Widen Your Span: Why Rock-Star Individual Contributors Fail as Leaders
How many rock-star individual contributors do you know who failed as leaders?
Successful engineers, geologists, operations professionals, and other technical experts don't always make successful leaders.
This episode of The Energy Detox uses the EQT Washington & Green Counties’ Covered Bridge Festival to explore three challenges that often accompany the move from individual contributor to leader: protection, capacity, and span.
What should new leaders protect? How can they create capacity through delegation? And how can they widen the span of their expertise, influence, and impact without having to be personally involved in everything?
How far does your expertise travel without you?
Visit WidenYourSpan.com for more bridge-inspired leadership lessons.
Transcript
(AI training in progress; please excuse any errors)
How many engineers, geologists, other technical professionals do you know who had great success as individual contributors were given a leadership role, and then failed? Similarly, how many operations-minded folks do you know who had great success on the front lines as company men out in the field, were brought into an office setting, given a leadership opportunity, and failed. Well, there's a good chance that a number of people come to mind for you and I, as a coach. Now, well, one of the most common reasons that I'm brought into companies is to address this very situation, and so today I'm going to step through some of the most common reasons for these failures, and of course, step through some of the most common ways to mitigate the likelihood of these new leaders not having a ton of success right out of the gate.
00:49
And the first of these things that I see quite often is that these new leaders who had great success before come in and waste so much time protecting something that does not need to be protected, that is their former identity. So many leaders come in and they're worried, unconsciously in most cases, about their reputation for getting results and being an expert and whatever it is that they're tasked with. But guess what? I never hear somebody say, "Hey, you know what, Joe? We brought this person into a leadership role. Turns out we were wrong about them. They weren't as savvy. They weren't as sharp as we thought they were. That never happens. So guess what? You don't have to worry about protecting this former identity. What you do have to worry about is protecting the time and the space necessary to grow and develop as a leader.
01:37
So the question is, well, how do you do that? Well, it's twofold. One, if you are this new leader, you need to articulate what things are going to change now that you're in this leadership role. In other words, what expectations did people have for you before that might need to be adjusted at least in the interim? Now, I'm not saying you go forth and say, "Hey, I'm a new leader. Here's my excuse to lower the bar and produce, you know, lesser quality outputs to ignore safety to ignore regulatory requirements. No, obviously that's not the case, especially in the industries in which I work. But what I am saying is, you need to set expectations and say, hey, you know what? If you get this a little bit slower, if it looks a little bit different in the interim, that's to be expected because my primary responsibility now is to grow and develop my team. Now, again, I get we're talking about working managers here, middle management. They're doing their old job. They're trying to grow and develop as a leader. It ain't easy. I get it. But if you're not articulating and giving yourself that space, protecting that space to grow and develop with the people around you, it's not going to happen.
02:38
But I would argue more importantly, if you're in senior leadership, if you're responsible for promoting somebody into this new supervisory role, you need to do the same thing. You need to create and protect that space for that individual to grow and develop his or her team. And again, there's a million ways to do that, but the most important thing to do is to articulate it. To tell that individual, hey, here are the ways in which you can fail out of the gate. Here, use your newness, if you will, as an excuse to fail a little bit, to you know what, temper the expectations of the people around you. That's okay, and I'm here to support you in that. That's on senior leadership to communicate. And to underscore that point, I've got one anecdote for you from an individual I hired as a completions engineer long ago, and he told me about a year ago. He said, "Hey Joe, you know when you hired me on, you told me that I have an excuse. I have a period of time that I'm not going to get at any other time in my career to basically make mistakes, to fail. I'm new to the company. I'm new to this role. I can go forth and fail.
03:40
And quite frankly, I did not remember this conversation, so I'm going to take him at his word. But the moral of the story is that gave him the ability to take a breath, to ease his nerves a bit, and go forth and fail a little bit to take some risks, if you will. And that was healthy for him. It was healthy for the team, apparently. And again, it's the same type of thing that we're talking about here.
