While you do need a range of skills to be a good leader, the reality is you don’t need to have experience in every single area. To better understand this, Executive Interview Coaching founder Richard Elstone explains how people’s careers are often built in three main stages.
“The first one is the technical skills,” he says. “You leave university and you become a Finance Analyst or you’re in sales or a Marketing Coordinator. You’re finetuning your technical side.”
Richard says inevitably, the next stage in the career is managing a team. “Being a manager, you’re normally managing or team-leading other technical people in a similar skill area. In other words, you’re a financial analyst and you’re leading Financial Planning and Analysis or you become a Financial Controller.”
The final step in your career is leadership. “Being a leader means you’re leading people you don’t necessarily have experience with,” says Richard. “For instance, if you’re a Chief Financial Officer, you might not have experience in managing treasury as a technical area, or you might not have experience doing mergers and acquisitions, but you’ll have technical experts reporting into you.”
So, how does it all fit together?
Imagine an upside down pyramid
Often people think of organisational structure like a pyramid, but Richard suggests thinking of it as an upside down pyramid.
At the top, you have the customers and the people supporting the sales team, then the people supporting them, like the sales managers, and so forth. At the very bottom is the CEO – the person who supports the rest of the organisation.
“At the end of the day, they’re there to be the escalating point,” says Richard. “They’re the last port of call. The CEO is at the bottom in a supporting structure.”
So, which skills are most important as a leader?
Relationship management
The further you go up the organisation, the more it’s about being a leader and the less it’s about your technical abilities, says Richard.
“It’s your ability to lead leaders that’s in question,” he says. “By this point, a lot of what you’re required to do is basically relationship management. It’s about developing relationships with external suppliers or with regulators if you’re in a bank or dealing with customers or other organisations.”
Delegation
Being able to delegate to others is another really important skill as a leader. If you don’t know about organisational risk, for example, hire a chief risk officer whose function is to look after risk.
Steve Jobs once said:
"It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do."
“A good leader is a person who has the confidence to say, ‘I don’t know, what do you think’?” says Richard. “The leader’s job is to find subject matter experts who are able to do their job well, so that their part of the organisation runs really well. So many leaders become ineffectual because they take everything on themselves.”
Richard says delegation is also important because subordinates want to be challenged and stretched, otherwise they likely won’t feel fulfilled in their role. That can lead to high staff turnover.
Streamline and support
Another key skill is the ability to streamline and support your colleagues – to essentially ‘be the broom’, according to Richard.
“Your job as the leader is to sweep all the rubbish out of the way and let your leadership team and your managers do their job,” says Richard. “You’re a support mechanism. You get rid of all the ‘noise’ so that the people who report into you can do their job.”
Planning your next executive appointment?
Executive Interview Coaching offers a range of services to give executives the confidence to excel in the interview room.
“When you go into an interview, you really need to prepare numerous examples of how you improved relationships, delegated, and supported your team,” says Richard.
“Everybody who I coach is a leader and I help them come up with impactful examples about how they’ve exercised their leadership skills, so that they’re fully prepared for the interview process ahead. We also delve into their leadership style and unpack what their team might say about them as a leader.”
Get in touch today!