Is Leadership A Skill?

by Elyse | Sep 25 | Leadership

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born-that there is a genetic factor to leadership. That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.

 

Warren Bennis, Founding chairman of The Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California

Is leadership a skill? It is a question that is worth asking as well as worth answering.

Let’s start by defining what a leader is.

According to Merriam-Webster, leadership is defined as

1: the office or position of leader

2: capacity to lead

3: the act or an instance of leading

4: leaders.

This definition is great because it hits on many key things that you need to be a leader.

First of all, to be a leader, you must have followers or people to lead.

Second of all, it hits on the question of can a person who is in a leadership position lead.

Thirdly, it highlights that there may be certain moments or instances which call on a person to be a leader.

If a leader is someone who is in a position of leadership relative to followers then do they need any skills? No, of course not. This is what many people would call bad leadership and someone that is only a leader because of their position. But someone still needs the opportunity to lead others to be considered a leader.

The capacity to lead and the act or instance of leading are the parts of the definition that are much more based on whether on not leadership is a skill.

Leadership is a skill. And like all skills, leadership can be learned.

Like all other skills, to learn a skill you must be teachable. I think that is what the definition means when it talks about capacity.

Are you overwhelmed?

Can you handle your own emotions?

Are you self-aware?

Are you prepared to handle other’s emotions?

Are you willing to do anything you ask of those who follow you?

Are you teachable?

Are you willing to admit when you’re wrong?

Do you have the time to learn a new skill?

In The Success Principles by Jack Canfield, a book I recommended in this blog post, there is a chapter titled ‘Become a Leader Worth Following,’ and he describes leaders as people who develop the skills and attitude to become a leader. He also mentions that the skills to become a leader are teachable and learnable.

Jack Canfield then lists the behaviors people need to develop to become leaders.

The behaviors he lists are:

• Self-awareness
• Holding yourself and others accountable
• Inspiring others with a clear vision
• Listening
• Creating new leaders
• Practicing gratitude

You are probably already doing more than one of these behaviors in your daily life, and you can start one of these new behaviors today.

These are also probably the behaviors prevalent in leaders you like to follow.

You can learn to become more self-aware. You can learn how to hold yourself accountable. You can learn how to hold other people accountable.

You can create a vision for the future that you believe in. You can learn how to articulate your vision. You can communicate your vision with others so that they believe in it just as much as you do.

You can become a better listener. You can listen to everybody. You can learn to ask more questions. You can learn how to empower the people around you.

You can feel grateful and you can practice gratitude daily. You can also express gratitude.

Download the free guide: 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work.

You are already capable of all these behaviors, and if you are not capable yet, you can learn and develop these skills.

Some of these skills might be a case of implementing these behaviors daily and continually improving each day as you develop your capacity for them.

Is leadership a skill, or are people just born leaders?

Leadership is a skill. More specifically, leadership is a collection of both learnable and teachable skills, and you are capable of learning all the skills of leadership and becoming a leader yourself.

25 Unique Tips for New Managers

by Elyse | Sep 22 | Leadership

Here are 25 tips for new managers:

