3 Leadership Mistakes I Have Made and What I Learnt

Leadership is an achievement. Rightly, many people see it as a career goal and an endorsement of what they have achieved, their capabilities, and potential.

However, in many ways the real journey begins with our first leadership role. I know from experience that it pays to see it less as an achievement and more as the beginning of an exciting and challenging journey.

Looking back, I didn’t realise this and didn’t think about it enough. When I first became a leader, I assumed it was a comment on what I knew and could do, not on my potential to learn.

I had done some good work, and I fitted well into our company culture, but I had no idea of what lay ahead. In a word, it was lessons — lots of them — sometimes so fast I couldn’t keep up. Here are three of them.

I Micromanaged

I got my first career leadership role when I was promoted from our team of two to lead our fledgling department.

My colleague was more experienced and probably better at what we did than I was, but I had been there longer and I got the role. I quickly started to blow it. Subconsciously, I equated leadership with control, believing that oversight was what leaders should do to make sure things go to plan.

In a clumsy way, I started checking my colleague’s work. What I failed to realise was that my overbearing approach annoyed and stifled him and quickly undermined our relationship. In a very short space of time I had become a micro-manager.

The lesson here was clear: leadership is not about dictating every move. Trusting team members with responsibility and providing them with the autonomy to do their work is the baseline a leader owes the people they lead. It’s a respect thing, that leadership should not supersede unless there is a good reason.

I Thought I Had to Solve Every Issue

In my early days as a leader, I fell into the trap of believing that I needed to have all the answers, responding to every small issue. Without thinking about it, I believed this demonstrated my ability to lead.

However, my constant involvement in minor matters detracted from my ability to focus on my own work and bigger issues. Moreover, it inadvertently signalled a lack of trust in my team’s abilities to resolve issues independently.

And to cap it off, I (slowly) realised that every leader has a limited well of time and energy, and spending it on small issues was the opposite of investing it in ‘legacy’ actions that would have a positive effect for a long time.

The lesson was that a leader has limited time, energy and influence. That flittering those precious resources away on small, often ‘noisy’ but not truly important, issues limits their leadership, making it reactionary and tactical, not big picture and strategic.

I Forgot to Look Up

As the above two lessons illustrate, a consistent early mistake in my leadership journey was spending my time on small, today things, not big future things.

Looking back, I can see I was mostly entangled in short-term issues right in front of me, my team, or organisation. Similar to micro-managing, I didn't think it through and assumed leading was all about running the here and now effectively. But putting my time there meant I was not looking up and ahead.

It’s not surprising that leaders are unconsciously drawn to what they know. They’ve come from that work in their last role, and it’s a relatively safe space in which they know how to deliver.

The lesson is that in their new leadership role, they are not here to do their old job. They are there to think and work at a new level, with a greater focus on a bigger picture and the future.

I learnt to think forward, to carve out time for strategic planning. As I grew to understand that my job was the future and had the confidence not to cling to more tangible but less important here-and-now issues, I moved from making time to fit in some future thinking to making our future the focus of my work.

This strategic focus added far more value than solving daily issues. What’s more, the only way I could do this was developing people capable of handling operational details, allowing me to focus on navigating the organisation - a win for all concerned.

There are many more lessons in leadership than these three, but I now know they are classics. How are you going with them?