Premise
There is a lot of leadership advice available on the internet – free and otherwise. I offer a lot of them myself, here on this blog. There are innumerable number of books being written on this topic, so much so that at times, it can become too daunting for someone looking for help.
However, as leaders, we need to know which advice or ideas are relevant for us and which one’s are not.
There are two key criteria or filters that we need to apply in order to decide whether a piece of advice might be useful for us or not.
Where in the leadership Hierarchy am I
In my opinion, there are 6 levels of leadership in any organisation. They can be summed up as below.
It is always a good idea to understand where we are and take advice from people who are either at our level or above our level of leadership.
The more specific help we need the better it is to go to someone who is one or two levels above our own.
Individual Contributors
These are people who are mostly responsible for their own work. They are not directly responsible for leading anyone else. They are generally people who are or want to become an expert on a given topic and would prefer to make their contribution by deploying their expertise.
From an experience and seniority point of view, they can vary from being an early talent to renowned experts.
Apart from the generic leadership skillsets, they usually need to learn and develop the ability to lead with little or no authority and to be good coaches or mentors.
Team Leads
At this level, people have usually made a choice of either leading people or projects. They are usually early in their careers and are leading people for the first time.
The challenges that they face and the advice that can help them is very different from all the other kinds of leaders.
This period of time is crucial for their development as leaders. This period and what they learn can sow the seeds of great leadership, when they heed to good advice.
They would benefit a lot more by working a lot more on their own self and becoming aware of their own strengths, biases and areas of improvements.
This is also the time to work on their ability to build strong relationships with others by showing empathy and socio-cultural awareness.
Leading People
People at this level have decided to deliver results through leading other people. This poses a different set of challenges for them as leaders.
They need to learn how to hold people accountable for not only their own performance but also their contribution to the overall team’s success.
They need to learn to enable collaboration, to problem solve as a team, manage conflicts, career growth expectations, setting and managing goals, hiring and firing people, identifying and developing potential and retaining the right people.
Leading Managers
At this level, one needs to focus a lot more on the culture that we are creating within the different teams. Creating a vision and alignment between teams becomes more important.
Political savviness becomes crucial. Talent development takes on a lot more importance. Conflict management and the ability to make decisions based on incomplete data takes on more importance.
Strategic thinking becomes more critical. The ability to balance competing priorities becomes a foundational skill. At this level, one needs to become an expert at leading than any other skill.
Leading Lines of Business
At this level, strategic thinking and business savviness become table stakes. Creating compelling visions is a crucial skill. The ability to inspire and rally people for a cause becomes an important skill to succeed.
Leaders at this level learn and benefit a lot from coaching and need to become better coaches and mentors. The leaders at this level also need to be able to spot trends and learn to be futurists.
Their ability to spot and balance risks and opportunities become a key differentiators. They can do this by attending industry conferences and speaking to their peers from across and outside the organisation.
In order to be successful, they need to learn to really understand and use the concept of leverage (of time, energy, effort, etc).
Leading Organisations
Leaders at this level, need to be working on the business and not in the business. Crafting compelling visions and communicating them in a way to inspire an entire organisation is their first and foremost job, which they need to keep getting better at.
Leaders at this level often struggle with staying in touch with the reality of their people and their customers.
Leaders at this level learn by engaging thought leaders, from their peers, through coaching and mentoring, from their frontline staff about the realities of their organisation.
Leaders at this level also need to be able to communicate to all kinds of stakeholders – customers, partners, analysts, press, governments, employees, shareholders, board of directors, etc.
Each stakeholder needs to hear and know the same story from their perspective and the ability to do that becomes key.
What are you trying to achieve
Once you know which level of leadership you are at, you need to be clear about what are you trying to achieve and where are you struggling to achieve that.
You can lead to innovate or drive change or grow sales or develop a new product or service or service customers or improve operational efficiency or improve cash flow or land new customers or retain existing one’s or transform the culture or create some stability within an environment of chaos or anything else.
What you are trying to achieve has a big bearing on what kind of help you need and whose advice you can benefit from.
It is always a good idea to check if the person giving the advice has had any first hand experience in facing and overcoming the challenges that you are facing and need help with.
In conclusion
In conclusion, all I can say is that the ability to seek advice and guidance is a meta skill, that can prove to become an invaluable asset for any leader to have in their toolkit.
The better we get at seeking help from the right person and at the right level of detail is something that we need to learn over time.
