IT Leadership

No matter your role, title, or experience, one thing remains constant: You must lead yourself first before you lead a team. This leadership starts with self-awareness, which allows you to recognize your emotions, values, and biases and how they impact your work. Self-awareness is the first step toward building solid leadership. From there, you can develop your leadership identity and gain the respect of your team.

As a leader, you’re responsible for guiding your team, and that includes providing constructive feedback, upholding company standards, and providing a clear path for growth. However, this becomes difficult when leaders fail to hold themselves accountable to the same standards.

Leading by example is the best way to encourage and motivate your team to reach goals, meet deadlines, and communicate effectively. Ultimately, leading yourself and your team with integrity and respect will create a healthy work environment and propel your company forward. Now let’s break down the actionable steps you can take to lead yourself and your team to success!

The Importance of Leading Yourself

Before you can lead a team, you must master self-leadership. As a self-leader, you hold yourself accountable to your words, actions, and behaviors, and do not rely on anyone else to do so. You set your own standards and priorities and stay true to your beliefs, even when it’s challenging or inconvenient. This leads to meaningful and sustainable success, both for you and your team.

The path to self-leadership begins with building self-awareness. Self-awareness is a vital skill for leaders looking to improve their effectiveness. This skill allows you to recognize your strengths and weaknesses and understand your emotions and how they affect you and your work. It’s easy to overlook your weaknesses or deny your feelings. acknowdging them takes courage and humility, but doing so is essential to your personal and professional growth.

Once you’ve honed your self-awareness, you can take accountability for your actions a step further and work on your interpersonal skills. Interpersonal skills, like communication, empathy, and building rapport, are necessary for any leader. By strengthening your emotional intelligence, you can approach discussions with empathy, openness, and clarity, allowing you to solve problems more effectively.

When leaders prioritize self-leadership, they gain a clearer vision of their goals and values. This clarity translates to confidence and enables leaders to motivate and inspire their teams. In contrast, leaders who ignore self-leadership may experience feelings of insecurity and uncertainty. These leaders may struggle to guide their teams, as they lack the clarity and confidence needed to motivate and inspire others.

Of course, self-leadership doesn’t mean avoiding failure or personal growth. Instead, it’s about owning your mistakes, learning from them, and using them to improve. It’s also about understanding your emotional reactions to challenges and obstacles.

When you lead yourself well, you become a role model for your team, and teammates will naturally look to you for guidance and direction. Your ability to navigate challenging situations with integrity will earn you and your team respect. So, it’s crucial to lead with honesty and integrity and to uphold these values, regardless of whether it’s easy or convenient.

Now, let’s look at how you can bring your leadership skills to a team setting.

Leading Your Team

As a leader, there are several key behaviors and attitudes you should adopt to support and motivate your team. These include:

• Providing constructive feedback
• Upholding standards
• Offering a clear path for growth

1. Providing Constructive Feedback

Offering constructive feedback is a necessary aspect of team leadership. This means giving honest feedback, especially when it’s crucial to do so. Of course, conveying criticism can be challenging, especially when you’re responsible for evaluating someone’s work. Nonetheless, it’s important to provide your teammates with feedback that can help them learn and grow.

When offering constructive feedback, follow the sandwich method: Start with a positive, then provide the negative feedback, and finally, conclude with another positive. Balance is key with this method, so you don’t want to dilute the impact of your feedback with unnecessary praise. The first two pieces of feedback in the sandwich should be your focal points, with the third being less critical (but still genuine).

Example Feedback Sandwich

Start with a positive piece of feedback:

> I really liked your presentation style. You clearly understand this > industry and its trends, and I believe you are well-suited to present on > this topic.

Now, provide the constructive criticism:

> However, I do feel that some of your arguments could have been more > thoroughly developed. While you addressed the topic from a high level, we > need to dig deeper into the data. You also forgot to include slides that > specifically addressed our company action items and how this industry > impacts our work. To improve this, I would recommend spending more time > collecting and analyzing data to support your points.

Finally, provide a third piece of feedback:

> Overall, you have excellent industry knowledge, and with more attention > to detail and analysis, your presentations can become outstanding.

Remember, the main point of constructive feedback is to help someone improve, so ensure you offer specific suggestions for improvement whenever possible.

Tips for Providing Constructive Feedback

• Focus on the issue, not the person. Avoid using language that might personalize the criticism.
• Provide specific examples to make your feedback more impactful.
• Stay positive but realistic. Help the team understand what they can do to improve and reach the next level.
• Offer potential solutions or alternatives, so the team feels more empowered and in control of their growth.

Remember, you’re guiding your team members, and your feedback should help them understand where they excel and where they can improve. This way, they can further develop their skills and grow in their role.

2. Upholding Standards

As a leader, you’re responsible for upholding and enforcing the company’s professional standards. You should expect and demand consistency in performance, quality, and behavior from yourself and your team.

Tips for Upholding Standards

• Lead by example. Personal integrity is critical to gaining the respect of your team.
• Clearly communicate standards to your team, and provide examples of what these look like in action.
• Be consistent in your messaging and actions.
• Avoid hypocrisy. If you expect your team to follow a specific code of conduct, ensure you follow it too.

3. Offering a Clear Path for Growth

Great leaders provide their teams with a clear path for growth. This includes mapping out goals and providing the necessary resources and support to help teammates excel.

Tips for Mapping Out Goals and Providing Support

• Get to know each team member on a personal level. Understand their interests, goals, and skills to help them develop personally and professionally.
• Provide learning opportunities and encourage education through courses, workshops, or training sessions.
• Offer specific and actionable feedback to help them grow and develop.
• Create a culture of open communication and discussion.

Building a Culture of Accountability

As a leader, you have the power to create a culture of accountability within your team. Start by setting clear expectations and goals, and ensure each team member understands their role in achieving these.

Accountability requires transparency, so make it clear that you expect individuals to deliver their responsibilities timely and with high quality. If someone fails to meet these expectations, there should be consequences. Similarly, reward teams that excel and exceed expectations.

Tips for Building a Culture of Accountability

• Encourage open communication and feedback within the team.
• Model accountability through your actions.
• Provide the tools and resources needed to succeed.
• Offer support and guidance to help team members achieve their goals.
• Acknowledge and celebrate both individual and team achievements.

Conclusion

Leading yourself and your team requires accountability, and accountability starts with you. By developing self-awareness, you can take responsibility for your actions and behaviors to create a clear path for growth. Leading yourself first allows you to develop the necessary skills to guide and motivate your team.

Remember, your team looks to you to set standards, provide feedback, and offer support. By upholding these responsibilities, you’ll create a culture of accountability and help your team succeed.

Leading yourself and your team requires accountability, and accountability starts with you. By developing self-awareness, you can take responsibility for your actions and behaviors and create a clear path for growth. It allows you to develop the skills needed to guide and motivate your team.

Lead yourself first, and you’ll be well on your way to leading a high-performing, motivated team that produces quality work and achieves its goals.