First-Time Leader

Foundational Tools for Inspiring and Enabling Your New Team

George B. Bradt, Gillian Davis

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781118828120
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118858387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Liderazgo

First-time leaders get motivational and planning tools from top executive coaching firms

The First-Time Leader provides basic frameworks, processes, and tools to help first-time leaders and their teams deliver better results faster. Leading is about inspiring and enabling others to do their absolute best, together, to realize a meaningful and rewarding shared purpose. Authors George Bradt, Managing Director of PrimeGenesis, and Gillian Davis, Managing Director of AlanKey, show how to achieve these results through the BRAVE acronym: Behaviors, Relationships, Attitudes, Values, Environment. Learn the three stages of team development, and get advice for specific leadership situations including onboarding yourself, onboarding others, and crisis management.

• Offers a way of thinking about leadership and a structure for action to help first-time leaders lead at both overall conceptual and tactical levels
• Includes downloadable tools that are easily adaptable for each leader's specific context
• Contains illustrative examples and stories from a range of experienced leaders and experts to help guide first-time leaders through things they may not have experienced themselves

The First-Time Leader shows new leaders what to do next, later, never, why, and how. It's an indispensible guide for stepping up and inspiring others to come together for success.

PART I

GETTING STARTED

CHAPTER 1

OVERVIEW: CONGRATULATIONS! IT’S GREAT TO BE A LEADER. YOU’VE EARNED IT. AND YOUR NEW JOB IS GOING TO BE A WILD RIDE

PART I: GETTING STARTED

“If only I had known then what I know now about leadership.” Our vision is that years from now, this thought will never cross your mind. Most people become good leaders only after stumbling through new situations, making mistakes, and learning from them. Not you. You’re going to benefit from several lifetimes of leadership insights, learning from others’ mistakes and positive experiences to cut out a lot of unnecessary stumbling and pain and accelerate your success as a first-time leader.

Before we go any further, congratulations! If you’re reading this, either you have earned a career-defining opportunity, or you are wise enough to reconnect with the fundamentals of leadership with fresh eyes. You should be excited. And you should temper that excitement with a healthy dose of concern. Your opportunity comes with a fair degree of personal risk. Forty percent of new leaders fail in their first 18 months.1 That’s why this book is for you. It’s going help you mitigate the risks and accelerate success all at the same time.

When Gillian first started her role as manager, she went in with guns blazing. She assumed the best way to get people to buy into her ideas was to prove that she was capable. So she went off in all directions, trying to change processes, marketing plans, new product lines. It wasn’t long before she realized that not only was this not working, it wasn’t sustainable. She needed to be strategic, and most importantly, patient.

The number one problem first-time leaders face is failing to understand that leading requires entirely different strengths than does doing or managing. We’ve all experienced first-time managers who come in with guns blazing. They think they can be successful by doing more of what they were doing before and telling others to do the same. But telling diminishes. At best people comply with the teller’s direction. More experienced managers persuade and support. Great leaders go one step further to co-create a purpose-driven future with their followers.

This gets us to our core premises:

• Leading is different from managing. Where managing is about organizing, coordinating, and telling, leading is about inspiring and enabling and co-creating. Great leaders can also do and tell when needed—and we’re certainly going to provide you a broad set of management tools—but this is not a book written to help you write a budget or comply with labor laws. It is a book about leadership with a focus on inspiring and enabling others to do their absolute best together to realize a meaningful and rewarding shared purpose.
• Taking over as a leader for the first time is a critical, career-defining moment. Getting this transition right accelerates your career trajectory. Avoiding avoidable mistakes at this juncture requires preparation, commitment, and follow-through. Hence this book.
• Focus on the cause. People follow charismatic leaders for a time. But they devote themselves over time to the cause of a BRAVE leader who inspires and enables them in the pursuit of that cause. BRAVE leaders have the courage to accept that leadership is not about them, but rather about working through behaviors, relationships, attitude, values, and the environment to inspire and enable others.

This book provides foundational frameworks, processes, and tools to help by

• Laying out a way of thinking and a structure for action for your leadership at both conceptual and tactical levels. We’ll tell you what to do next, later, never, and why, and how to accelerate success.
• Providing several lifetimes of leadership insights, examples, and stories from experienced leaders and experts to guide you through risk-filled situations you may not have experienced yourself—yet.
• Making available downloadable tools, easily adaptable for the situations you face. (Plus bonus tools and new ideas over time, online at www.onboardingtools.com.)