1. Ask yourself better questions. Your brain is like a computer or Google and will find answers to whatever questions you ask. So, make sure you ask powerful and helpful questions instead of unhelpful ones and find answers you are not looking for.
2. Get a mentor. Learn from the people that have gone before you and if you can’t afford it yet, start by reading books and using the authors as mentors. Here is a list of the top 3 books everyone should lead before they become a manager.
3. Develop your emotional intelligence. This is one of the most important skills for a manager and is not often discussed. It is important for a manager to be aware of their own emotions but also for them to be aware of the emotions of those around them. A good way to develop your emotional intelligence is to start developing your emotional vocabulary by naming the emotions you regularly feel.
4. Remember that you still have to output your own work while also juggling your manager duties as well. This calls for using your time wisely and making sure you take time to plan and organize.
5. Use your calendar for meetings. This is important so people who need to interact with you can tell when you are in a meeting and when you are available.
6. Use results planning. Results planning is planning for the result you will have accomplished by your deadline instead of doing the thing.
7. Learn how to process your negative emotions. Many negative emotions will come up during your time as a new manager. It is important to know that nothing has gone wrong, it is normal to experience negative emotions, and those that went before you also had negative emotions and how to process them so that they don’t interfere with your productivity or your ability to lead. This blog post can teach you how to process negative emotions.
8. Learn the difference between accountability and responsibility. The difference differentiates between what you are responsible for and what the people you manage are responsible for. You have to take responsibility for your results and what you produce. Other people are responsible for their own results and outputs, but as a manager, you will need to hold people accountable.
9. Know that other people have agency. Like you have the agency to think, feel and do whatever you want, so do other people. By reminding yourself of this, you can avoid micromanaging and trying to control other people and focus more on how you want to show up.
10. Take time to learn and integrate into the company’s culture. This is something that you will want to make sure that the other people around you do as well. Culture plays a large part in how decisions are made and is hard to change. A lack of conformity with a workplace culture is often one of the transition traps of new leaders, so make sure you observe, learn and take your time before making any dramatic changes.
11. Learn the purpose of a one-on-one. Many people use one-on-one meetings just as status updates and don’t take the opportunity to talk about skills and career development. Learning how to run a one-on-one effectively is one of the most valuable skills a new manager can have.
12. Think about the vision for your team. Since you are now the manager, you need to spend more time focusing on the long-term vision of what your team produces and defining what is and isn’t important.
13. Become comfortable with measuring your progress by measuring other people’s output and less so your own. As a manager, you will have less individual output. So you will have to get comfortable with delaying the instant gratification that comes from getting something done. If you want more help with this, check out my free guide, 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work.
14. Find a way to capture new information that comes your way. As a manager, you will essentially act as an inbox for all directives and requests for your team; you need to find a way to manage this so that things don’t get lost and so you have a way of organizing all the information your way.
15. Build supportive alliances in your company. The higher you rise in a company, the more you will need to rely on influence to push your agenda forward. It is important to start building alliances now. It is also important to build alliances as a new manager because, at some point, you may need to call on your peers-don’t make the mistake of only focusing on those directly above and below you.
16. Learn how to be decisive but judicious. As a manager, you will make many more decisions than when you were an individual contributor. You need to be able to make effective decisions for the company. Learn when to make a decision yourself, when to escalate the decision to your boss and what decisions you can give to your direct reports.
17. Learn how to become an active listener. As a manager, you are dealing with people. This may be a stark contrast to the role you had as an individual contributor. Make sure you listen to what people are telling you and understand what they are trying to convey. This helps build trust with others, helps you get accurate information, and can be the start of solving problems.
18. Take time to learn before making big changes, especially structural changes. Don’t make the mistake of changing everything all at once. Take your time to learn why things operate the way they do before trying to make big, sweeping changes.
19. Use your authority judiciously. You do not want to use your authority position unless you have to. Remember, the goal of a manager is to help a team accomplish its goals, and a large part of that is developing a working relationship.
20. Be a proactive communicator. Communicate often and frequently instead of just when asked. This skill can be improved if it is something that you don’t feel confident in yet.
21. Give feedback consistently and early, good and bad. You want your direct reports to succeed and do a good job. To that end, you must tell them what you want, what you expect, what is going well, and what needs to be improved upon.
22. You must be forward-thinking. Managers are forward-thinking. They think more in long-term units such as year to year or month to month. This is a transition you must make when you go from an individual contributor to a manager.
23. People want to be led. Show up as a leader that you would be proud to follow.
24. Be curious instead of judgmental. Whenever you notice yourself becoming judgmental of someone or their behavior, turn your judgment into curiosity instead. Ask, ‘I wonder why she would make that choice?’ from a real place rather than judge.
25. Be on time for your meetings. This one should be obvious, but I think it is still important to mention. Also, show up to your meetings.

How to Be More Confident at Work

by Elyse | Sep 8 | Leadership

Everyone wants to feel confident at work: like they are doing a good job and be acknowledged and recognized for doing good work. But, sometimes you don’t always feel so confident-no matter how good your skills are, and not everyone knows how to feel more confident at work.

Now, it is true that competence breeds confidence. So, if you feel unconfident because you are new or want to hone your skills, you should find a way to practice to get to competence.

If you’re reading this, my guess is that you are very competent at your job and need some help to appreciate your competence and feel confident in situations where self-doubt, fear, and insecurity creep in.

