One of the most common misunderstandings about leadership is that anyone who has reached a certain level of expertise in his or her field is automatically qualified to lead. The assumption is that the capacity to guide and manage a large number of diverse individuals in a complex work environment is a natural byproduct of technical competency rather than its own line of work requiring a separate and unique set of skills.
For example, hiring or promoting people to leadership positions because they’re, say, accomplished product developers, technicians or financial officers might look like a logical choice at first, but the failure to distinguish between technical and people skills is one of the most common and costly corporate blind spots. What’s regularly overlooked is that successfully managing a team has nothing to do with how much you know about chemical compounds or shipping costs, but how skilled you are at organizing and motivating a group of human beings to work together in reaching ambitious and often challenging goals.
Take one of my clients: A German native, he worked his way up for over ten years as a skilled technician in the small production line of a German car manufacturer. When the company needed a new general manager to guide one of its large North American plants through a period of rapid growth, they thought of their rising star and asked this obviously brilliant and loyal employee to take the helm of their expanding overseas branch. Flattered by the company’s trust in him and the prospect of a meteoric career rise, the barely 30-year old agreed to take the job.
Next thing you know, he’s on a flight from Frankfurt to Detroit — presumably relying on the pilot’s qualification to get him there safely — to manage a factory in a country he’s never been to that is about to double its workforce from 350 to 700. What could possibly go wrong?
You don’t have to hear the end of the story to grok all the potential landmines he was going to run into.
Cultural differences and language barriers? Check.
Level of complexity beyond any previous experience? Check.
Lack of management and leadership skills? Check.
What’s so typical about this story — as you suspected, it ended in utter chaos — is that it doesn’t actually lack a human element. The problem is that there is no conscious attention paid to it, thus allowing preconceptions to take over without proper context and against better judgment.
From the company’s perspective, it’s easy to empathize with their desire to pick a known and trusted entity, a “family member.” Likewise, it’s hard to blame my client for jumping on an opportunity that seemed filled with new potential and experiences.
However, it’s these very human responses that ultimately blinded both parties to the primary requirement for this particular position: the proven skills to lead and manage a rapidly growing and diverse population of employees in a complex work environment.
This doesn’t mean that leadership skills can’t be taught and learned after a person gets thrown into the wrong pool. In fact, my client is already faring much better since I’ve been coaching him. However, a lot of stress and agony could be avoided if employers were to heed the simple advice we all learned as children when it comes to experts, specialists, executives, and leaders: One of these things is not like the other.