Happiness is good. Actually, three goods: (1) doing good for others, (2) doing things you’re good at, and (3) doing good for you. These three goods come together in great leaders. Great leadership flows from a passion for a cause—inevitably a cause with a meaningful impact on others. At the same time, these leaders invest in making themselves ever better leaders on an ongoing basis. As a result, they reap abundant personal rewards: good for others, good at it, good for you.

There are real costs to becoming and being a great leader. Assuming you’ve got the talent and inclination to lead (and not all do), you need to invest in acquiring knowledge and skills. It’s a never-ending effort. You are going to be frustrated along the way. You are going to make tough choices, giving up some personal comfort in pursuit of your cause. You are going to be stressed. You are going to fail. Then you are going to get up and do it all over again. Why? Because the impact and rewards far more than offset the investment and costs.

We are going to give you a process for taking charge, a framework for leadership, and then apply those across small, medium, and large teams to accelerate success. Here’s the flow by chapter for the chapters following this one.

Take Charge of Your New Team

When moving into that first-time leadership role, get a head start, manage your message, build your team. Get a head start by having a plan and putting an emphasis on jump-starting relationships. Manage your message by making sure what you do matches what you say matches what you fundamentally believe. Then apply the components of the BRAVE leadership success framework to build your team.

The BRAVE Leadership Success Framework: Behaviors, Relationships, Attitudes, Values, Environment

Behaviors are the actions that make real, lasting impact on others.

Relationships are the heart of leadership. If you can’t connect, you can’t lead.

Attitude encompasses strategic, posture, and culture choices around how to win.

Values are the bedrock of a high-performing team. Get clear on what really matters and why.

Environment sets the context for everything else in terms of where you are playing.

PART II: BUILD YOUR BRAVE LEADERSHIP FROM THE OUTSIDE IN

Behaviors flow from relationships. But you can’t get there until you’re aligned on environment, values, and attitude choices. Thus we suggest leading from the outside in: from the environment, through values and attitudes, to relationships and behaviors. As a first-time leader, it’s hard to know where to start; you have expectations coming at you from all angles: your boss, your boss’s boss, your peers, your team. If you don’t build yourself a platform to stand on, you will not be able to stand for long.

Environment: Get Clear on Your Mission and Fields of Action

One of your most important choices is where to play. Understand the context in which you’re operating and interpret and create the context for your team. The context includes both what others have decided for you and the choices you and your team get to make. Today’s environment is highly uncertain in exciting and dangerous ways. So be sure to consider all the risks and opportunities both outside and inside your field of endeavor and organization. You may never have had to consider the external environment in your previous role, but now it’s your responsibility to do your homework.

• Understand the business and competitive environment, organizational history, and recent results.
• Align around an interpretation of the situation assessment.
• Make clear choices around where to play and where not to play within your context.

Values: Align Yourself and Your Team with the Organization’s Mission, Vision, and Values—More or Less

Virtually every long-serving leader says that the number one job of a leader at any level is to own and drive vision, mission, and values. Clarify what matters and why—the value you and your team create, and the drivers and principles you choose to follow within the context of the overall organization. All too often, this exercise is overlooked. Just because your manager did not do this, does not mean you should skip it as well.

• Align on a shared purpose: vision, mission, values as the foundation for all that follows.

Attitude: Make Crucial Choices around your Team’s Strategy, Posture, and Culture

Strategy, posture, and culture comprise the pivot point between environment and values and relationships and behaviors. Decide how you are going to fulfill the mission you’ve been given—how you are going to win. To change your organization’s behaviors and relationships, change its attitude. Make choices around strategy (which may be someone else’s substrategy) and then be sure your posture and culture are in sync with those choices.

• Clarify strategy, posture, and culture to guide relationships and behaviors.

Relationships: The Heart of Leadership

Everything you do and don’t do, say and don’t say, listen to, and observe communicates—24/7, forever. This is the heart of leadership. Inspiring and enabling others is all about relationships. This is probably the biggest shift for first-time leaders. At least it was for Gillian. Shifting from executing the work to delegating the work was one of her biggest challenges, and continues to be one. You are changing h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Getting Started
• Part II: Build Your BRAVE Leadership from the Outside In
• Part III: Leading Small, Medium, and Large Teams
• References
• About the Authors
• Index