What No One Tells You About Being a First-Time Leader

10 lessons from being thrown into cold water myself

The first time I was a leader, I had no idea. Walking into the office and having everyone be nice to you because you’re the leader feels strange.

What you’re not told is that that feeling can disappear in a jumping jack flash if you don’t quickly figure out the rules of the game.

Your team will stop following you if they quickly figure out that you don’t know what you’re doing. They are secretly hoping in their hearts that you are there to help them and see them succeed.

Simple stuff like logging annual leave, running a meeting, having one-on-one’s, and giving feedback are fairly easy to pick up and those templates will probably be given to you by the company or your team who have the format stored in their head from previous leaders.

There are many things you’re not told as a first-time leader that can secretly screw everything up. Some of you who are already leaders still may not have been told these things. So, here you go.

1. You Work for Them, They Don’t Work for You

You are completely delusional if you think that being a leader means you are in charge. You’re not in charge at all because your team is in charge of you. The moment you don’t serve them, they vote you out and you are moved on.

Being a leader means that you have just become the chief satisfaction officer of your team who is now in charge of checking in and ensuring your team’s experience is beneficial to their career, giving them meaning, and in-line with what they hope to achieve.

You will be graded on your ability through engagement surveys that will form votes that are either for you or against you.

2. Gain Their Respect First

The first thing you need to do as a leader is to get your team’s respect.

This is not easy because people will not look up to you in the beginning. The quickest way to earn your team’s respect is to spend time with them — counter-intuitive, I know.

You have one-on-one’s with them, take them out for coffee, play ping pong with them, get in the trenches, and attend their meetings.

The biggest hack

You spend time doing what they do. If they ring customers, then you ring customers. If they order supplies, you order supplies.

In other words, you show them that you’re just like them and you understand their typical workday.

In my first few weeks as a leader, I got my head ripped off by some angry customers in the middle of the office where everyone could see. I sat there, took it, didn’t complain, and saw what the team had to deal with on a daily basis.

Surprisingly, I succeeded in turning a few of these angry customers into advocates by listening to them. This earned respect with my team.

3. Link Their Work to What Matters to Them

Each person you lead has different priorities. Here are a few:

• To start a family.
• To be a leader.
• To be the founder of a startup.
• To start a side-hustle.
• To travel.

There are lots of reasons people come to work and your job as the leader is to find out what matters to each member of your team and tie their daily work back to it.

Then, in your one-on-one’s, you tie back the meeting to what matters to them and measure the effectiveness.

“You said you wanted to shadow the product team to change your career path away from sales. Last week you spent two days with the product team. Has that helped you achieve your goal? What can we do to give you even more exposure to the product team to work out if this is what you want to do?”

4. Tell Your Team When You Don’t Know

Show me a leader who says they know it all and I’ll show you a leader that is going to fall flat on their ass and have a severe meltdown one day soon.

It’s OK if you don’t know the answer and you have people in your team who can help with that. You can’t know the answer to every product or customer question because that is not your job. Your primary job is to lead people.

Information is a commodity thanks to the internet, whereas the skill of dealing with people and leading them has become highly sought-after.

5. EQ Over Smartness

EQ stands for emotional intelligence and it’s far more important than your intelligence. The smartest person in the room doesn’t win; the person in the room with the highest EQ wins because they are self-aware and know that the show is not all about them.

The most highly-regarded companies are hiring emotionally intelligent leaders and testing for it during the hiring process because it creates an infectious culture.

An infectious culture is good for business and emotionally intelligent leaders thrive in this environment while bringing others up with them.

6. Listen and Stop Talking So Much

The biggest mistake I made as a first-time leader was not listening enough. It’s easy to fill up the conversations with your team with your own voice. They will often listen because of your status, but that doesn’t mean they will like it.

Experiment with entire meetings where your team does the talking or you conduct a one-on-one with a member of your team doing all the talking.

Having a member of your team say: “Wow, I’m so glad I got that off my chest and now I feel better!” is how you take a difficult situation, do nothing other than listen, and solve it.

7. Ask for Help From Other Leaders

It’s going to be a fast learning curve and there is no point making all the mistakes yourself.

Chat to the other leaders, have coffee with them, and find out how they are coaching and leading their team. What works and what doesn’t?

Then, copy and paste what works rather than reinvent leadership philosophy for an entire generation from the novice position you are starting from.

8. How You Treat Others Shows Who You Are — Your Team Copies That

If you talk down to a customer or another leader, guess what? Your team mimics your behavior because they think that is okay.

Role model the behavior you want your team to embody and they will mimic some of your actions.

When I was a first-time leader, at five o’clock a man would come around to clean the kitchen. No one would ever speak to him or even say hello.

I started saying hello to him every day and was on a first-name basis with him. Each day I would ask him about his day and family. A few months later, I noticed others in the office started doing the same.

Being kind to people, no matter their title, is taught through your example, not your ideals of how the world should be.

9. Seek Feedback Regularly so You Don’t Live in a Bubble

It’s easy as a first-time leader to think you are shooting the lights out and doing a great job. This creates a bubble if you don’t learn to seek feedback.

Regularly speak with the other leaders. Ask them what they are hearing behind the scenes and things that your team is not happy about. Find out what the unspoken words are and pay attention.

Throughout my career, I have seen many leaders living in a bubble created by their ego, that makes them think everybody loves them, when the truth is that the exact opposite is true.

10. Have One of Your Team Replace You

The ultimate achievement as a first-time leader is to create another first-time leader that replaces you.

Letting someone else have a go and discover the fulfillment that comes from leadership is a must.

Remember that someone gave you that opportunity which is why you are a first-time leader and it’s your obligation to pay that gift forward. One of the people I used to lead ended up filling my old role and nothing makes me happier.

Leaders create more leaders, thus the cycle of life continues.

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