How to Feel More Confident at Work

Google defines confidence as:

• the feeling or belief that one can rely on someone or something; firm trust.
• the state of feeling certain about the truth of something.
• a feeling of self-assurance arising from one’s appreciation of one’s own abilities or qualities.

Learning how to cultivate confidence in yourself will help you learn skills quicker, become a better decision maker and increase your self-esteem by having your own back.

Confidence is a feeling you can learn to feel on purpose, so you can call on it whenever you need it.

In this article, we will go over an 8-step process on how to be more confident at work.

1. Identify the unhelpful emotion you are feeling instead of confidence
2. Process the unhelpful emotion
3. Find the thought-producing unconfidence
4. Question the thought
5. Find a new, more supportive thought
6. Write a list of accomplishments
7. Start a victory log
8. Talk back to your inner critic

Identify the unhelpful emotion you are feeling instead of confidence

The first step will be to gain awareness of your feelings. What is the emotion you feel when you are not confident? Is it doubt, insecurity, fear, frustration, envy, resentment, self-pity, confusion, or indecision?

What you are feeling does not have to be limited to these listed emotions; they are just a suggestion of emotions that could be possible.

Learning to name and identify your feelings is one of the first steps to self-awareness and creating change.

Process the unhelpful emotion

The next step is to process the unhelpful emotion you have just identified.

Processing an emotion means welcoming the emotion to your body with an understanding that emotion does not have the power to harm you and that you can feel any emotion.

An emotion is just a vibration in your body, and an emotion only lasts for 90 seconds. Try not to resist or avoid or not have the feeling you are having–that will only make the emotion stronger and come back.

Instead, invite the emotion into your body and start to describe it.

Identify where you feel the vibration in your body. Ask yourself if it is moving, has a color, or has anything you can think of.

If you do this process correctly, the intensity of the emotion should be significantly reduced, and it should feel like the emotion has dissipated.

Find the thought-producing unconfidence.

Thoughts always precede feelings. In other words, a thought is what creates a feeling. Therefore, you want to find the idea that makes unconfidence in you.

Narrow it down to just one sentence.

Question the thought

Question the thought that is producing unconfidence in you.

Is it true? Is it helpful? Could something else be equally as true? Is this the only option? Is there another way to look at this? Are you making any assumptions or judgments?

Let’s try an example. If the unsupportive thought you have identified leads you to feel unconfident is something like, “Jean didn’t like my presentation, and I could tell by the look on her face.” We can now question this thought to loosen it up in our minds.

Is it true? 

Or does Jean make faces during presentations, which could be for several reasons?

Is it helpful? Not really. There is not much upside to trying to guess other people’s thoughts or making assumptions that they have a negative opinion about something when they haven’t voiced an opinion one way or the other.

Could something else be equally as true?

Could something in your presentation have reminded Jean about her cruel ex-boyfriend, and she was making a face about that memory instead of your presentation? We are not in Jean’s head, and we can’t know what she thinks, so it is equally valid that there could be any reason she would make a face.

Is there another way to look at this? This question will bridge you into the next step of the process.

Find a new, more supportive thought.

Once you have questioned your thought, examined your thought, and sought to understand your thought, the next step is to find a new, more supportive idea.

If previously, your unhelpful thought was, “Jean didn’t like my presentation. I could tell by the look on her face.”

You could think of a new, more supportive thought: “Sometimes Jean makes weird faces during my presentations, and that is okay. I don’t have to make it mean anything, and I could be fascinated or curious about this instead of making assumptions.”

This new, more supportive thought is the one you need to keep directing your brain back to thinking every time it thinks the unhelpful thought.

Talk back to your inner critic

The inner critic is the voice in your head that is critical of you, talks down to you, and always thinks about what could go wrong, or that other people don’t like you.

Your job is to manage your mind and to talk back to your inner critic. That is why you want to find new, more supportive thoughts so that you can tell your brain the supportive thoughts when it offers up unhelpful thoughts.

Write a list of accomplishments

In the book, The Success Principles by Jack Canfield, he talks about ways to build up your self-esteem, and one of those ways is to write a list of 100 accomplishments you have in your life.

Most people have some significant accomplishments they can put on the list, but to come up with 100 achievements, you have to start recognizing all the small wins you have had in your life. Some examples he suggests in the book include moving from second to third grade, learning how to ride a bike, finishing your first novel, etc.

