Being in a new position of authority or in a new environment can be intimidating and young leaders often make mistakes early on. In this video, Todd Adkins of Lifeway Leadership breaks down two common mistakes that young leaders make when they enter an organization.
The entire video is above, and the complete transcript is below.
One of the most common mistakes I see young leaders make is from day one when they enter into an organization. A lot of them will feel like they have good ideas and they have something to prove. And they won’t take the opportunity to kind of step back and understand how this place works before they begin to work on this place and bring change to the organization.
So a couple things I would have them look at before they make a move:
First off, look at the true leadership structure of the organization. Every organization has a formal leadership structure. Kind of a hierarchy that would be easily seen in an org chart. But then it also has an informal structure. So these are people that may not have positional authority, but wow, people really respect them. And they have informal leadership and informal authority that goes well beyond however highly they rank in the organization.
When you understand this, then you can further delve into what does the organization really say is important. Ah. It’s one thing if they say this is important with their words, what they articulate in maybe their vision or their values or even a cultural statement, but what is really the underlying, actualized things that happen when people make decisions? What is their behavior like? What is celebrated in the organization? What is measured? And what do we control?
When we begin to examine and understand those things, then a young leader can know the pathway that they need to move forward.
