The first time manager. Pt.2

Welcome to Leadership Sovereignty. I'm your host Terry Baylor along with Ralph Owens. Today we'll discuss why being your authentic self is important, the benefits of being authentic, the show.

And you have to take you have to take note of these things right because if you don't bring your authentic self to the, table you can expect other people to bring our authentic self to the table Right? Because it's it's your authentic self that brings the diversity in a group which spearheads and generates innovation which which makes you competitive. Right? But if you try to get everybody to be the same way, you lose all that creativity. You lose all that innovation.

So she said being authentic. So I'll just read down the list of the eight things. Be authentic, build trust, have clarity, create other leaders, focus on diversity, be innovative, create inclusion and use your voice. So I I definitely recommend for any first time leaders out there to check out her book. It is a must have.

She starts the very very beginning of the book with this is what it meant to be an individual contributor. Now this is what it means to be a leader. And I'll just touch on this one other topic too. And this is something I've read from John Maxwell. There's a difference between role power and leadership.

Role power is what people have to respect because of your title. That I think they said that's only that only really works about 20% of the time. Where people are really gonna follow you based on how well you influence them, not just because of your title. So just if you if you're out there and you think that, oh, I got the title, they gotta do everything I said. No.

It's it's you're deceived. Right? Because just as we may have been that person who was like, oh, man, I'm not doing all that. I'm not giving all I'm not going above and beyond for this person because you didn't really believe in them. You would be that the exact same person.

Right? So role power only really constitutes about 20% of your leadership. Right? The trust that you have to build, the influence that you have to create, all of that takes work that you have to put in on the front end. But I'm curious on your thoughts on that too.

Yeah, so I remember I'd got a first time manager and this person, he was a great person, right? And love Microsoft. And man, he was pushing everybody to be a Microsoft guy.

I know what you're talking about, I remember. I'm

like, don't get me wrong, I love the technology. Man, I'm just passing through this technology because I realized the journey that I was on fleece for me. And I went to the classes, I managed the systems, I did my migrations, I did it all. But you know what I realized? I just wasn't passionate about it.

I liked it, I loved learning it. Loved, back in the early days, man, I did a NT4 to AD migration, reading the books, I loved it. But I was like, okay, been there, done that. Managing exchange, I did that, it was great. I loved the experience.

Man, I built resource domain, I did it all. You know what, I forgot I did that. But I did all this stuff. But once I did it, I was like, okay, I got the knowledge, let me move on. And so the reason I bring that up is I believe as a leader, when you're leading others, tap into what their passions are, Now granted, there may be some roles and responsibilities that they have to do to manage the job and make sure that things move forward.

Yeah, totally agree, hey, these are the set of objectives that must be achieved. As I'll say this, as a leader, I'll give you a story. So this is when we were working at the same company together. And I saw something in this young lady and we were working on a project. I forget what it was exactly, but it was something across the entire fleet.

And so I went to the young lady, I'm like, hey, do you mind working with me? Because I need a project manager on this. And she said, Terri, I've never done anything like this before. I said, great, that's even better. Because she was hungry.

I said, look, I will not leave you hung out to dry. If you have any questions, just ask. So fast forward, I don't know, it was about a six month project, something like that. Because it takes time when you're going through a fleet and you gotta get approvals and sign offs and all of that and coordination. At the end of that project, she thanked me, she said, Terri, I really appreciate you trusting me with this opportunity because one, it afforded me to learn more about the business and two, it allowed me to establish or work on a skillset that I had not had before.

Well, fast forward another eight or nine months, she reaches out to me and she goes, Terri, you just lit a fire under me with that opportunity. And I found my passion and she shared, I have an interview to be a project manager. Now, if I had never reached out, I'd never asked, partnered with her on this. And so she said, Terri, what is the single biggest advice you have for me? And this again is another nugget for a manager.

She said, what is the biggest single piece of advice you have for me because I got the job. I said, when you go in and you meet with your new leader, always remember to negotiate the success. Not be an order taker. Negotiate what that success looks like. They may want it in three weeks and then you build a scenario with information that says, well, I believe this plan will look better at maybe five weeks because of these scenarios, right?

Back to your point, Ralph, in those eight items, use your voice. Negotiate what success looks like guys. And here's the thing, that is vertically and horizontally, right? So I want to hit on something that Ralph talked about because we were all guilty of this. The first time you are a manager, you think the job of being a manager is walking away with all the tasks.

That's right.

That is not the goal for being a manager.

No sir.

Because here's the deal, when there's a part of that authenticity and there's a part of that balance that comes along with that, that gives you some credibility when you're in these meetings with your peers or when you're in meetings with those verticals, don't be the only one walking out of a meeting with all the tasks on you. It's negotiating. Okay, you know what? I'll take this on. Can you and your team execute on this piece of it?

