Success and your new management job

OK, so you want to be a part of the executing team, but not just as a manager. How will you know if you’re doing it right? Or wrong?

You will know that you have been successful in your drive to lead rather than manage when you become the least important person in your organization.

Decisions—the right decisions—will be made and actions taken even before you are aware of what’s happened. Initiatives will grow around the themes that you set. Problems will be identified and solutions crafted by the people most affected. All of this will happen without your direct involvement and sometimes without your direct knowledge. The daily stuff will just get done, and you’ll find yourself with time to think. Time to lead.

The least important person?

So it’s a bit of hyperbole to say that you will be the least important person in your organization. There are decisions and responsibilities that you must take on your own. They are the job of the person in charge.

But at some point, when your team is large enough, your job won’t be to do any of the work that your organization does. Your job will be to enable other people to succeed.

This was a big adjustment for me. I was used to doing, and my transition to management involved a rather unusual jump from a two-person team to a hundred-person organization and a big mission (if you are tempted to think that all this leadership stuff and career planning doesn’t matter until later in your career, remember that you don’t always get a lot of notice before the jump up).

At first I tried to stay very hands on, actually doing some of the same work I had been doing before I took over as director of my organization. It was a hard lesson for me that this was not going to work. I was unavailable when things needed to be done or when people needed to see me. There were decisions that were legitimately mine to make that I didn’t take time to handle because I was still doing the job that I used to do; the job that someone else now had. My job was now to set the stage for the team’s success, to define the tone of the workplace for the team, to identify and nurture each team member’s special talents, and to form a vision for where we would go from here.

As Joseph Jaworski, author of Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership (1996), points out, before you can lead others you have to know who you are. Rather than imposing your will upon your organization, you have to make yourself available to others to shape and mold them into the people who will execute your mission as if it were their own. This kind of leader is self-aware. Self-aware people know what motivates them, and can recognize these factors in others even if the others do not see these traits in themselves. A self-aware person with a vision rightly comes across as credible, honest, and nurturing. People sense the genuine desire to help rather than push, and they respond to that. At the same time, the leader is prepared to make, and capable of making, the final decision.