From Taskmaster to Trusted Leader
Your title doesn’t define your impact, your actions do. Here’s how to level up from task oversight to true leadership.
3 sets of behaviors for us to differentiate today, all in the spirit of elevating your impact further:
Supervising
Managing
Leading
Let’s take a look at key characteristics and challenge you to identify where you are.
Supervising
Folks who thrive at supervising are great at ensuring tasks are done. Supervisors are all over the day-to-day operations.
For early Managers, supervising can be a point of comfort.
After all, they were recently an individual contributor, doing day-to-day tasks, and deeply in the weeds.
At best, supervising ensures work gets done.
At worst, supervising yields task masters a la Bill Lumbergh of Office Space:
Supervisor mode can, and should, evolve to ensure you’re activating stronger employee engagement, development and business results.
Leading us to…
Managing
The two core functions of managing are:
Developing people
Driving business results
Strong management has an eye on both growing people WHILE meeting and exceeding goals and business needs.
Managing well results in solving challenges WITH people, not FOR them, and finding opportunities to coach people to their deliverables and metrics.
Leading
Leading has a way of connecting and evoking emotion from those around.
Leading is a way of being that can inspire trust, can excite, can generate feelings of belonging and a desire to be part of where things are going.
Leading involves clarity of vision, illustrating what’s possible, AND enrolling folks in the desired future state.
Seasoned leaders have the ability to see the forest for the trees, thinking more broadly about the business and the challenges at hand.
Compare & Contrast
Let me move this from hypothetical to practical.
Your team member misses a deadline. Here are 3 different ways of engaging:
Supervising: You check in and remind them of the due date.
Managing: You seek to understand what got in the way, empower them to create a plan to get back on track, and kindly, and directly, hold them to standards.
Leading: You use the moment to reinforce team norms, expectations, and re-inspire the importance of their contribution to the bigger picture.
Action > Title
Your actions will dictate more of how people experience you than your title in your HRIS.
You might be a Manager by title, and your actions might be supervising, not managing.
You might be a Supervisor, and you might be excelling leading others.
This is precisely why I believe actions & impact matter more than titles.
“I don’t measure leadership by the number of people you manage or the title you hold.
I measure true leadership by how boldly people are willing to dream under your guidance—and how supported they feel going after those big ideas.” - Jennifer Dulski, CEO Rising Team
Where do we want to be?
This is the image I often share with Managers invested in elevating their impact and positioning themselves for continued promotion:
Those that set the bar of excellence live at the intersection of:
Powerful, effective management - developing people & delivering results
Personal, connected leadership - evoking emotions of trust, excitement, belonging
Managing, while leading.
Leading, while managing.
Doing the doing, while consciously mastering your Being.
Note: There are seasons when a Manager might get pulled into the weeds, and supervising becomes more prominent. Staying there too long stunts your growth, and that of your team’s. The goal is to recognize the distinct differences between supervising, managing, and leading so you’re better able to embody the actions that will deliver impact.
Gut Check
What are you seeing differently with:
Supervising,
Managing,
Leading
And now, where does most of your time go each week?
Monitoring & checking the work is done
Coaching, empowering, and driving things forward
Creating clarity, vision, and connectedness
What would take you 5% further in your quest to operate further into excellence?
That’s it for this week!
As always, be human and have high standards.
- Katie
I’m Katie!
I help leaders drive stronger business results through group training & coaching.
I'm also a mom, triathlete, & aspiring cowgirl who loves good martinis.
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