Jul/091
Training Leaders
I thought I should release one sample chapter from my up coming eBook. So here it goes, I hope you enjoy.
Overview
Let’s first go through a one fact: no one is born as a leader. It is ridiculous to think that somebody is born with some skill set, no they aren’t. Being a leader is a profession as all others, you’ll need to learn the tips & tricks of the trade before you are a good one.
Now, the problem in training leaders is that there really isn’t any very well defined process to do that, and it would be really hard to do that, because organizations are different – or more to the point, people are different. And, different people require different leadership skills.
My Short Story
From my experience training a leader requires throwing the person in to the ‘flames’, in middle of the action. Over a year ago I had to go this through. I was given a responsibility to lead a team that had loads of problems: communication didn’t work out, processes lacked… all the classic symptoms of a start-up team. But, let’s not go deeper in to what caused those problems.
I didn’t really know much about leading a team nor anything else related to management. It was really scary time as I did not have any support from anybody. I didn’t have the trust or respect of the team. Now this is about as hard as it gets to start: no support, no experience. But, I started executing: trying new processes and ways to do things, at the same time trying to take the team more and more in to the process of creating new ways to do things.
During the process I basically threw everything old away. What happened was that I understood what good was in the old ways as the team was complaining that we were missing some things that worked before. So I continued trying new processes and adopting the ones that worked, but at the same time I reflected against the past to understand what good ways had already been in place. It took about a year to gain the trust and respect of the team.
Points To Learn From My Short Story
- Throw the leader in middle of the action
- Give him the responsibility and power to change things. He must learn that all of his actions have consequences. This helps him to at least learn change management, people management, and communication skills.
- Upper management support
- Someone must be regularly supporting new leader and challenging his actions. I didn’t have anyone to challenge me so I had to throw everything away and learn from the hard way. If someone is challenging and teaching the new leader you are able to avoid some of the problems during the transition. Remember that upper management is there to only support him, not to make the real actions for him.
Conclusion
And in the end, everything comes down to point that people only learn by doing, but also with the help of other people. You might have heard about team learning, well, that is exactly what the support in this case is all about, it is a team: the new leader and the upper management.
