As a leader, the important thing is not to learn any management skills, but to master the mentality that a leader should have, that is, to help one's subordinates succeed as one's own success. If you don't have this mentality, you will only be tossing about some interpersonal relationships all day long.
Text/Lin Zhenggang (CEO of Gangyi Leadership Company, former President of Cisco China)
The first thing to improve leadership is to manage yourself well.
When we say that a person has leadership ability, we actually mean that he has the power to influence others. Even though he may be doing a very basic level of work, he still has the ability to make others willing to follow him, learn from him, and imitate him. Therefore, the most important performance of leadership is to be able to make others follow their own actions.
From another perspective, management is to manage others, and leadership is to manage yourself. As long as leaders manage themselves well, they will naturally have many followers. This is leadership. Therefore, the biggest difference between a leader and a manager is attention. The manager puts his attention on the other side, and the leader puts his attention on himself.
So the first thing to improve leadership is to manage yourself well. I think the first thing to do in management is to throw away the word "management". No one wants to let others manage, so once you try to manage others, you are already in trouble.
Management is to be a man
As a manager, you are managing the behavior of everyone under you. When an employee appreciates your way of being a person and doing things from the bottom of his heart, and treats you as his learning object, he is naturally willing to obey your management.
As a leader, the important thing is not to learn any management skills, but to master the mentality that a leader should have, that is, to help one's subordinates succeed as one's own success. If you don't have this mentality, you will only be tossing about some interpersonal relationships all day long. Management is to be a man. To be a good manager, you must be a good man. The most important thing is to cultivate a good attitude, cultivate good communication skills, and learn the knowledge you need. This is what you need to do in your life. There is only a starting point and no end.
Managers must first manage themselves. If they can’t manage themselves well, there will be no basis for being a good manager. Self-management is something that people do not do well in their whole life, and there is no end to it. The sooner you start, the better. Self-management is actually cultivating a good life and the habits of being a person and doing things. Everyone understands these, but how much you can do, choose a simple thing to start today.
Help subordinates succeed
As a manager, your only responsibility is to ensure the success of your employees. Their success is your success. This is the biggest difference between ordinary employees and managers.
I have a colleague who has been in sales for more than ten years. He is a very successful salesperson. Customers like him very much. Once he asked me to talk and he asked, "Boss, when can I get promoted?" I said what you want to do, and he said he wants to manage. I have more contact with this colleague at work, so I know him better. I know that he is a very capable salesperson. But I am also very aware of his weaknesses, he does not know how to organize the team.
So I told him: "When your mentality is ready, you can be promoted. You have enough experience in doing things, but you currently lack the mentality of being a manager. I can't let you sit in a managerial position. Cultivate this mentality, because then you will hurt a lot of people. Therefore, when you cultivate this mentality, I will let you sit in the position of manager."
Why can't many outstanding young people make the transition from a grassroots employee to a good manager? The reason is that their mentality has never changed. The biggest difference between grassroots employees and managers is their mentality. As a grassroots employee, if you win, you win. The credit is yours, and you are the star. But as a manager, you must not have a star mentality. Instead, you must recommend the people behind the scenes, that is, your subordinates. Each of them is your star.
*This article first appeared in the July 2020 issue of "Manager" magazine