Written by: Marguerite Thibodeaux, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
You got promoted. Congratulations! I hope you get to take time to celebrate before the questions start bubbling up. What exactly is your new role? What are you responsible for now? Why can’t your new team just do what they’re supposed to like you did?
Welcome to people leadership. You probably got promoted, because you were awesome at your last job, an individual contributor. What made you great there won’t necessarily make you great here. Lucky for you, I’ve got the basics outlined to get you started, even if your organization makes the very common mistake of assuming their rockstar individual contributors will make rockstar leaders with no support or training. Let’s first define what a leader is. A leader is someone who leads people and manages results. Leading people means aiming in the right direction, connecting to a higher purpose, assuming your teammates want to succeed, and empowering them to contribute. It’s about building a sandbox. Just like a sandbox’s borders, you too need to set the boundaries that your team will be working in. Knowing your sandbox will help you and your team focus on what is most important and avoid getting distracted by shiny objects outside the sandbox. On the other hand, managing is about what you do inside the sandbox: measuring what matters, providing frequent feedback, coaching to bring out the best in your teammates, and allowing room for growth. So how do you build your sandbox and engage your team there? As a new leader, you have a unique opportunity to set up your team for success. Here are the essential tools and skills that you must learn in order to build a strong foundation for leadership and management.
1. Locate Your North Star
People want to know where they are headed, The What & The How. They need a North Star that they can navigate towards. Consider:
What does your team aim to accomplish? Why does your team exist?
How do you want your team to show up every day to reach that goal?
Your North Star is going to be at the crossroads of The What & The How. That intersection also helps you locate the center of your sandbox. Let me use as an example my own coaching and consulting company, MagnanimousLeadership. The What of Magnanimous Leadership’s North Star is “Equip managers to have fun unleashing their team’s exceptional, sustainable results.” How will MagnanimousLeadership get us there? Everyday, we will show up leveraging the science of people to make the hard work of leadership fun and creative. We built our sandbox around that North Star and deliver in that sandbox in small and big ways, including this article you are reading now.
2. Craft Customized Key Performance Indicators (“KPIs”)
KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, bridge the gap between leading people and managing results.It does so by translating the North Star into tangible metrics to track and evaluate. These KPIs create the boundaries of your sandbox, telling you and your team when you’re on track or have veered off course and started buildings and castles outside your sandbox. Create effective KPIs that are customized, focused, and laddered.
Customized: Measured directly what is explicitly in your What and How statements.
Focused: Hone in on no more than five KPIs, the fewer the better.
Laddered: Provide each level (team, department, etc.) their own KPIs that ladder up to the organizations.
You can create KPIs by breaking down your What and How statements into measurable components. Let’s use the Magnanimous Leadership North Star as an example again: “Equip managers to have fun unleashing their team’s exceptional, sustainable results.” The KPIs here center around keywords:
“Equip managers to have fun unleashing exceptional, sustainable results.”
Number of managers helped – Client satisfaction – Before and after scores
3. Provide Feedback
People seek stories to understand the world around them. Feedback is factual and your most effective tool for grounding your team and providing them with extra perspective.
Effective feedback is also couched in KPIs. This helps you stay focused on what matters most to the business and avoid HR landmines. If the feedback you want to provide can’t be tied to a KPI, it’s probably a personal preference that does not need to be shared. This helps you and your teammates stay on track, navigating towards the North Star. I frequently share tips and tricks on how to provide meaningful feedback quickly and effectively. You can follow me here to learn more.
4. Coach Your Team
People want to succeed, but few can do so alone. Coaching is the step that helps teammates act on feedback in the most effective way possible for them. Coaching is a special type of conversation. It is empowering, forward looking, a two-way dialogue, and leverages self-knowledge. Coaching is not a punishment, dictating how to work, siloed (work vs. life), or one-size-fits-all. The key to coaching is asking. After delivering feedback, ask your teammate what they want to do differently in the future. Explore options, share additional context as needed, and encourage your teammate to ask for the help they need to succeed. Often, asking instead of telling provides richer, more thoughtful ways forward than dictating your own solution. And it almost always generates more trust and engagement from your teammate.
Conclusion
Now that you have these tools, how do you want to plug each of them into your team’s regular schedules, so they become reliable guideposts for you, your team, and the organization? Creating a work environment that makes it easier for everyone to succeed lays the foundation for you to lead magnanimously and for your teammates to contribute magnanimously, with courage and compassion. If you want to grow more in your leadership development, join me in one of my programs by clicking here. About the Author: Marguerite Thibodeaux is an executive coach and talent management consultant dedicated to changing our relationship with work. Work should be a place where each of us gets to enjoy the challenge of contributing to something bigger than oneself. Through her company, Magnanimous Leadership, she focuses on helping leaders at all levels create habits, skills, and environments that empower teams to thrive.
Every leader deserves support.
Follow her on LinkedIn for leadership tips and discussions.
Check out her website for free leadership resources like a Professional Development Roadmapping Worksheet and Attrition Risk Matrix.
Want one-on-one help adapting these strategies to your team? Book a complimentary call with Marguerite. Every leader deserves support.
Read more from Marguerite!
Marguerite Thibodeaux, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Marguerite Thibodeaux, an leadership coach and talent management consultant, helps leaders and organizations bring the best out of people with courage, compassion, and clarity. After building development programs and leading a talent transformation at a Fortune 100, she became increasingly aware that not all leaders had access to a Fortune 100 Learning & Development team. To do something about that, she started Magnanimous Leadership, a leadership coaching and consulting firm that's on a mission to make resources and support available to every leader.
