Let’s talk about People Leadership. This is for you if you’re in a role where you manage a team and manage people. There’s actually a path you can take, there’s a journey you can go on but there are some steps that you can take to take you from someone who doesn’t feel confident or comfortable as a people leader to someone who feels like that’s part of who they are, and is confident with the practices and habits that got in place and know that they’re working.
So if you get this wrong, if you’re on the other side of not feeling comfortable as a people leader actually what you should be doing is probably be in an individual contributor role. Being in a technical role where you solve technical problems.
If you get this right, you actually realise that your skill is being able to engage and motivate other humans. So these are the steps involved if you’re keen to kind of go on becoming an amazing human leader or people leader.
The 3 Steps
And why I want to share this with you is because, I want you to think of where you’re at in your development as a people leader and what stage do you need to focus on next.
So here’s the thing, essentially if you think about building yourself as a leader. There’s three ways we can do that:
- The first thing we can do is focus on what you know. These are the knowledge and skills you’ve got in terms of how to be a great people leader. We should always be continually learning and never stop, we want to keep building our skills.
- The second is what we can do and leadership is not just what we say, it’s also what we do. And most of the people, the staff, the people we interact with, vendors, suppliers, other leaders, peers, customers all of those people are really affected by mostly what we do with them, our actions not just our words.
- And then the final level is how we think. For many people, they think leadership is just about what you know. And what can happen is that you know you can have an MBA and learn as much as you can, but you never make the transition into understanding that it’s actually more about in the moments that matter, it’s what you do.
The trick then is to be able to realise that it’s literally how you think about problems, and you start to make a transition to being really aware of yourself, and that actually you’re thinking throughout your behaviour.
The Framework
We want you to shift ideally as a people leader, all three levels, but we want to know which level is going to help you right now. So the framework looks like this:
The first shift as a person becomes a people leader is what we call a mindset shift.
What is a mindset? A mindset is what you believe to be true when you’re in front of someone you’ve got to lead. If you don’t believe, if you don’t care about the person genuinely, their development, their motivation, their productivity. What’s going to happen is that they are going to know it, they can see it in your behaviour.
So three things are going to happen here:
- You could genuinely care about people, and you’ve got to massively kind of commit to the role. Because if you’re half in and half out, people will know it.
- The second thing we need then is habits.
- Think about what sort of daily or weekly habits have you got in place as a people leader? How often do you meet with your staff?
- How often do you talk about their performance?
- How often do you review their performance and give them feedback?
This doesn’t have to take up all your time, but I would say that the difference between great people leaders is that they know people notice what they do not just what they say. And the great people leaders are the ones that can put their knowledge about leadership into action.
So, is this gap for you those daily, weekly, monthly systems that you’ve got in place? And what systems would you want to put in place that will improve it around performance, feedback coaching people, one on one meetings and stuff like that? And this is all attitude.
We kinda need the mindset, and then the first step is to put some daily habits in place, the foundations of people leadership that then gives us the permission to really inspire performance.
Inspiration is really about the fact can we motivate people to give discretionary effort. And you know you think about a person, which is if that is like a little cup, and that’s a 100% percent of their capacity and right now they may be giving you just half of their capacity. To what extent can you motivate them where they giving their heart and soul?
Summary
Leadership is about what you know, what you do, and how you think. If you want to be a great people leader, there’s just kind of three steps or three stages:
- There’s being aware of your mindset towards the team and the people you lead and the stakeholders around you.
- There’s the daily, weekly habits. Performance, feedback, coaching which of those have you got in place?
- And then the final is to what extent once you’ve done all that, can you inspire them to go beyond? Just what they’re paid for it to give you that discretion if their heart and soul is completely in their work.
Leave me a comment or Get in Touch
Leave me a comment below if this has inspired you to make some changes. What are the changes that you’re gonna make as a people leader?
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