04:01
That being said, why am I sharing this in front of a covered bridge? Well, this bridge, which is one of nine bridges that are part of the EQT Washington and Greene Counties Covered Bridge Festival, has a roof and walls for a reason. All covered bridges do. It's not just to look nice; it actually serves a purpose, and that is to protect the underlying infrastructure by being covered, the bridge will last longer, and that brings us back to this idea of protecting what actually matters. If you're going to build walls and a roof around something, don't build it around your former identity. That's not in question. What is in question is your ability to motivate others, to communicate more effectively, to show executive presence, build your covered bridge, if you will, around that because that is much more likely to be called into question and to deteriorate early on in your leadership journey, if you will. That being said, covered bridge here also works nicely because most of these covered bridges do not have very high weight limits. This one behind me is about a three-ton limit. Some of these bridges you can't even drive over. It's pedestrians only, and of course that's okay. That weight limit is is not a design flaw. It's it's just part of the design, and that's okay.
05:12
But it calls into mind, of course, new leaders who have extra full plates. Many working managers who already have a lot of their old job responsibilities, and now are adding on people management, and I get that there's no quick fix, and you know to the extent there is a fix, usually surrounds being more effective as a delegator, which again is easier said than done. And so that being said, today I'm just going to share one one delegation observation and tip related to not just new leaders, but quite frankly, leaders of all experience levels, and that is to make sure that you are not treating delegation as all or nothing. So often, when it comes to delegation, people say, "Hey, you know what? I need to get this off my plate, but I'm not quite ready yet. You know, a little bit more training and sharing, and I can finally hand this off to somebody else. When in reality, you can delegate partially. Delegation occurs on a scale. You can delegate something and have it essentially be micromanagement. You can say, "Hey, look, I'm giving you this task and responsibility, but I'm going to check in a whole bunch. And you know what? Sometimes that's okay, especially if you're communicating it up front. Versus the other end of the scale, which is, hey, I'm giving you this, and I'm giving you full ownership. I'm not going to ask you hardly any questions. I don't need any updates. You need something from me. You know, come and ask, of course. But otherwise, it's all yours. And then obviously, there's other things you delegate that are somewhere in between in terms of how much you know updates you need, how much information you need, and how informed you want to stay. The moral of the story is, don't just say, "Hey, I'm going to delegate this or not. Communicate what type of delegation it is, and you're going to find it far easier to get stuff off your plate that doesn't need to be there. And the final tie-in between covered bridges and new leaders has to do with the fact that these covered bridges, by and large, do not have a very wide span. In fact, the widest span of all these bridges is a whopping 77 feet. Not exactly the Golden Gate Bridge, but that's okay, right? Like, people are still going to come here and enjoy themselves, enjoy the festivities. And so, what does that have to do with new leaders?
07:18
Well, new leaders need to be coming in and saying, hey, look, here's my current span of influence. How do I widen that span without me having to be directly involved? How do I expand my technical expertise deeper into the organization without me having to be directly involved? And what's the answer? Well, one of the answers that I encourage all the time is to basically go out and do a roadshow, go out and have conversations with other people in the company, other leaders especially. Use your newness as an excuse to go out on again a roadshow of sorts, not to sell something, not just to ask a bunch of questions about how to be a more effective leader, but simply to understand how your team is connected to this other team. In some cases, it might be you know second or third degree connections, and that's okay, because by doing that, you'll be front and center on the minds of those other individuals, and they can bring you deeper into organizations. They can bring you into meetings. They can bring you into rooms without you actually having to physically be there. That is how you can again go deeper and widen your span without you having to do it all yourself. And as you ponder that, if you're watching this in time, I encourage you to head down or up to the EQT Washington and Greene Counties Covered Bridge Festival. Or if it's too late for this year, put it on your calendar for next year. And in the meantime, if you're interested in more bridge-related ties between leadership and the energy industry and technical and operational leaders, I encourage you to head to widenyourspan.com