I almost titled this blog entry “What was my First Lesson in Leadership?” I decided against that as it wouldn’t give you any clue as to what the lesson might be. This is the story of the very first lesson I learned just before my first role as a people leader. To this day it is one of the most important lessons I have ever learned. Everything I do as a leader is wrapped around the idea of how a leader achieves success.
In the fall of 2009 I interviewed for an opportunity to be a people leader, a role managing 10 Solutions Architects in one of Akamai’s Professional Services teams. I was surprised that I was chosen for the role as I was up against stiff competition and both of the other candidates had prior experience as Managers leading people. When my soon to be manager called to offer me the role I remember being so excited that I pumped my fist and sort of slid across the floor, just like a hockey player does after scoring a goal.
After my initial excitement wore off a bit of panic set in, or maybe it was a mix of excitement and nerves, my wife always reminds my kids and me that excitement and fear physically feel the same way. I was panicking because I realized that I was suddenly responsible for leading 10 people and I had a lot to learn about leading. I was lucky that my current manager approved an introductory training course in IT leadership from Learning Tree.
This training was a good course and it turned out to be a key first step into becoming the leader I am today. I look back at this course as the place where I learned possibly the most important lesson of leadership. The learning is core to everything I do and makes up the foundation of my leadership philosophy. That lesson was that as a people leader I was no longer in direct control of my own success. As a leader your success is defined by your team’s success. Your success is no longer about how hard you work as a leader, rather it is how hard you work to make the people you are leading successful.
This was a big revelation and it meant rethinking what success meant to me. I have always been a self driven person and for as long as I could remember I could study, practice and work hard and that would lead to success. This was true in my early roles as a developer, my days as a project manager, and traces back to both grade school and college. This meant that I had to reframe how to be successful at work with this new understanding. And this is how I discovered my core principle for leadership. If my success was no longer in my own direct control, if it was with my team, the people reporting to me, then my focus had to be on their success. I’ve refined this over time to be a bit more simple, my core leadership principle is to help the people I am leading succeed.
Today, everything I do is connected to this idea and to be sure I am staying true to it, I frequently ask myself, “Will what I am working on help the team members succeed?” If the answer is no or unclear I will rethink what I am doing or even stop and focus on something else that has a better or more direct connection to the team’s success. This philosophy has helped me at every stage of my leadership career and kept me focused on making sure the people I was leading were as successful as they could be.
When I share this philosophy with team members I am very quick to caveat that this doesn’t mean that I will spoon feed them or do their work for them. Rather it means that I will put them into positions to succeed and they must then execute to achieve their own success. I have found this clarity critical so that teams understand that you will knock down blockers, help think through problems, provide them with training, acquire budget, etc. and then they need to do the work themselves and put in the time and effort to be successful.
The answer is that a leader cannot directly control their success, they can influence it by setting their team up for their success. And if the team you are leading is successful, then you as the leader are successful too.
When I share this philosophy with team members I am very quick to caveat that this doesn’t mean that I will spoon feed them or do their work for them. Rather it means that I will put them into positions to succeed and they must then execute to achieve their own success. I have found this clarity critical so that teams understand that you will knock down blockers, help think through problems, provide them with training, acquire budget, etc. and then they need to do the work themselves and put in the time and effort to be successful. – this is everything in leadership that most leaders forget!
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I'd like to echo, when we become manager, that’s when "you don’t count any more" 🙂 People usually say the team works for you, but it's actually the other way around, you work for the team! Lifting people up and enabling their success is our daily job!
I love the way you put it Catherine. As a leader you work for the team. The org chart should be seen upside down with the leader in the bottom, working for the team. I find that visual really helps explain the role of the leader and their responsibility to drive success for the team members.
Very well put together Scott- I do believe in creating a team that's independent and interdependent. As a leader, equip others to lead and not just follow.
I love how you orient and prioritize based on "Will what I am working on help the team members succeed?” . Many people just go through their day haphazardly and do not have a North Star like that to guide them. Thanks for sharing!
It's true that as a leader you have to delegate and equip your team to complete the work efficiently so that your teammates successfully complete the project. Their success is your success.
Thank you for the positive feedback. Exactly, one of our jobs as leaders is to build more leaders!
I wish I knew who said this. Apparently there is a profile bug in blogger, you can fix it by visiting https://www.blogger.com/switch-profile.g
Thanks Matt! I think it is good to find your North Star, whatever that is. For you in Products it might be is what I'm doing making the product better and then everything should connect to that.
Exactly, we are all in this together and together we can all be successful. Peers and teammates should also focus on helping others on the team be successful too.
Great insights, Scott. Really resonates with me. Thank you.
Thanks Darell, glad you found it useful and hopefully insightful too.
Loved it! I have personally learned a lot from you Scott and continue to draw inspiration from you and like,
as i traverse my journey as a people leader. I strongly believe that a leader is a sum total of his/her team(s) and a good leader is one who enables the team. Enabling is the hard part especially for someone new to leadership. You are so used to doing the work yourself and ensuring it's success as individual contributor that you tend to do so even as a manager and tend to spoon feed. It takes practice as a manager to trust your team and get over the fear of failure. Atleast,I had to go through this phase when I first transitioned into a leadership role several years back.
I look forward to what you write next! Keep it up sir!
That is a great outlook on leadership Ravi, a good leader is one who enables the team. It is a lesson that often takes time and as you said requires practice. And I think it is the practicing, learning, and growing that separates the best leaders from the good ones.
Wow, I actually never linked leadership and being in control of our own success this way. Or if I did, it was the other way round: leader = more in control. At this moment it is a little scary and it would not be an easy natural thing for me to just let go of the controlling-my-own-success piece. But realizing this now is super-helpful in planning my career now and also re-thinking how I work with others (even if not formally a manager)
The letting go of full control is a big switch I imagine and I wish more people would understand that and let it impact how they lead their teams. Thank you Scott!
Isn't that funny, people usually think of the leader as having the control. Of course leaders do have control over many aspects and how they use it is important too. The best leaders see their job as responsible for the team, not in charge of the people on the team.
And you are spot on, learning to delegate and release control is often difficult. Especially since many people promoted into leadership positions were top team members themselves. Letting others do the work and do it their way takes time to learn. Once you do, it can be freeing as a leader too.