Transitioning Into A Leadership Role? Read This
Transitioning into a leadership role is undoubtedly one of the biggest challenges you’ll ever face in your professional life especially if you come from the world of consulting. If you are in consulting, the pressure of managing your teams along with stakeholder management (both internal and external) may seem quite daunting and you’d really wish there was a leadership template that you could just lift and shift into your life to ensure a soft landing into this new role.
Alas..only if there was one!
As I stepped into this new role (a couple of years back now), the notion of my life’s hedonic treadmill became real. I realised the glory and accomplishment of this transition didn’t last too long and how exhausting relationship building, and being personable at all times really was. A quick reminiscence from earlier times, when I could lay low in my team and get away with it, seemed like a distant memory and I soon started second guessing my aspirations and readiness for it.
Being a woman of color, I often doubted my calibre while working at the biggest professional services in the world and felt like an imposter who didn’t belong there (mostly my own contrivance) but I am really grateful to the meritocratic system and the open and transparent culture at my firm that not only helped me survive but also thrive at workplace. A lot of trials and errors along the way coupled with some amazing leadership guidance and support (that I was fortunate to receive) really empowered me to unleash my potential and own this new space with panache.
Here’s a quick primer on some tips and tricks I learnt that really helped me in upping my consulting leadership game. I am no expert by any means but hope the below are insightful.
Step 1 | I started with identifying the fundamentals of being a leader :- Given the nature of consulting, one gets to work with different team members across various projects which always keeps things fun and exciting. I was lucky to work with multiple leaders in the first year of my promotion; and while that was a tad formidable as I had to understand their unique leadership styles in order to engage with them accordingly - it also presented me with an excellent opportunity to ascertain what I could really learn from each one of them and how I could build my own unique style.
I really wanted to understand what were the qualities that really defined leaders and what exactly helped us to identify them in a room full of people. And so, I observed.
Some leaders were great in painting a big picture view both for the project teams and for the clients while some were great in execution and ensuring quality standards for deliverables and some, well some were just larger than life.
But by far, the single biggest commonality I found among all leaders is their disposition and calm demeanour along with their thriftiness with words - their ability to describe something without being verbose and being able to elevate their message by putting meaningful labels on seemingly unrelated patterns. While speaking in a room full of people, they focused on quality and not quantity of words. Their main focus was on thinking holistically and passing down ideas to their teams and helping them execute on it while they focused on incremental builds - always staying two steps ahead in the game. Another big one was being lazy, yes you read it right, being just lazy enough to not jump on to start tasks themselves but, to wait for their team member to get cracking on it.
Step 2 | Then I doubled down on the fundamentals :- Following this observation, I started putting together a list of things I needed to do to get from here to there. As a first step, I started taking a leaf out of my leaders’ playbook by observing their language and vernacular in an attempt to be able to speak like them in meetings. I also started using time blocks in the morning for creative thinking (example creating a project approach, roadmap etc.) so I could carry out the right direction setting for the team.
I also learnt to be empathetic so I could understand where my team members were coming from, this enabled me to step into their shoes so I could help unlock their true potential. I realised, more often than not, it all boils down to our insecurities. Insecurities make us act the way we do both on the personal and professional front. Hence, I started out by identifying the potential insecurities of people I worked with in order to understand how I could allay these, so the team members would feel more empowered and could bring their best selves to work.
However, the toughest one for me was ‘being lazy’ as this didn’t come naturally to me. On many occasions in order to reduce time to value for any task, I got tempted to put my ideas into execution right away. Being patient was never one of my virtues so I had to consciously work on it. I realised being patient had two upsides; firstly by taking time to let my ideas marinate I often identified gaps in them myself, and having the buffer time enabled me to iterate the idea further until it was more fully formed so I could relay it to my team members more convincingly, and secondly, using the Ikea effect, I knew that my team members would feel more invested if they were hands-on involved in the end-to-end tasks while I was just an onlooker in the process. Trust me, this worked like a charm!
Public speaking and presentation was the next hurdle for me. I always took immense pride in being an eloquent speaker but I didn’t realise the changing landscape of work and its impact on delivering quality and conversational presentations. Golden rule of presentation - no one cares about all the details, it puts people off when presenters focus on every detail on a single slide. Additionally, most people have a short attention span so it’s best to select top 2–3 things that must be covered in a slide. Most importantly, while presenting making the audience feel involved by knowing when to pause to solicit their feedback goes a long way. Sidebar - in fact, this is also true with any meeting as well. Some people load meetings with a lot of agenda points when they should only be focused on a single outcome from the meetings and identify top 2–3 points which will help them get there.
Going back to slides, it’s also equally important to convey a narrative so those top 2–3 points fit well and give something more than what is outlined as content on the slide. This is because slides can always be circulated post the meeting and the intended audience can read through in their own time but the narrative, and the additional context is what makes a good presentation great and worth attending. These might seem like obvious areas to cover but it took me a while to understand, I really had to zero in on this to uplift my presentation delivery. I also learnt to never underestimate the power of a smiling face while presenting - and no, you don’t have to crack any dad/mom jokes in order to make others smile.
I am very much still in the learning phase and if I become half as good as some of the illustrious leaders I’ve worked with, I’ll consider myself a success but in the meantime, I try to stay humble and always remember this quote I read somewhere -
Leadership is an action, not a position
