5 Essential Tips for Aspiring Leaders 🏆
Issue #97: How to Transform from a Solo Performer to an Effective Leader. Google AI Lab. Pale Blue Dot.
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💡 Here are 3-tips to help you learn, grow, and be inspired this week!
🎓 Learn
Anyone who takes responsibility is a leader in my eyes.
This week, I met 20+ senior engineers in my company taking on small (formal and informal) forms of leadership in their roles.
The journey from being a solo performer to leading people and projects can be both stressful and rewarding.
To support them, I conducted a small workshop where I shared my leadership lessons, techniques, and mental models.
Today, I want to share those tips with you. Whether you aspire to be a leader or are already one, I hope these insights will help you grow and inspire you on your journey.
Tip #1: Earn Respect, Not Love
Many people confuse respect with love. As a leader, you’ll need to make tough decisions, deliver bad news, and demand results from your team. If you expect everyone to love you all the time, you’ll be disappointed. Focus on doing the right things, educating and challenging your team, and being a fair, clear, and direct leader. Respect will last much longer than love.
Here’s how to earn it:
Be reliable: Keep your promises and proactively apologize if you can’t.
Build team spirit: Encourage each member to play their best and contribute to the team’s success.
Be fair: Avoid bias, favoritism, and sugarcoating.
Communicate openly: Don’t shy away from difficult conversations.
Tip #2: Be a Guide, Not a Guru
If you doubt your ability to lead, remember you only need to be a couple of steps ahead of your team in skill and experience. You don’t need to be an expert. As a guide, show your team how you tackle problems and share your learning journey with them. People often find it easier to learn from someone just a few steps ahead, not a distant expert.
Here’s how to be a good guide:
Show, don’t tell: Demonstrate your methods and problem-solving process instead of just giving instructions.
Be honest: Let your team know you’re a fellow learner, not an all-knowing expert.
Tip #3: Be Clear, Not Clever
In the early days of my leadership, I thought I needed to appear smart. I was wrong. Effective leadership starts with clarity. Be clear about your values, vision, boundaries, and communication. Ambiguity, misunderstanding, miscommunication, and misalignment cost more to a goal than a lack of a strategy. Use these tools for clarity:
How to Work with Me Guide: Create a document outlining your leadership style, preferences, communication protocols, frustration points, etc., and share it with your team. My friend (and old mentor) Chris Lema has a great post on creating your “How to Work With Me Guide.”
4W Method - I recently started using this method to assign important projects to my team.
What are the key actions?
Why are we doing this?
When does it need to be done?
Who will be the pilot (responsible) and co-pilot for this project?
Tip #4: Be a Mentor, Not a Parent
As a leader, connect genuinely with your team members. Instead of treating them as friends or family, be a mentor or coach. Support them in achieving their meaningful life goals. Here is how I capture my and my team’s meaningful life goals.
This approach will earn you respect and make your team more valuable contributors.
For inspiration, look at how Mindvalley encourages employees to share their meaningful goals.
Tip #5: Master Delegation
Delegation is crucial for leadership. Know what to delegate and how to do it. Here are four levels of delegation:
Tasks: Simple things like organizing files, booking a hotel, etc. A quick video tutorial (loom) can suffice.
Project: Combinations of tasks with some decision-making. Organizing a company retreat or event is an example of a project. Use the 4W method for delegation.
Decision: Delegating a decision is tricky. Clearly defined values, red flags, and constraints are very important. Create a to-avoid list.
Goal: Share a problem or desired outcome and let someone figure out the projects, tasks, and decisions.
Key Takeaway:
Remember, taking on a leadership role is a choice. While it can be rewarding, it also brings stress. Make sure you’re fully committed to the role, not just doing it because someone else expects you to. Focus on earning respect, being a guide, ensuring clarity, mentoring your team, and mastering delegation to lead effectively.
🚀 Growth Tip
I’m not sure if you know this already, Google Labs is a platform where Google showcases its latest AI experiments and technology. It serves as a hub for users to explore and engage with cutting-edge AI projects.
Google Labs is free to use. You can access and experiment with the AI tools and technologies showcased on the platform without any cost.
🤩 Inspiration
Do you want to guess what this tiny, pale blue dot circled in this image is?
My friend and business partner, Aslam, knowing my interest in space and spirituality, told me about the pale blue dot.
In 1990, as the Voyager 1 spacecraft was leaving our solar system, Carl Sagan convinced NASA to turn the camera back toward the sun and take one last photo of our planet.
Earth appeared as a pale blue dot—a single pixel in the vast, grainy image.
Every time I look at this picture, I am spiritually humbled by how tiny our entire planet, with its nearly 8 billion people, appears in the vastness of space. It puts our individual egos and fears into perspective.
Anil
May the Peaceful Growth be with you! 🪴