a straight, well-paved road. Awareness for the bends and bumps ahead will help you stay on track and keep you going forward.

Here are the six phases every learner should prepare for.

1) The easy part

You have been promoted to a leadership position and it feels great! You have a bigger budget, a larger team, greater responsibilities and you are raring to go. How long have been preparing for this moment? Isn't it wonderful to see how all your hard work is finally paying off? What could possibly go wrong?

• Don’t waste the positive momentum of this precious time. Let your confidence shine through and use it to build your network and cultivate the relationships with your team members, your management and your peers. Those efforts will pay off abundantly when the going gets tough.

2) The first bumps

You realise that everything you have read about being a leader is not that easy in practice. Your workload is exploding and then there are all these people in your team who are looking to you for guidance. But you don’t have time to baby-sit them. Shouldn’t they be grown up enough to just get on with things?

• Understand that the humps are there to show you where your gaps are. Maybe you need to get better at prioritising and managing your time. Maybe you need some extra training on a particular technology or skill. Maybe you need to trust your team and delegate more. Or maybe you need a mentor or coach to speak truth to your power. It may feel lonely at the top, but it doesn’t have to be.

3) The uphill struggle

Your new role has increased people’s expectations of you and the pressure is building up from all sides. What seemed like a golden path is actually rougher and steeper than you imagined. And with all these other people trying to push you into the ditch, you find yourself responding with fear, defensiveness or aggression, never finding the right tone. This is the moment when you wonder if you are really cut out for this job. Inside, you feel stupid and insecure, and try to mask this with even more bravado. You can’t show your weakness, right?

• This is one of the toughest sections of your leadership journey, but it is also the one that enables you to build your endurance, resilience, patience and dependability. The biggest lesson from this time is that you can’t make it on your own.

This struggle calls on you to galvanise the strengths of your people, collaborate with other teams and leverage the power of the organisation. Only than can you achieve truly great things.

4) The doldrums

This is the moment when you take on more and bigger responsibilities and yet the feeling of success seems to keep moving further and further away. Although you are still achieving a lot, you don’t feel like you are making any significant progress. Instead, boredom and fatigue are starting to creep in. Little negative thoughts start coming to mind: This is not what I signed up for. I'm not enjoying it any more. What is the point of it all?

• Even this phase can teach you a thing or two about leadership. That creeping boredom is perhaps a signal that you have drifted away from the values that make work meaningful for you. Perhaps you have been so busy delivering, responding and reacting that you have neglected the creative strategic work that you are so passionate about. Take time to pause and re-evaluate what is important to you and then reconnect to that.

5) The breakthrough

So now things are beginning to make sense and you can see the bigger picture more clearly. You are focusing less on the details and are now looking further ahead, scanning the horizon, finding ways to push through the next boundaries. Not only do you feel like a leader, you are also seen as a leader. You feel like you are finally fluent in the language of leadership and maybe you don’t need to study any further.

• This is a fantastic time to enjoy the fruits of your efforts, but you can’t take your eye off the ball. All the invitations to speak at events, join company Boards or write a book may be good for your ego, but are they helping you stay connected with your purpose and your values? Are they benefiting your team or your organisation? Or do you think that the time has come for something totally new?

6) Rinse and repeat

The final and most important aspect of mastering the language of leadership is recognising that leadership is not just won and done. The next executive shakeup, organisational restructuring, disruptive technology, new team member or personal tragedy is just around the corner. All such things beyond your control will force you to revisit those challenging moments of discomfort and fear you thought you had left behind. 

• Mastering the language of leadership is not a one-off exercise achieved by attending an expensive course or passing an exam. Like any other language, it requires effort to learn, persistence to master and constant practice to sustain. 

And while you are doing that, know that you are not alone. In fact, you are in very good company.