Ready to Get Promoted to That Leadership Role?

The perspective of management has evolved over the years. In the past, if you wanted to be successful and wealthy, you had to be a manager or a boss. It was everyone’s aim to get promoted to that role. My father used to always ask me, “When is your employer going to promote you?”, “When will you get your next promotion?”, and all possible variations of that. Today, a lot has changed. To be successful and wealthy, you don’t need to be a manager at all. You could instead be a specialist and be very well paid.

Of course, the status of such a role and position is sometimes coveted because of the prestige associated with it. Some people want leadership roles because they look nice on business cards. There’s also a false impression that once you’re a manager, you give orders and don’t need to do actual work.

The reality is that being in management is not glamorous. It requires you to give and deliver a lot more than a regular role, and it requires you to lead. Not all managers are good leaders. You can be managing a team of accountants by inspiring them and being a mentor to them, or you can be someone who is operationally giving out tasks and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) weekly or monthly. The former is a leader, the latter is not.

Leading Others

Don’t become a manager because your parents, family, colleagues or friends are pressurising you. Some people get mocked by others because they've been in the same role for five or six years without being promoted to a leadership role. But the truth is that working at a role for a long period of time doesn’t mean you have or should be a leader. Leadership isn’t about experience, it’s about people. If you don’t enjoy interacting with people, you should probably forget about going into management. Of course, some industries need an operational manager who tracks their results, but this manager still needs to be leading others to some extent.

Management is more about processes while leadership is about people. A manager is a team head who is responsible for a specific project, like a project manager who is overseeing a project. Leadership, on the other hand, is about managing emotions and people. This concept relates to a theory in Martin Buber’s book where he discusses two types of human relationship. The first relationship is the “I and you” relationship. The second relationship is the “I and it”. The “I and you” relationship represents leadership where you care for the person and connect with them. The “I and it” relationship is very much like operational management where you treat the person as a task provider who needs to meet the output you’ve laid out for them.