This exercise is effective at getting your brain to look for all the accomplishments you do have in your life.

Start a Work Progress Log

This is something that is also mentioned in The Success Principles. A work progress log is a log you keep daily where you write down everything you have accomplished for the day.

It will help you build self-esteem and confidence and make your brain more efficient at looking for all the ways you are succeeding in your life. Keeping this log will also help you develop an appreciation for your skills and abilities.

Summary

These are ways how to feel more confident at work. If you are interested in going more in-depth on this topic, check out my free guide, 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work.

3 Must-Read Books for Newly Hired Managers

by Elyse | Sep 1 | Leadership

Want to know the 3 must-read books for newly hired managers? Well then, keep on reading.

One of the hardest things a newly hired manager has to grapple with is learning a whole bunch of new skills in a short amount of time. One of the fastest and cheapest ways to learn new skills is by reading applicable books on the topic.

There is no shortage of books on management, leadership, and work. But, it can be daunting to know which ones will be the most helpful or the most applicable.

While there are many books written for people who have been leaders at their company for a long time, this post will specifically focus on the must-read books for newly hired managers.

Must-Read Books for Newly Hired Managers #1: The Success Principles by Jack Canfield

The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Jack Canfield is an all-purpose, all-encompassing personal development book.

This book is a great place to start if you have never read self-help or personal development book.

It covers almost every topic of personal development. 

It covers so many topics that the book is incredibly in-depth. There are six main sections of the book and each section has small, bite-sized chapters that go into specific topics.

The Success Principles covers topics such as:

• deciding what you want
• persistence
• exceeding expectations
• transforming yourself
• developing habits
• staying motivated
• redefining time
• having difficult conversations
• develop a positive money consciousness

The Success Principles is the most comprehensive personal development book I have ever read and is a great choice if you don’t want to buy a ton of generic personal development books.

Must-Read Books for Newly Hired Managers #2: The First Time Manager by Jim McCormick

The First Time Manager is like having an on-hand guidebook to becoming a manager. The book has short chapters on almost every situation a newly hired manager will face in the role.

The book is broken down into different sections with each section having short chapters that go in-depth into specific topics, much like the way The Success Principles is organized.

The First Time Manager is written in a very logical format for someone who is preparing for being a manager for the first time.

The book is easy to navigate and will come in handy for the beginning phases of being a new manager.

It is a great book to have on hand to reference how to handle different, tricky situations when they come up.

The First Time Manager covers topics such as:

• hiring
• firing
• creating a team dynamic
• communication
• active listening
• class and style

The First Time Manager is a great book for any newly hired manager in any industry and is widely applicable and helpful.

Must-Read Books for Newly Hired Managers #3: The First 90 Days by Michael D. Watkins

The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter by Michael D. Watkins is a book about leadership transitions. The book is backed up by a lot of research and is more specific than the other two books in this post.

Since you are a newly hired manager, you are in a period of career transition. And as Watkins talks about in the book, you are probably simultaneously going through multiple transitions just by taking your new role.

A new role is a transition.

A new company is a transition.

A new industry.

A new city.

And with each transition, there is a higher likelihood of falling into what Watkins calls one of the “transition traps. This book is much more focused on new leaders or just leaders who are in a new role of some sort and less about brand new managers.

The First 90 Days also has much more managerial and corporate jargon than The Success Principles or The First Time Manager.

Resources:

• 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work (free download)

It presents a research-backed way of thinking about your new position and offers case studies to help you either emulate successful leaders or avoid the pitfalls of some failed leaders.

The book is based on the idea that first impressions matter. And that the impression you make at the beginning of your role sets the tone for the rest of your career trajectory in that role.

The book is filled with questions to ask yourself, charts, and worksheets to fill out for you to evaluate yourself and make adjustments if needed.

The First 90 Days covers topics such as:

• creating a learning plan
• negotiating your success
• securing early wins
• matching strategy to the situation
• creating alliances
• building a team
• balance at work and home

The First 90 Days is denser than the other books and each concept builds on itself since the book is meant to be read and implemented chronologically. It is a great read if you are a newly hired manager in a leadership position.

While there are a lot of books for managers and leaders, these are the 3 must-read books for newly hired managers.

If you want something shorter to read but just as impactful, make sure you get my free guide to overcoming impostor syndrome.