David Sobotta on Leadership
David Sobotta has a lifetime of leadership in the community and business, starting with the Boy Scouts and even including advocacy for equal educational opportunities in rural Canada. He is currently the Vice President of Market Development for Webmail.us, a leading provider of email services for small business. He and his wife live in Roanoke on the side of a mountain where he publishes the View from the Mountain blog.
Sometimes the need to be a leader sneaks up on you. Most often it finds you unprepared. Actually most of the time you aren’t even being asked to be a leader. You have likely been offered a position as a manager.
On the surface that sounds like a great deal. You get to tell other people what to do. Some managers actually end up being addicted to the power trip of bossing people. They have likely reached their level of incompetence.
As a new manager, if you can get your head above water long enough to survey the scene, it doesn’t take a lot to figure out that being a leader is lot more effective than being a manager.
Being a manger involves telling people what to do and hoping that it gets done. Being a leader is helping people understand what they need to do and why, then getting out of their way so they can do it.
Being a manager is a lot harder. You have figure out what needs to be done, and then try to make people do it. The people following leaders have this uncanny way of figuring out what needs to be done and doing it before anyone tells them that it needs to be done.
Getting from being a manager to a leader involves lot of hurdles, but it is worth the effort.
The first challenge of leadership is understanding that the urge to have everything done perfectly in your particular way can destroy the very people you are supposed to help.
As a new manager, it is not unusual for your first worry to be that your team might make a mistake and end up making you look like a poor manager. It quickly follows that the next impulse is to jump in with both feet and make sure the work is done the way you would do it yourself. Naturally since the best way to get work done your way is to do it yourself, you likely will end up doing at least some of the work which should be done by others.
If you end doing your job and that of the people working for you, you are going to be one exhausted manager. If this is your pattern as a manager, you will likely never become a real leader.
To get beyond this, the single most important trait of a real leader is the ability to accept misjudgments in the people they’re trying to lead.
I have often told people that a mistake is not a mistake the first time around. In my book the first time around, it’s a learning experience. If you don’t allow people to stumble, they will never reach their full potential.
Very few of us are wired the same way so we have to learn in our own way how to handle challenges. If someone understands that you are behind them even when they blunder while they are trying their best to accomplish their job or mission, you can be assured that you’re well on your way to having your first team member. A leader has a team not staff.
There may be some magic to being a leader, but a lot of it is just hard work and believing in the people who work with you. You believe in them, and they’ll end up believing in you. It is hard sometimes watching them solve a problem the hard way, but often your advice means a whole lot more with that experience under their belt.
