When there is a big promotion to senior executive or management levels, career professionals who occupy functional supervisory role becomes entitled to certain benefits and other forms of recognition by virtue of their managerial status. An individual named manager is now a member of the executive or management team, and people who were recently his peers now directly report to him. His functional peers from earlier in his career report to him two or three levels removed from his current position.
As a manager, he will be asked to contribute in ways that are remarkably different from how he has contributed in previous roles. Though his contributions will partly depend on how he uses the information he receives, he knows that he doesn’t have all the information he needs and isn’t sure whether all the information he has is correct. He must become a skilled interpreter and seeker of information if he’s going to succeed at this level.
All this requires a leadership maturity for which no one has prepared him. Mature leaders have developed empathy, timing, judgment, and sources of information; they have learned to listen and seek to absorb information from sources both inside and outside their organizations through formal and informal means. They have learned how to talk to (and correct) their people without smothering creativity and risk-taking.
Mature leaders have developed empathy, timing, judgment, and sources of information; they have learned to listen and seek to absorb information
They recognize the importance of thinking long term-term as well as short-term. In other words, they have grown up as both managers and leaders. Some managers never develop leadership maturity, much to the detriment of their functions and the business. Leadership maturity is an overarching concept that describes the requirements of the role of people in strategic positions. To develop it, the first step is to understand it. Let’s begin by learning about its two essential components.
To understand leadership maturity, let’s look at the term from a functional perspective and a business perspective. Functionally, maturity translates into an ability to think about the function from multiple perspectives. Too often, people below this level act as though their function were an island. As a manager, they must transition to the belief that their function exists to support the overall business objectives.
This belief necessitates difficult trade-offs. It may mean that the functional head must create a new structure that supports the needs of the company, changing the structure from centralized to decentralized and enduring all the travail that such a change entails.
Maturity also involves learning to communicate with a multilayered group. Communicating effectively becomes more complex as additional levels are added; it also becomes problematic when people are spread out across different offices, states, and countries. In earlier managerial positions, people were used to seeing their direct reports frequently and having one-on-one conversations with them. Now, this communication mode isn’t always possible.
Sometimes other people are too geographically distant. Sometimes the manager doesn’t have the time for this type of communication. As a result, the mature leader learns to delegate and trust rather than always require in-person, frequent, lengthy conversations. This leader’s calendar, too, is skewed to manage upwards and horizontally.
Leadership immaturity manifests itself when team members of different units within the organization are asked to work together for the good of the organization. Too often, managers become embroiled in finger-pointing when things go wrong or in arguments about who deserves the credit when things go right. Although the company may well subscribe to a boundaryless ideal, it may not measure and compensate accordingly.
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As a result, the immature manager screams that his group should get credit for a successful project because they did the bulk of the work or accuses another manager of sabotaging his efforts. Rather than maturely leading his function in ways that create synergies with other functions and overcome parochial differences, he complains and makes excuses.
The other aspect of maturity involves thinking like a businessperson rather than just an employee. This is a significant leap of thinking for someone who has spent ten or more years working exclusively at an operational level. Being able to consider how a decision affects not only one’s own “team” but also the larger organization of which a member has not been inculcated into managers. Developing a view of the business as opposed to a view of the function takes a mature perspective.
This perspective comes with experience. Ideally, organizations will have their young, high-performing people serve on task forces, committees, and project teams and give them other assignments that force them to plan and implement ideas that transcend their functions, and by practicing strategic thinking, they are more likely to grow up faster as leaders.
Leadership maturity can be difficult to identify. When a manager is clearly an expert at what she does and has a solid track record as a manager within that function, her deficiency may even seem relatively minor or may even be missed. At this level, a manager needs to know the behaviours and attitudes that indicate leadership maturity.
Please look out for a continuation of this article.
