The Leader’s Journey
This article explores the leader’s journey so that you can be more decisive in your learning journey and manage self-doubt. What is the leader’s journey? The leader’s journey is the personal and professional path a leader follows to develop the skills, experiences, and mindset necessary to lead effectively. This process is ongoing, requiring continuous growth and self-discovery. To excel, active learning is encouraged because as new experiences arise and knowledge evolves new questions and challenges will also arise that you can then tackle by learning from even more reputable sources. Over time you become a credible and competent leader who can go on to learn even more skills to shape the future for your organisation and maybe even the world.
So you’ve just become a leader. Your first step is to know who you are as a leader. What are your strengths, and weaknesses? How do you use these to your advantage…? What are your values and motivations? These form the bedrock of understanding how you interact with the world so you can work out what to learn and how.
As you start learning you will encounter the need for not only ‘hard skills’ (like using Excel or communication platforms) but also more nuanced skills like utilising your leadership qualities and leadership soft skills. You may start off with some knowledge or none but at the end of the day, you must be able to self-reflect on these skills and acknowledge where growth is needed.
As you start to learn these skills you will encounter new scenarios. As every person is unique and your market is ever-changing you need to be prepared that new scenarios and change will be part of the day-to-day. Therefore, rather than letting challenges impact your self-worth or motivation, use them as a catalyst to learn more and take on the challenge head-on. This is not necessarily easy and can often benefit from mentoring or coaching support to help you learn whilst being successful or, if it occurs, to soften the blow of mistakes or failures. Support from coaching can also help with stress and overwhelm.
As your resilience develops, you too may become the mentor, coach, and role model for your organization. You will have mastered the skills of leadership to such an extent that your team trusts you. You are now competent and credible. Wherever you are on the leadership journey this opens you up to ever more exciting opportunities. Perhaps now you have the ability not just to influence a team but also to run one, or, you can now step up to manage a department and even one day an organisation. The higher you go the more direct impact you have on the world and its direction, but no matter where you are you will always make an impact.
It is important to understand that, although leadership does require continuous learning, there will be spikes and troughs of how much is needed. As you enter a new role the level of learning will be high. The leadership journey often consists of moving individuals through the following tiers and each jump requires a new round of learning.
Note that organisations can differ based on their needs and the following tiers are for reference only..
Individual contributor
Any individuals without management responsibilities i.e., direct reports or strategic oversight.
Manages the standard day-to-day tasks with efficiency
Senior Individual Contributor
Does not have management responsibilities like a standard individual contributor
Has extensive knowledge of processes and tasks that allows them to handle a variety of scenarios including those of higher responsibility.
Senior / Individual Contributor with delegated leadership responsibilities
They may mentor others to help them excel
They may be called on by leadership to give detailed ‘on-the-ground’ information or reports.
They may support process changes and implementation of new software used by the team due to their expert knowledge
Team Lead
Team Leads often remain part of the team with the individual contributors and complete some day-to-day tasks just as the team would. However, they also have some leadership responsibilities which are as follows:
Support the goals, objectives, and task setting of a team
They help with team performance monitoring and improvement
Support team development by providing mentorship and coaching
They influence strategy and vision and help embed it in the team although they are not responsible for deciding the strategy or vision.
They are not responsible for budget management but may support budget processes
Manager
Typically, they manage the function of a team within a department. This means they may support the “EU Marketing team” whereas another manager may support the “APAC Marketing team”
They are ultimately responsible for the team’s performance, including HR management, resource hiring, and budget.
They do not do day-to-day tasks with the team unless temporarily necessary, i.e., to familiarise themselves with the team’s work or to support spikes in resourcing needs.
They manage all team leads and individual contributors.
Director
A director is typically responsible for a department i.e. Product Marketing in which EU and APAC marketing reside amongst others
They are responsible for the strategy and vision of the whole department in line with the organisation's needs.
They manage the managers and ensure they are properly managing their teams
They are responsible for reporting to executive/higher management about their team’s performance
Executive levels (CEO, COO)
These roles have ultimate responsibility over the organisation. They monitor the market and world trends, listen to customers, and make fundamental decisions about how the whole organisation operates.
This is a framework as organisations vary in the challenges they face and the best way to structure a hierarchy to align to this but we can see these roles are quite different from each other. This means that both you transition into leadership and as you move up into new roles learning demands increase. You can use awareness of this to strategise how to learn efficiently and effectively (hint, speak to your people to understand what learning to prioritise). It also means you can take the self-doubt down a notch because any new role requires learning so any mistakes or challenges you make are because you have not yet completed the learning journey.
Similarly, leaders will face times when their role, team and organisation have not changed but there is a new impact from the market. Maybe a new product or service is being sold or perhaps the market has crashed or boomed causing customers to buy less (meaning you now need to support tighter budgets and more efficient processes) or they buy even more (greater demand means you need to manage demands to increase resources whilst still being efficient and productive). All of these things require you to learn and adapt.
It can be hard to learn these skills on your own which is why coaching and mentoring can be so beneficial. It is also vitally important to get foundational knowledge and experience in the real world so that when that exotic and unexpected new thing comes around the corner you are not worrying about the day-to-day and can get on with tackling this new challenge or opportunity head-on.
The coaching provided by Inspirea gives you this foundation so if you are curious to learn how coaching can support you can visit the Emerging Leaders Development Programme summary page.