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About Evolving Management
Hello, and welcome to Evolving Management. We are excited to have you join us as we kick off this adventure together to share best practices and lessons learned with managing others. We believe that all leaders go through an evolution concerning their management skills and abilities. The most experienced leaders are continually going through a process of evolving management phases: Crawl, Walk, Run, Leap.
For those looking to elevate their careers, it’s essential to recognize and understand the ever-evolving stages of management. You need to be able to crawl successfully before you can walk, and before you can run at top speed, and gain enough momentum to leap to the next level. It can and should be a slow build. Depending on the task or situation you face, you may show different levels of proficiency and competency. That’s OK, and that’s understandable. No one is a master of management and has all the answers.
Lessons Learned
Throughout my career, I’ve seen many people receive promotions into spots where they are forced to be leaders too early. Sometimes, people are just not ready to face certain situations. Some may be great individual contributor’s, receiving promotions to take on managing a team or individuals. Some make it and become successful people leaders over time. Others struggle, fail, and negatively impact the engagement, growth, and progress of those following them (and even others around them).
Here some reasons why someone receives a promotion into a leadership position too early:
- Great individual contributor: Someone excellent at sales is rewarded with a promotion to lead a team. While they have proved that they can excel in the role of selling, they might lack the leadership experience to manage others.
- Lack of options: Promoting someone based solely on potential and the hope that they figure it out. To avoid the complexity and risk of hiring externally, you choose to go with a greener internal candidate, moving them to the next level sooner than they should.
- Concessions are made: Sometimes, hiring managers make concessions when they are unable to find the right fit. Ultimately, they focus solely on the potential they see or some qualities that may blind them to other risks with such a promotion. Other times, recruiting fatigue kicks in, and they decide, this person is “good enough.”
Crawl. Walk. Run. Leap.
Reflecting on my career, I may have been promoted too early coming out of university. Lacking some of the fundamentals which would come from training, or even understanding, that managing others is a process, I didn’t receive the coaching or leadership needed to be as successful as possible. But I also didn’t ask for help either. Fresh out of university, I thought I knew all the answers and that if I didn’t, I could figure it out as I went. The challenge was I didn’t know about the impact that my approach and actions could have on others always. I made some mistakes and learned some lessons, eventually becoming more successful with building and leading teams. Through a lot of trial and error, my experience grew, and I became a better manager.
Our Approach
I’m going to share some of the management lessons that I have learned over the years of being a people leader. My goal is to give you an accelerated crash course on some key fundamentals to help you along your way. For experienced leaders, we are a resource for you too. We design our content and solutions also to be a refresher resource.
Each piece of content is brief and concise so that the information is more natural to absorb. With research increasingly showing that everyone’s attention span continues to shrink, our goal is to make all of the content consumable in bite-size pieces. You can follow along from beginning to end or skip along to the areas you find most relevant to you based on where you are in the stages of management.
Remember, all leadership is situational, and the situations we face as leaders, change daily. Evolving Management offers to help leaders innovate while balancing continuous improvement, employee engagement in a culture of coaching and development.
If there are areas you want us to dive into, contact us and let us know how we can help.
For a regular dose of advice, tips, and tricks from Evolving Management, follow us on our company LinkedIn page. You can also follow me or my podcast, The Chris Hanna Show on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn or visit chrishanna.ca for more solutions. Let’s connect.