Because again, if you're going into those meetings and you're the only one coming out with a list of things, then your value honestly is being diminished because you're not using your voice. You're not negotiating what that success looks like. Also you gotta give air cover for your team.

That's right. Yeah. No, think that's beautiful. You so remember telling some of the guys that reports to me where I'm at now. One individual, he was frustrated because he's well, I'm too busy.

I'm like, okay, well, what are you doing? Well, I got this person coming up telling me they need this. I got this person coming up telling me they need that and he's doing it all. And he's a manager over like six people. Right?

And I had to look him in the eye and say, man, you are not a order taker. You are a it's in your title. You are a manager. Your role is to manage work, not to do the work. So that's the next tip and nugget we're to drop on you is that you are hired to manage the work, not do the work.

That's the reason why they call you a manager. But you have to understand that what got you there will not take you to where you wanna go. Okay, so what got you there is your expertise and your technical discipline, the ability to drive performance and drive outcomes. But when you get promoted to manager, you're now responsible not just for what you do but for what your entire team does. Your entire team's performance defines your success.

So you have to understand just like as a technical discipline, as individual contributor, you did what it takes to improve your technical discipline. You went to the classes, you got the certifications, you volunteered for the projects. Right? You got all of this great experience and it made you a senior level person in what you do. Okay.

Great. When you take on, when you take that hat off and you put on the manager hat you have to approach it the same way but you have to look at okay what is it going to take for me to be successful in this role? Well to be successful in this role is your ability to influence and lead people so that they can be successful. That's what determines your success. Not you showing how smart you are to all of your guys that you can do the work, but you still got the chops.

And you gotta let that go.

Have to. Yeah. If you if you really wanna be successful. Now I've seen people, Terry and I both have seen people that they'll never wanna let it go. They just wanna be the smartest guy in the room.

And what happens when you do that is you completely limit and stunt your growth. I mean, would you agree with that Terry?

Yeah, you know what, so I want to chime back in on what you said Ralph, matter of fact, got this circled in a book that I'm reading and they actually referenced that book. It is by Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You There Won't Get You There.

That's it, that's it. Hey, look, look, I got it right here.

There it is. It

I'll talk about it today too. Yes, sir. That is a fantastic phenomenal book. Now I would say that definitely is the number two recommendation. If you haven't read it, if you especially if you're just getting into leadership, you have to get into it.

I actually had a couple points from the book that I wanted to just kinda drop on you guys. The first one is, so they have he has, he has 20 bad habits that successful people and leaders should stop. So if you may have gotten away with this as an individual contributor, right, because your individual performance is what determine if you were successful or not. So your interaction with other people may not have been as important. But when you turn manager, your interaction with people is everything.

So like I'll just name one of them. It says, being overly competitive. Being competitive is good but not if you try to win all the time, at all cost, even when it doesn't matter. E. G.

A friendly match. So when you have a group of people that you're managing, if every time something comes up, you tell them, no, I got it. You don't know what you're doing, I got it. Right? You can start to demoralize them and they won't even try.

Right? So as a manager, you have to be able to step back. This is what I love about my boss and he's he's notorious for doing this. If I'm at a table with my coworkers and a problem is presented, he will purposely stand there and step back, put himself on mute, and just watch everybody talk. Because he knows that because of his role that people are gonna tend to lead with what he says.

So he'll he'll he'll specifically step back and allow everyone else to have some conversation so they could think through it. Every now and then he'll throw a nugget in there to kinda lead the conversation in a certain way. Right? And then at the end, he'll say, is everyone done? Okay.

All right. Well, this is what I thought about it as well. Right? Giving everybody in the room the opportunity to contribute from their authentic self, right, before he actually brings himself into it. Even if he doesn't agree, he'll still let us kind of talk through it or whatever.

Being overly competitive and just making and just squishing the person every time they have something to say, no, you don't know what you're talking about. This is what you do. Yeah. I got it. Got it.

You know, stuff like that. Right. And one other thing is showing how smart you are. You don't add value when you boast about what you've done, achieved or by saying I already knew that. When others share their input just say thank you.

Powerful man.

I need to hand that book to somebody.

I think I got an extra copy. Yeah, yeah just these are things that, you may able to get away with being an individual contributor. Because again, at the end of the day, your work performance is what's determining if you are succeeding. These are things that are about relational, right? How you interact with other people.

And if you don't take the time to start working on yourself, how you interact with other people. To the book's point, then the name of the book, what got you here will not get you there.

Thank you for being with us today on Leadership Sovereignty. Stay connected with us on X, formerly known as Twitter, and on Instagram by searching for Leadership Sovereignty. And just like this podcast, let's all collectively grow as we go. God bless.