What does it mean to be a leader?

When your career begins, your key responsibilities are to do your tasks and to grow your skills. With enough time, this is often sufficient to justify a promotion. However, as you reach higher career levels, there comes with it, the expectation that you are not just producing results, but also leading others on your team. Even without the title and responsibility of being a manager, leadership is a skill that everyone should work to develop.

If I boil "leadership" down into a single concept, I would have to say that being a leader means "enabling your team to do more". That single concept is the key to good leadership. It's not about specific actions, just doing whatever is necessary to improve the ability of your team to produce.

Initially, leadership is more of an informal activity. Your work output is still expected to maintain near current levels. But, as leadership becomes more formal, it takes up a larger percentage of your day and your direct output will wane. However, as a leader, your indirect output is your impact multiplied through the number of people that you lead. This is why managers may not appear to "do" anything, but, if they are a good leader, they are enabling their team to be more productive than if they were led by someone else.

The first and easiest form of leadership is one that you can take entirely on your own. It's not one that you need any special permission to take. It's leading by example. When junior team members are unsure of what to do next or are not confident in what decision to take, they'll often defer to senior members. Whether you actively pursue this form of leadership or not, just by nature of experience, you could find yourself in this position. The best thing to do is to recognize the fact and make sure that you are setting a good example for your team.

While leading by example is a good practice, it can also lead to burnout as you try to continue to produce at a consistently high level. It also has the smallest impact to the improvement of the team. Eventually, you will need to take a more active form of leadership.

If your team is young and inexperienced, leadership may take the form of education -- often through mentoring and coaching. Teaching them better techniques enables them to do more of their existing tasks. Teaching them additional skills allow them to take on new tasks and do more through expansion of responsibility.

Another form of leadership is through improving process efficiencies. Leveraging seniority and more experience, you can enable your team by eliminating unnecessary or redundant process steps and by automating steps or entire processes.

Education and process efficiencies are team focused leadership. Eventually, you will need to turn outwards in order to enable your team.

Sometimes, leadership is about removing roadblocks. When your team is unable to make progress on their tasks, a leader can leverage their experience, their network, or their authority to help the team resume progress. A leader's experience can help the team find ways around the roadblock. A well-connected leader may know someone who can remove the roadblock or at least a person who can introduce them to someone who can. And lastly, a leader with the proper authority can just command that the roadblock be removed.

And lastly, another important aspect of leadership is protecting your team. This is often reserved for a leader who is a manager or executive because protection usually involves some sort of political maneuvering. A leader can advocate for help -- either from another team or in the form of growing the team -- if the team is asked to do more than they are capable of or work that they do not have the skills to do. A leader can help resolve conflict across teams. Or, a leader can protect the team from excessive work or unnecessary process.

Whether formally or informally, leadership qualities are a key component of advancement. We've discussed several types of leadership today, so spend time in the coming weeks and months working on those skills.

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