Are you a dysfunctional leader?
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Contents
About (not) being the most intelligent person in the room
Many of us ended up where they are because we were good at what we do. I have talked about the problems with that in the past. And I want to reiterate the simple fact that being a great expert doesn’t make you a great leader.
Being a great expert can help you start with free authority in your team based on your knowledge, and it might allow you to support teams under challenging situations occasionally. But assisting a team in their day-to-day work has nothing to do with leadership.
This confusion is rooted in a misunderstanding of where leadership can support the organisation. Think of an organisation as an organism. As leadership, you often think you would be the brain of that organism, but that is not true. The leaders in the teams make up the brain. You are the evolution that creates an organism that will survive and thrive in the organisation’s ecosystem.
And this leads to a very different understanding of the skills you will need to be successful. A great leader will be successful in creating a high performing organisation independent of the domain. They may be more successful in a field others consider them experts in, as it might be easier for them to see which people are more talented and not just repeating what they read on Twitter.
Thus, if you are in development and believe you would fail to lead a sales department, don’t lead a development department. It’s as easy as that.