Leading Beyond your Expertise

To be a manager/leader has to do with achieving goals with and through people. The amazing thing is you don’t have to know it all. All you need is people who know their stuff. Knowing how to handle this people based on their various capacities and differences. I think this is where the hard work is.

Personally, I have had to lead teams where the members where more skilled than I was. I had the theoretical knowledge but I wasn’t so skilled in the practical aspect. But guess what? We could make a presentation and most times it had to be me who would take the accolades, the honor, e.t.c. if there were prizes to be won, I was the one who was seen as the face of the team. I was seen as being so good but really it was my team members. My code was, delegation, inclusivity and recognition of peculiarity of members.

Delegation in simple terms is just about knowing what needs to be done mostly by you, but assigning to someone else and following it up. I needed not to stress myself especially when I knew I was not so good at a particular aspect. Depending on how complex the task was I could even delegate the one’s I knew how to and focus more on Supervision. Even when I needed to be leading a presentation, I could just assign it to someone else. This made my team members committed to tasks and brought out their best potentials.

My inclusivity code made me to involve my team members in decision making process. The risk here is they might not make decisions to my interest but at least they felt they were heard. So what I did was, I met team members who were more influential and had more experience in that particular so I sold my ideas to them believing that their opinions might also be respected by their fellow team mates and it’s a win-win for me.

I had different personalities in my team. Some preferred to be given a task well on time, some didn’t mind, some preferred to keep their opinions to themselves, some just never meet up with deadlines and lots more. As much as I could delegate task, the way I supervised each of them was different, some I give them earlier deadlines, some, I get their opinions outside meeting times, and for some, I just know when to keep them shut. In this aspect I mean having that team member who just feels they are better and should be the lead not you. Especially in meetings when given opportunity to speak, they could go overboard, and because I take time to study them, I just hit them with a question to throw them off balance. And I always got away with it.

To be a leader or manager is quite tough, you have to learn to be everything for every situation. It was not always easy, sometimes you feel you have a hang on it all but those at the top would just call you in sighting a loop hole. In all you have to be smart, resilient and quick to take decisions in various cases in order to meet up with the set goal/ objective.