💎 The Corner Office #1 - From Manager to Leader

Read time: 7 minutes

Hey y’all,

Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Corner Office! Nothing great happens in the world without great leadership. That's the core belief driving this newsletter. We're here to fuel more greatness in the world, one leader at a time.

Every Monday, we'll deliver a powerhouse mix of insights, tools, and frameworks directly to your inbox. Our goal? To supercharge your leadership journey, elevating not just you, but also your team and your entire business.

This week’s insights come from Adam Bryant’s (author of Leap to Leader) appearance on The Dov Baron Show (Part 1 & Part 2).

The harsh truth? Most companies fall short in providing timely, if any, leadership training. Add to that that many people find themselves in a management position for all the wrong reasons. The result? The destructive impact of a bad boss: creating stress and undercutting value. But here's the silver lining: becoming a great leader and a great boss is within your reach. It starts with self-awareness and a conscious effort to shape your leadership identity, which in turn can propel your team to new heights.

Everybody knows there’s a big difference between a manager and a leader. But how would you define it? And considering people often leave managers, not companies, how do you bridge the gap from being a good manager to a great leader? This week's insights are your first step towards unravelling this challenge.

 Insight of the Week  

Stephen Covey noted, “leadership cannot be taught, it must be learned.” To me, that means not only learning by consuming content, it’s about active learning through doing. If you stop reading here (I hope you don’t!) and do this exercise, I’ll chalk that up as a win. Want to make it more impactful? Hit reply and send me your answers.

Personal Excavation

Reflecting on my nearly decade of management experience, this caught me off guard. In hindsight, my journey into being a manager wasn't as deliberate as I thought it was at the time. It was more a casual drift, riding the waves of my mental models of the world and my boss's direction. However, true leadership requires challenging the status quo, something that is often done externally but is more difficult to apply introspectively. It took me a few years to do this work and uncover my own identity as a leader. This insight is a reminder that leadership starts with questioning and defining our own motivations and choices.

Who am I as a leader? A seemingly simple question. You might be surprised how long it takes you to write out the first words of your answer. It never ceases to amaze me how simple questions often yield the most profound answers.

Values can often mean many things to many people. What I consider integrity might differ from your understanding. That’s why it’s crucial to not only define your values but also to clearly articulate what they look like in practice and how they resonate on an emotional level. Share this clarity with your team. It’s common to see companies list values without a deep understanding of their implementation. Remember Enron? Integrity was one of their core values. Go figure.

Living your values is a cornerstone of trust. Publicly committing to those values can be intimidating but it serves as a powerful forcing function. It compels you to uphold your values, especially when it is challenging. To truly earn your team’s trust, you must consistently demonstrate your values through actions; walk the walk, don’t just talk the talk. Your behaviour should always reflect your proclaimed standards.

Manager? Or Leader?

There are many ways to differentiate between management and leadership. I love this one because it’s simple to implement and to identify.

New managers should use playbooks. They’re a great tool to build the basic foundational management skills. Transitioning into leadership means embracing the challenge of tackling tough situations and running a play that has a high risk of failure. Managers will accept how things are done and execute, while leaders will challenge the status quo and blaze their own trail.

Putting it into Action

Reflecting on my early management days, making decisions was easier because I usually had access to ‘enough’ data. Looking back at my evolution into a leadership role, I can trace when I started to get comfortable with making decisions where it’s all grey areas, with no right answer. It’s still not easy. And I still struggle realizing that my decisions are going to piss some people off. That is hard, but essential. To make it in leadership, you can’t be paralyzed by the desire to be universally liked.

From Vice Presidents to team leaders, many managers I’ve worked with are confounded by strategy. It seems, to them, a fancy and complicated concept, beyond their grasp. Yet, the idea of reframing strategy as a series of calculated 'bets' is nothing short of brilliant. This perspective has already reshaped my approach. As I write this, I'm strategizing – or rather, planning my 'bets' – for 2024. Based on available data, I’ll crafting a hypothesis of what the future might look like, and my bets are how my team can leverage these forecasts. Making good bets is the essence of being a good leader. Moreover, presenting these strategic choices as bets to your team fosters transparency and builds trust.

Adam shares a poignant example of mentorship in his company. When hearing a young CEO’s negative self-talk, his mentor pointed out: 'if you talked to your friends like that, you wouldn't have any.' This story resonated deeply with me. The ability to separate work from home life, to move from a failed initiative to planning the next, requires a unique skill: compartmentalizing. To me, tucking away thoughts in a specific corner of your mind, allowing for restful sleep, and revisiting them with a fresh perspective in the morning is a superpower.

The most impactful piece of sales advice I ever received was: make it incredible easy for your prospects to say ‘yes.’ This principle doesn’t only apply to sales, it is just as relevant to leading a team. Business environments and internal company dynamics are always shifting. For your team, that’s all noise and distraction. A leader’s job is to cut through the noise and create the a clear path to success. Like a well-designed highway on-ramp, we need to construct simple, straightforward pathways for our teams to succeed.

Tiny thought

If two keys to successful leadership are simplifying complexity and trust, which is your strong side and why? What is one thing you can do today to improve your weak side?

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