3 Leadership Skills That Turn Managers Into True Leaders in Edmonton (Listening, Communication & Courage)
Why Most Managers Struggle to Become Leaders
The First Leadership Skill: Listening
My name is Adam Melnyk, leadership coach and owner of The Momentum Coach. And today I’m going to teach you the three core skills to level you from manager into leader.
The first skill is something that we do every day. In fact, I guarantee you, you think you’re really good at this skill, and I can almost guarantee you, you are not. You’re probably crap at it. And it’s not your fault. It’s because no one taught you how to do it correctly. And that is listening.
Most of my clients, when they come to talk to me, they say, “Hey, I’m such a great listener. I listen to people all the time. I understand them. I hear what they say. I hear their problems. I’m a phenomenal listener.”
But when I get into the meat and potatoes of it, no, they’re not. They’re absolute garbage at it. And that’s because when they listen, they listen from a point of view of themselves.
What do I think about what they just said? What do I want out of this conversation? What do I believe should happen?
And it’s always I, I, I, I, I, I.
Which is phenomenal because that I position, one, allows you to understand what’s going on internally with yourself, but also allowed you to climb the ranks and the ladders of leadership because, let’s be honest, in order to stand out, you had to be a bit narcissistic and think about yourself.
The issue is, if you want to move from management into a leadership role, you have to stop thinking about yourself and you have to start listening from a different perspective, and that means listening to them.
They are coming to you with information. Why is this information so important that they are saying it to you? What feelings do they have around this information? What do they want out of the conversation? What do they want to see? Why is this conversation so upsetting? Or why is this conversation so exciting to them?
It’s a completely different frame of mind to start listening from.
And when I talk to leaders, most of them don’t listen from this perspective. In fact, they listen from the “I.” And in fact, they love to talk about themselves ad nauseam, which is not what you’re supposed to do.
Which is why the first skill is listening.
Listening is critical if you would like to:
- Understand why somebody is coming to you with a problem or information.
- Hear problems or issues that are arising within the organization.
- Be able to make people just feel heard and seen within the organization.
It is a critical skill, and to honestly master it, you’d be looking at at least a few years, if not a lifelong journey.
Listening is a core skill that you can go as deep as you want with it.
Communication Is More Than Just Talking
Leaders Must Learn to Speak Their Team’s Language
Which brings us into skill number two, and that is communication.
This isn’t just communicating information. A lot of leaders, especially managers, when they first get into a management role, they just want to communicate information.
And then they get frustrated because their employees or the person they’re communicating with either:
- Doesn’t do what they want.
- Doesn’t understand them.
And that’s because, when you get into it, the leader, the manager, doesn’t know how to communicate.
See, it’s not about just communicating information. It’s communicating information in a way that the other person hears you.
And this is critical because the golden rule in communication is: it does not matter what you’ve said. If the other person doesn’t hear it, you’ve wasted your time.
And I see managers make this mistake all the time where they are communicating in a way that they themselves understand, but not in a way that their workers understand.
A fabulous example of this is I remember watching a team meeting where the manager is standing in front of their team and talking about data, talking about metrics, talking about lag indicators, talking about research, talking about all this crap.
When you looked at the team, the team completely glazed out. They didn’t care. That wasn’t how they communicated.
They communicated in shorthand. They used a completely different set of jargon. They used a completely different set of words. They used a different set of metaphors and similes to communicate their message. And they cared about different things.
And so, when they had this manager just talking about data and metrics, the team wasn’t listening. They just didn’t care what the manager had to say.
And that’s where the manager had to learn, “Hey, if I want my team to care about this information, about doing what I want them to do, I need to stop communicating in a way that I want to be communicated with and start communicating in a way that they want to be communicated with.”
An example of this is I had a manager that worked with a bunch of nurses. Again, my background is in nursing.
And when they first started really getting into the management side of things, they were talking as if they were talking to executives. They were talking about SWOT analysis. They were talking about how exposed they were in the business. They were talking about profit. They were talking about data.
And they were doing this to the frontline staff.
The frontline staff does not care about your statistics. They do not care about profits. They don’t care about SWOT. They don’t care about how vulnerable they are.
