Leadership: Getting Started
A coworker of mine asked me a simple yet profound question: how do I start to be a leader? What are the initial steps I should be taking?
TLDR; the recipe follows:
Everything starts with Integrity. Be curious, learn about leadership and yourself. Become great at your current job. Seek to help others. Lead at a small scale without authority. Embrace opportunities. Grow and repeat.
A bit more depth…
You must build trust by having integrity, proving to others your commitment to principles and you are honest and speak up but also know when to remain quiet (retaining privacy/security). You must recognize fault and apologize. You must recognize and praise others. You must acknowledge your own contributions. You must be genuine. This is your foundation.
A fundamental step on the path is one that will carry with you throughout your journey: learning. Reading articles, reading books, taking assessments, taking classes, honestly introspecting, all of this is critical to your learning path. This desire for education and improvement is the cornerstone of your growth as a leader and will prove out your ability to actually lead.
Then be the best at your job that you can be — note that you might not be the best at the job but your work ethic and desire to help others will create opportunities to lead. If you are doing this to manipulate your way up the chain, for promotion, for recognition, you are not acting with integrity.
Become highly competent in a particular component of your job and you will find others coming to you for advice and assistance. Helping your peers is a very rewarding form of leadership. It should not be forced either by you interjecting yourself when not desired nor your peers taking advantage of you.
At this point you are occasionally leading without authority and that is one of the more critical leadership capabilities to learn. Here you are leading with the various principles at a smaller scale (you aren’t to layout a vision at this stage). As you become more useful to your teammates you are also becoming more useful to your supervisor. The combination will begin to open doors for further opportunities.
Some opportunities are going to be very valuable to your boss but not explicit to your technical competencies. A few examples: processing employee feedback surveys, organizing volunteer events, participating in office welfare committees, etc. These additional activities will grant you immediate access to exercising your leadership abilities (someone needs to participate in discussions, lead the committee, etc.) and get you more opportunities as you further build trust with your peers and superiors.
As you are useful on multiple levels you will find your superiors looking for additional occasions for you to exercise your burgeoning leadership skills and likely promote you into a management role (or enable your external promotion to a different department or a different company). Once you are a manager you are a leader, but you still have more to do. See this blog for more on Leadership & Management.
At this point you’ve seen several steps to take in becoming a leader at small but vital scale. These steps are all achievable and fully within your ability to control the level of engagement. This is the beginning of your journey of leadership and likely management.
