How to Succeed as a New Leader
There are so many things to consider when embarking on a new journey as a leader of a team in an organization. Use these three approaches to help you get started down your road to becoming a successful leader.
Seek to Understand Your Team
Take measures to understand your team members. Thuy Sindell's first expert tip for new leaders is to listen to your employees. She writes, "a new leader needs to take the time to learn about how their team works and why." In other words, figure out how strengths can be leveraged on your team. This takes time, but observing, listening and getting a "lay of the land" will be important to all subsequent steps of being a successful leader.
Learn How to Delegate
As the leader, you will have to learn to delegate projects and tasks to your colleagues wisely. In order to do so, you must have a sense of your team members’ strengths and how members can use their strengths together successfully. Additionally, while it is important to be able to gauge the success of colleagues and challenge your team to reach big picture goals – you don’t need to know how to execute the minutiae of each role on your team. Instead, become comfortable with the vocabulary and function around each role and help your team excavate a path toward that goal together. Forbes suggests that successful leaders must understand, "There are many paths to the mountain top, and we need to encourage our team to come up with them." Thuy also writes that seeking out new perspectives will help a new leader to be successful.
Put on Your Coach Hat
Forbes explains that part of a leader's job is to help team members develop their skills. In a previous article, The Benefits of Coaching in the Workplace, we share that leaders who excel in the workplace know how to activate the power within their teams through coaching. As a new leader, you may need to learn how to become an effective coach and what style will be most beneficial to your team. Marquette University's Business blog offers examples of coaching in the workplace and different coaching styles.