Congratulations! You’ve got the promotion you’ve been waiting for catapulting you to a leadership role within your organization. As you prepare for the new responsibilities and challenges ahead it is best to be prepared well.
These tips might help you in transitioning to the new leadership role, add yours in comments below..
Understand your Role
The first step is to gain awareness and understanding of your role. The best ways to go about this is to ask your boss, read handover notes from your predecessor, ask peers and subordinates.
Let go of your Former Role
You might be coming from a different organization, division, or another leadership role, you must first let go of your standard practices and preferences to adapt to the new responsibilities and expectations at this new job.
Define Expectations
How would you like to interact and communicate with your team and peers, how do they prefer it? What’s the company culture and how can you set standards and procedures that clearly define your expectations to your team and peers? Focusing on a practical strategy at the very beginning of starting on a new role will make matters easier to handle in a fast paced work environment.
Set Goals for Yourself and your Team
Your team looks up to you for guidance, inspiration and efficient delegation. Setting SMART goals up ahead for yourself and your team must be a top priority now. Understand first what motivates your team. Quoting Kouzes and Posner here: “Leadership is a team sport. There may be a captain, but without the team working together, no one can score the winning goal.”
Manage Time Well
If this is your first leadership role, there is a high probability that you might be overwhelmed by a demanding leadership role. Define strategies and schedule your workload with good time management skills.
Keep Improving
Whatever you do keep doing a good job at improving and learning from others. Employees look up to you to lead them but delegating and offering responsibilities to others will only make you a better leader. A good leader is a life long learner, there is nothing easy about ‘being at the top’, in fact it’s a lot harder trying to be a beacon!
“Leaders are made not born”, here are some qualities of an effective leader by Brian Tracy:
Here’s an infographic via mindflash.com which also offers some interesting aspects of leadership:
