It wasn't pretty. As a new supervisor, I thought I knew what leadership was. After all, I had over 20 very productive years in IT. I had observed some good supervisors and some bad, and some very bad. Surely I had learned a lot from all that observation! Wrong.
We were having a team meeting and I had just finished a sentence that began with, "It can't take that long to..." when one of my team members exploded and started to leave the room. I had become a bad supervisor. I wasn't listening to what my experts were telling me. I was assuming my strong technical background of the past had given me some kind of infallible wisdom for the future. This episode got my attention.
I suddenly realized that I needed help to learn how to lead people. John Maxwell, Ken Blanchard, Peter Drucker, Paul Glen, and Stephen Covey came to my rescue. The books these guys wrote were gold to me. They helped me understand what I was doing wrong and change my way of thinking. They helped me understand that leadership is more than knowledge, it is caring about people. Truly caring - not just paying lip service. As Maxwell is fond of saying, "people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."
I learned a valuable lesson that day. Strength and knowledge in one career field doesn't translate into strength and knowledge in another. Being an expert in one field of knowledge doesn't automatically make me an expert in another. My challenge to all leaders today is to assume you don't know everything and trust the wisdom of those that know what you don't know. That is a key to gaining trust between leaders and their teams.
No comments:
Post a Comment