If you were lucky, your employer gave you some basic leadership training when you moved from being an individual contributor to being a manager.
And if you’re like most managers, you’ve also discovered that living out that management training is harder than it looks. It’s not enough to learn the mechanics of management. It’s not enough to understand the processes behind the skills of leadership.
There’s a reason that studies find that adding a period of one-to-one coaching after leadership training can more than triple a new manager’s improvement compared to training alone.
The reason is that succeeding as you advance in leadership has far less to do with new activities and far more to do with a new identity.
Long after your title changes, your old identity continues driving your ongoing behavior. You’re used to being the one who shows people how things are done. You’re used to being the one to solve the sticky problems. You’re used to the recurring satisfaction of completing concrete tasks.
Your success has always been about your personal expertise and accomplishments. Now, your success is largely in other people’s hands, and that can be hard to accept. It’s hard to release control.
You can describe delegation, but it’s much harder to put it into practice.
The problem isn’t knowledge. The problem is a mind that hasn’t caught up to the brain. It’s a way way of being that hasn’t yet aligned with a new way of understanding.
If you find yourself in this kind of a situation, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.