6 Things To Learn as a Young Leader
#4 — Get good at presenting
For someone who just started out in a management role, it might feel like the jump into cold water.
It’s a common story for many managers. Soon after being promoted to lead a department or business, you’re faced with the daunting task of figuring out how to lead well. There are best practices which you’ve heard about, but it seems impossible. This is why I wrote this overview of my perspective for other managers like myself.
Establish KPIs
You might not have had them in mind when you took the job, but establishing KPIs is essential to the success of any business.
It’s easy to ignore key performance indicators when you first start out. But soon enough, KPIs will become important for assessing your performance.
Accumulating data allows businesses to refine their processes and subsequently grow revenue.
You need to find out which particular KPIs are relevant for the business you are in and which new ones you want to establish in order to measure the progress even better.
You need to build KPIs that are useful for the company, but also ones that are useful for you.
All of those KPIs should be easily understandable and only measure relevant factors that are controllable and therefore the KPI can be improved by decisions. This is what a lot of new leaders get wrong, they create new KPIs just for the sake of it.
If you can’t make KPIs work for you because your senior managers stopped taking them seriously, try to work out why they stopped and start to reinvent the KPIs from there.
Learn to Delegate
Learning to delegate was the biggest game-changer for my career in management. I think this is essential for anyone who wants to be a great leader. It can be something you’ve probably never had to do before, and to many young managers, it feels strange or uncomfortable at first.
If you’re someone who likes to do things yourself — and if you’re someone with a lot of ambition, that will likely be the case — you might find it really hard initially to step back from your job and let other people take over.
However, there are lots of advantages of delegating. For one, it allows you to do more than one thing at once. It also creates opportunities for other people to learn and grow, which is great if they’re looking to develop their own careers. What’s more, it builds trust in the workplace.
Just try it, ask your team members to do things, it sounds so obvious yet many managers just don’t do it.
Doing everything yourself will just hold you back from reaching greater goals. Learn to trust others.
This brings us to the next big point.
Trust Your Team
Teams are like family in the sense that you can not necessarily choose them but you need to trust them.
When you learn to trust your team, your team will learn to trust you.
You have to be able to count on the people who work for you, and for them to be able to count on you. This is something that needs building over time.
You can’t expect people to become great at their jobs immediately. They will take time until they are comfortable in their roles and until they know that their growth is supported by the company.
I learned that you need to be very clear and direct about what you want and how you want it to be done. If you don’t, people will not understand what they’re supposed to do or how they should do it, or when they should do it and you will become frustrated in the progress because targets will not be reached.
I found that it was helpful to set up a meeting schedule with your team members and stick to it. This became easier as time went by.
In those meetings, you want to review the progress of your team. As they’re progressing towards the targets you have planned, you can give them more responsibilities.
Get Good at Presenting
Many new leaders are afraid of public speaking because of the way they were taught at school (especially if it was one of those schools where bullying was rampant). But there’s no reason to be afraid; it’s an essential skill for great leaders.
Confident people who are good at presenting themselves can convince others that their ideas are both interesting and thoughtful.
Those skills are especially useful in top-management meetings where you need to present the progress of your work.
Try to present your points without too many words or fillers. For every slide or sentence you want to present ask yourself: “Is this essential for the point I’m making?” if the answer is “no”, leave it out.
Read, A LOT
“Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” — Harry S. Truman
Top managers in companies are often not aware of the latest developments in research and books. This lack of awareness may pose a threat to the company’s operation. It is therefore important for top managers to read, listen, learn about what is happening in their industry.
This information will help them stay informed on what they need to do or when they need to do something that needs improvement in their company. It will also provide them with an idea on how to deal with challenges faced by the employees within the company which has been caused due to externalities related to competition, technological changes, etc.
I would strongly suggest subscribing to one of the top publications, even though those can be pricey at times, the knowledge generated will pay for it in the long run. I personally am a subscriber to “The Economist”.
Build a Network
The more extensive your network, the more opportunities it will provide you. Other people can benefit from knowing you, too. For example, you might help someone in their career when they’re in need of it or they, in turn, might help you when you need it.
At the start of your career in management, keep in touch with friends and family in order to stay grounded and to get used to working with people who are not involved in your job.
Start by giving your LinkedIn-Profile a professional look and begin connecting to various people in the same business as you are.
Heres’s a great tutorial I found on getting your LinkedIn to look professional.
Work hard and it will pay off. The more you study and learn about management, the better you’ll be at it.
I hope this article was helpful for you.