Have You Got What It Takes to Lead?

Skills Group CEO Rosanne Graham shares ten lessons on stepping up, making the tough calls and knowing what success actually means to you.

Being good at your job can get you promoted. Then comes the slightly uncomfortable discovery that the next job requires you to stop doing quite so much of it yourself. Suddenly, your performance depends on how well other people perform, and taking everything back off them is going to make for some very long evenings.
Rosanne Graham knows that transition well. The Skills Group CEO leads a business training around 20,000 learners a year, with a career spanning CLEAR Communications, NZMA, Evolve Education Group and her own education business, Ignite Colleges.

Speaking at M2woman’s Journey to Excellence, Graham distilled her experience into ten lessons for aspiring leaders. They cover hard work, honest feedback, unpopular decisions and the occasional need to accept an opportunity before you feel entirely ready.

1. Be worth noticing

“I don’t mean be loud. I mean be brilliant.”

There are plenty of ways to attract attention at work. Graham’s recommendation is to earn it through the quality of what you do. That involves hard work. As she points out, we expect sportspeople to practise relentlessly to reach the top. Building a career deserves the same commitment. “I don’t know that many people who get into senior roles that don’t work very hard.”

2. Define your own success

“If you let someone else define success, you will be led around by the nose of somebody else’s ideal.”

Before pursuing a leadership role, consider whether you would actually enjoy doing it. Managing people is a substantial part of the job, and being an excellent specialist does not automatically mean you want to spend your days managing other specialists. “Success is a really personal thing.”

3. Move from “I” to “we”

“When you lead a team, you’re not winning for yourself at that point. You need the team to be a winning team.”

The skills that earned you a promotion can create problems if you keep applying them in exactly the same way. Being the person who gets everything done is useful until you become the person who cannot let anyone else do anything. Graham’s advice is to give people room to deliver, even when their methods differ from yours. “There are multiple ways to do many things. It does not need to be the way you did it. If they get the right result, they got the right result.”

4. Learn to manage the pressure

“You have to find techniques that work for you to manage stress if you’re going to be a successful leader.”

Managing pressure takes deliberate effort, particularly when other people depend on your judgement. Understanding how you respond to stress, and what helps you regain perspective, is part of preparing for responsibility. “You have a team of capable people who will find a solution, but don’t be the panicker in the room.”

5. Operate in the grey

“You never have 100% of the information when you have to make a decision.”

Anyone waiting for perfect certainty before making a call could be waiting a while. Leadership involves deciding what to do with the information available, accepting that some of it will be incomplete and remaining willing to change course. “Make the decision, adjust if you’ve made mistakes, and move on. But make a decision.”

6. Find people who tell you the truth

“The more senior you get in an organisation, the more people tell you you’re great. Have a great deal of scepticism about that, because you know you’re not great every day.”

A bigger title can come with a suspicious improvement in the reception your ideas receive. Keeping honest people close helps you distinguish a good decision from one nobody felt comfortable questioning. Seek people who can help you improve, rather than those who simply arrive with an endless inventory of complaints. “You have to find the people who call you on your bullshit.”

7. Get comfortable being respected

“You will make decisions that people really wished you didn’t make. Do it with integrity.”

Graham learned early in her career that difficult decisions come with the territory. You cannot always make the outcome welcome, but you remain responsible for how people are treated throughout the process. “Respect is a much more important thing, in my view, to aim for than to be liked or to be popular.”

8. Be yourself

“It’s absolutely exhausting playing a role of someone else that you think you should play to be a C-suite leader or a CEO.”

Trying to maintain a borrowed leadership personality adds a fairly unnecessary task to an already demanding job. Graham encourages people to find an organisation that embraces who they are, then extend that same permission to their teams. People bring real lives to work, including family pressures, health concerns and days when things are difficult. “Because when you’re yourself and you’re authentic, it opens the door for everybody else to be as well.”

9. Walk towards the challenge

“If you can have the support in place, take a step forward.”

At two significant points in her career, Graham’s initial response to an opportunity was to explain why she could not do it. Both times, someone else recognised her ability before she felt ready to back it herself. Her lesson is to look seriously at the opportunity and the support available before talking yourself out of the running. “You are going to have setbacks,” she says. “One failure does not determine your career or your life or anything.”

10. Give your ambitions some breathing room

“You can have it all, but you just can’t have it all at once.”

Graham moved into consulting when she wanted more flexibility to raise a family, then later returned to executive leadership. Those decisions were part of building a career over time, with different priorities receiving attention at different stages. The challenge is to make those choices deliberately, including putting the right support around you when you decide to step forward. “You can have a really, really rich life, but trying to do it all at the same time is a recipe for disaster.”

This is a regular coach column from Skills Development Group, the corporate training arm of Skills Group. With 30 years of expertise and a faculty of world-class coaches and practitioners, SkillsDG partners with enterprise and medium-sized businesses to build the leadership capability that drives real results across business agility, project management, sales and more.

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