They are there to work with patients, to work with clients.
And the minute you start talking to them about this crap, they tuned out.
So what the manager had to learn is, “Hey, if I want my people to understand me, to hear me, so then they can do what I really want them to do, I need to talk in their language.”
And this is where they had to change their approach from talking about all this BS, all this profit BS, all about grants and SWOT and all this shenanigans, just cut it out and start talking about people, compassion, empathy, and real life impact on the ground that the frontline staff saw.
And when they changed up just the dialect, the wording, and the general view of the conversation, all of a sudden the frontline staff were like, “Yeah, I get it. I should be doing this. We should be doing this because of A, B, C. It makes complete sense.”
And so again, it’s communicating, but it’s communicating in a way that the other person hears.
Courage Separates Leaders From Managers
Why Playing It Safe Holds Leaders Back
And this leads us into number three. You need to have courage.
I know courage is something that is desperately lacking in today’s society. And it’s not our fault.
When we look at the human species, I guess we could call it, or the human race, we are scared of the unknown. We do not like things that we do not understand.
This is why, when we are children, we’re scared of the dark because the dark could hold anything. It could hold monsters. It could hold bad guys. It could hold animals, tigers. We don’t know.
It is the unknown. And the unknown to us is dangerous. We could die out there.
And as a result, we, as humans growing up, we don’t like the unknown. We don’t like things that we don’t understand. We don’t like people that we don’t understand, cultures that we don’t understand.
It’s scary. This is completely normal.
The issue is, if you’re always going to play it safe, you’re never going to see the rewards.
And I see this with a lot of managers where they are risk adverse. They are not brave individuals. In fact, they would do everything in their power just to play it safe.
But the thing is, no risk, no reward.
If you’re not willing to stick your nose out there, if you’re not willing to venture into that unknown, if you’re not willing to try new things, you will never succeed.
I can promise you that on a personal level, but also on a team level and an organization level.
You as a manager, you as a leader have to be okay risking it. Risk it for the biscuit.
To walk into the unknown, to face your fears, try something new, and embrace failure.
This is harder than I make it sound because, again, we as a species are incredibly risk adverse. We love to play it safe. We love known quantities. We don’t like what we don’t understand.
But again, if you want to succeed, you have to be okay marching into that unknown and making that unknown become known.
Leadership Growth Happens Outside Your Comfort Zone
Embracing Discomfort to Become a Better Leader
It’s funny. I was recently just talking with a client and we were talking about creating bravery inside of themselves.
And they said to me, “I don’t even know where to start.”
And we started talking, and it turns out that something that was on their mind was going to a leadership seminar that was hosted every month at a bar.
They were nervous about it.
And talking with them, I said, “What makes this so nervous to you? What makes this so scary?”
And they said, “Well, I don’t know these people. I don’t know anyone there. What would I even say? What would I even do? It makes me nervous. It’s scary. It’s the unknown.”
And I said to them, “Well, yeah, of course it’s scary. You’ve never done this before. You don’t have the experience. You don’t have the knowledge. You don’t have the wisdom to navigate it, which makes this uncomfortable.”
“And in order to grow as an individual, you need to embrace that uncomfortable feeling. March into the unknown and just live in that moment.”
“And through it, you will learn. You’ll gather the experience to navigate that situation. You’ll gather the tools to navigate that situation correctly and the wisdom to be successful when that situation arises again.”
And that personal growth came from being in the unknown, by recognizing that, “Hey, this makes me uncomfortable. This is scary,” and intentionally marching towards it.
It’s a skill that many people do not develop, but it is critical if you want success in this world.
So, to get back to it, there’s really three skills if you want to level up from a manager into a leader that you have to practice:
- Your listening skills
- Your communication skills
- And leveling up that bravery
If you found this video helpful, please like, subscribe, and share it with somebody that could also use this information.
If you’re struggling as a leader, either at work or in your personal life, feel free to reach out to myself at www.themomentumcoach.com and sit down for a free 1 hour coaching session where we can really hash out where you are struggling, where you want to go, and start breaking those steps down into easily manageable bite sized chunks to get you to your destination.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you guys in the next video. Cheers.