Three Critical Skills for First Time Leaders

Congratulations! You were just promoted to your first management position. Mastering the skills of casting vision, gaining influence, and serving people will position you as the leader your team will respect and most importantly follow.

Vision – Your people will have power in the present when they have faith in the future. Leaders take their people on a journey. Leaders can see things as they are, not worse (like a drama king), but they can also see how things can be better. This future state is called vision.

What is your vision? Your vision may be the aspiration to be the best, it may be a quantitative goal, or it might be something else. It must inspire you and it must inspire your team. Your vision must be so clear that you can explain it to others and they will catch your energy, emotion, and enthusiasm.

Influencing – The true measurement of leadership is influence. When you have influence, people willingly follow you and are willing to give you their discretionary effort – the gap between what it takes to meet the performance objectives of the job and their true potential.

Challenge yourself to build your influence and gain the discretionary efforts of those on your team by making sure your team members can positively answer the following questions.

• Does the leader care about me? Check your motives. Do your actions serve you by making you the hero or the team by making the team the hero?
• Can I trust the leader? Trust builds when experiences match expectations. If your people don’t know what to expect from you as a leader, at some point, they won’t look to you for leadership.
• Can the leader help me? A leader sees more in the person than the person sees in themselves. The leader’s objective is not to get others to think more highly of them. The leader’s objective is to get others to think more highly of themselves.

Service – Serve your team, your peers and your superiors. You serve your team by listening, understanding, believing, valuing their uniqueness, providing resources, and developing them.

You serve your peers by filling in their gaps and picking up the slack when they make a mistake.

You serve those above you by delivering on your commitments, re-casting your leader’s vision and being a positive influence. A new manager becomes a leader by being a good follower, investing in themselves so they have plenty to give and being a good team mate.

There is a dearth of leadership in our society. We need you to rise up to your true potential and make a positive impact on those around you. Success may feel good. But success pales in comparison to the feelings you will experience when you make a positive difference in the life of someone else. Leaders make a positive difference in others.