How do leaders learn how to lead?

Becoming a good leader of people takes much more than obtaining the position and taking on a title. To be a leader you must have followers, and for people to follow you it requires an investment in the relationship you have built with them, what you have done for them, and what you have helped the company to achieve.

Intensifying the issue is that many organisations fail to provide formal leadership training to their managers – often putting people into leadership roles who have never been taught how to lead, manage, and motivate others.

That leaves people to flounder and so often we find people reaching out to us to ask for advice on what books they can read on leadership, or what podcasts we would recommend they listen to. Of course, there are hundreds of books, podcasts, and other materials you can consume on leadership, but nothing beats formal training.

Our leadership programme is accredited for Continuous Professional Development (CPD), and we cover a huge range of subject areas, such as change management, motivating people at scale through employee engagement, presentation, and communication skills. But if you aren’t fortunate enough to work for an organisation that will invest in developing your leadership skills, here are our top tips to help you on your self-learning journey:

• Work on your mindset – the key difference when you go from a technical role to a leadership position is that you no longer achieve results alone. You need to think and act with the mindset of delivering through others.
• Make sure you have face-to-face contact with your team members regularly. These one-to-one discussions help you to connect with people, getting to know what they are motivated by and how you as their leader can help them achieve more.
• Bring people together as a team and ask questions of each other. You’re not there to tell the team what to do all of the time – help to uncover and discover what they think they can do.
• Create a culture of continuous feedback. Give and seek feedback regularly to encourage honest conversations and an ethos of always seeking to improve. A simple question such as ‘what would have made this even better?’ is great to get the conversation flowing.
• Manage your own time and energy. Understanding yourself as a leader is crucial to your own effectiveness. When do you perform at your best? Are you communicating what you need from the team to be successful? When you are the leader you will have many more pulls on your time so it is down to you to conserve your energy and set the right boundaries.
• Make it safe for people to make mistakes and learn from them. This is called psychological safety – rather than blaming people, take radical self-responsibility for learning from things when they go wrong.
• Create more leaders. Your job as a leader is to create more leaders. Encourage and support your team members to grow and develop themselves. We can never develop enough leaders!

Our final piece of advice would be to seek out someone who is further ahead of you to act as a mentor. Even if it is just one conversation over a coffee – ask them what they found helpful when they were starting out on their leadership journey, and what tips they would share with you.

If you would like to know more about our leadership development training, get in touch – we would love to help!