Early Learning for Future Payoffs

Some new leaders skate through this passage without doing any of the things suggested here. They intimidate others, they ignore their doubts and uncertainties, they act supremely self-confident, and they get great results and ignore people. If management isn’t astute or paying much attention, it may look like these individuals are doing fine in their first leadership role and well on their way to one with greater responsibility. Eventually, though, what they haven’t learned in this passage will be manifest in the motivational climate they create for others and, ultimately, in business performance.

Business publications have been full of stories recently of top executives who have failed miserably because they never learned how to communicate and empathize with their people or because they persisted in running their divisions or companies like micromanaging individual contributors rather than real leaders. Enron is probably the classic example of an arrogant culture in which incompetent leaders created an environment in which people either “got it” or were deemed stupid and candidates to be “ranked” and then “yanked” (terminated). As the Enron case demonstrates, arrogant leadership can look successful for a while, and companies still have senior executives in place who cannot motivate and lead others. These people probably never learned to value the leadership requirement of having a vision, getting work done through others, or learning to manage their own potential for derailment.

Our point is that what you learn in this early passage will pay off in the future. For instance, this is the first time that you’ll have an opportunity to create a culture of your own (within your group) and lead change. These are two of the most difficult tasks a leader faces, and you probably won’t master them in this passage. You can, however, learn a lot about the skills that will give you an advantage for mastering them later on. In fact, many first-time leaders fail at leading change the first time, but they reflect and talk about their failure and gain an understanding of what went wrong that serves them well in their next change-leadership assignment.

This second leadership passage, therefore, is where you create the foundation for the rest of your career as a leader. It is fine to make mistakes here, as long as you’re conscious of what they are, why you went wrong, and how you might change what you do the next time.