How to be a good leader?

Just pick, do you want to buy a book, get a 10 week “certified” course, or just a 10 hours intensive class?

After almost 3 years of working as a system administrator on my current company, my then manager asked if we could talk for a bit. By the time, my home country (Argentina) was going through a difficult moment due to inflation, so my first thought was “crap, I’m going to get fired”.

I tried to delay “the call” because I feared that it was the end and I would soon be looking for a new job (on a difficult market), but before the day ended, I was already too nervous and with my mind too eager to know what the heck was going to happen to me.

His call may have lasted 10 minutes, but it was like 3 hours for me. He basically told me something we both knew, that I wanted to grow up in the company, but he would then tell me that “this was the right moment” to do so. When a disaster hits somewhere where a friend lives, your first thought is the worst. By the time you get good news from that person, the feeling of happiness is extreme, basically because you were not expecting good news… so your feeling went from a really bad one to be really good in a second, which makes you shock entirely and, most likely, you would not know how to express your happiness. Well, by the time I was speaking to him, I felt that way.

After saying yes (about 10 times) that I would be ok with the Team Leader position, I hung up the phone and told my wife (I prefer to tell her, my life companion). She congratulated me for the news and there came the first question… are you ready for this?

While young, every new adventure is a matter of joy. You ride a bike for the first time, you are not ready at all, but when you find out you can do it just fine, the feeling inside you is marvelous. Then you start to grow up, and the challenges keep getting better and better, while at the same time more difficult, but with an added bonus of pleasure when you do it just fine. But once you are an adult, and you have responsibilities, whatever you do needs to be done more than fine (or at least, your mind think everyone expects that). Your entire career may be defined by the way you behave on these opportunities, and you may end up digging a big hole that you can’t get off quite easily.

Her question made me think the whole night, and by the next morning (without any sleep, of course), I reached out to my manager and asked him about many things that I had on my mind.

One of the things that I like the most about my former manager, is his human touch whenever talking about difficult topics (like this promotion). He has his own way to calm you down, no matter the situation. I like to think of him as a guy who “manages” the panic (and I have learned a lot from him on that skill). His point of view on whether I was prepared for this position was obvious, he had already picked me… what would he tell me? So he actually focused on telling me how I had already done the job without even knowing in the past, and how well I had performed. This made me remember a moment on my childhood, where my english teacher gave us an exam without telling us that it was an actual test (with score). Her opinion was that most of us would not handle stress properly, hence doing the test without knowing it was a test, would produce better results. That time, everyone on the class scored more than 80% of the test, so her thought was right in the spot… (thanks Susana!).

So, back to my promotion, I decided that I was good enough to take the role (while not 100% convinced), but I would actually try to learn from books, magazines, web courses and anything handy that I could find. Took me like 3 seconds to find a ton of material to learn from… yeah, just do a google search.

After reading one “leadership” book, a few blogs on “being a good leader” and even taking a company-approved “leadership” course, my opinion was really clear… “what the heck is a leader?”.

The problem with a topic like this is that everyone has a different opinion. It’s not math, it’s totally subjective. You can be an entire jackass and a great leader for a specific team of people, while another team may need the most invisible boss to actually work properly. So, I started focusing my search on being an IT leader… and no, there is nothing good on that either.

After several months of doing the job (while learning from my own team), I ended up concluding that the best knowledge comes from the reality (practice!). I guess most leaders learn to be a leader on the go. The best leaders are those ones who prepared themselves with “the environment”. If you like movies, the one from flight 571 which ended tragically, crashing on the Andes, shows a good example on leadership. Why? Because these sort of situations actually need a leader, otherwise it would have ended worse than it did (and there would have been no movie to know about it).

After researching a lot on the topic, my conclusion was simple, I would need to read on people that actually lead, either a company or a specific situation (like the event mentioned above). One rule was clear, I should skip the smoke sellers, those guys that wrote a book about leadership, but have not even lead a group of boy scouts while young. Once you read from actual leaders, do not take their input as things you “must” do, just use whatever you learn to understand that each situation requires a different type of leader. If you take knowledge from different leaders, you might end up with your own style (and please, do not write more books to explain how your style works better than others, nobody cares).

If you came here looking for a quick course on being a great leader, sorry I made you waste valuable time on reading this. Still, you can get really good advice, trust your own instincts and try to improve day after day with the input from your peers. I do not believe a leader is born, but a leader is made… and you are constantly improving on it, with your own shares of mistakes and success. Once you get used to failing, plus understanding how to use the feedback in a positive way, you are in your way to becoming a great leader… but once you find the perfect spot, keep working on it, it’s a constant effort and you need to adapt when the environment changes.