10 Tips for Leading Leaders While Keeping Your Sanity and Energy

As a manager, supervisor or lead of leads, you may have felt challenged to influence and guide your team. Here are 10 tips you can use to support your leaders:

1. Know your role

As a leader of leaders, you are in a unique position, one that needs to create guardrails rather than boxes. You are the point person for concerns and big picture questions, but your role isn’t to always have the answers. Rather, your role is to open options and help leaders navigate tricky waters. So before you approach your leaders, get clear on how you will work together and what your role is.

2. Recognize them as top leaders

As a leader, they have proven themselves to be effective in their role and have years of experience. With this comes a level of trust, respect and agency. Make it clear what responsibility they hold by serving in their role. 

3. Macro-manage

We’ve all heard about micro-managing, where you get into the weeds on minutea details. In macro-managing, you’re looking at key milestones and deliverables and looking at trends that are adding to success or stopping progress in its tracks. Macromanagement looks at consistent snapshots over time to ask curious questions for insights and recommendations. In this way it’s more about what you’re noticing v. a specific and personal criticism on the individual.

4. Empower them to choose

The highest form of engagement is choice. Instead of delegating tasks and projects to leaders on your team, open the door for them to decide which projects would be a best fit and when they expect to complete them. You can offer suggestions by planting seeds about past successes related to similar projects or offer a stretch goal to inspire them. Once assigned, give the leader the controls on the approach and strategy for completion. It’s your role to help them increase awareness and navigation around potential friction points and roadblocks. 

5. Highlight their strengths

Where our focus goes is where our energy grows. Imagine what strength you’d like to leverage in your leaders and incorporate that into your discussions and feedback. For example: I see one of your strengths being around building consensus and I wonder how you could leverage that strength to move this part of the project forward? 

6. Get curious and get clarification

In this would of ambiguous corporate speak, it’s more important now to get curious about what someone actually means. Without it, we are running on assumptions. So if someone says, “We’re making this item a priority,” what does that actually mean? You can then respond with, “I appreciate you making it a priority, when do you expect this to be completed?” In this response we are validating what they’re saying and also asking for a specific “when.” Without specific information, we have a lot of gray areas, which further creates frustration, miscommunication and missed deadlines.

7. Create shared accountability

As you work with other leaders, it is important to ask how they want to work with you and how they want to be held accountable. What that means is that they give you permission to respond when things aren’t going as planned or when you notice a trend emerging. It’s also important to reciprocate the same sentiment for when you may not be keeping up with your commitments. 

8. Model the behavior you want to see

It is imperative that your expectations for others is what you embody yourself. If you want your team of leaders to collaborate and be open, guess what you need to be? If you want people to speak with respect, guess what you need to speak with? This is what we call alignment - when your inner thoughts and feelings match your outer expression. 

9. Give fast and objective feedback

When you see something, say something… unless you are emotionally charged. If you are using absolute language (never, always, every time), you are in a reactive state. In this case separate the story from the facts and only deliver the facts. And remember feedback should only be given when the other person feels safe and has given you permission.

10. Share your knowledge (when requested)

You are in this position for a reason, you have demonstrated expertise and the experience to do so. But just because you’re in this position doesn’t mean your way is the only way. Instead when in discussions with your team, ask for permission to offer up a suggestion based on your past knowledge. This could sound like… “So this reminds me of a past experience working with a similar technology, if this would be helpful I’d be happy to share.” By asking for permission, we are building lines of trust v. a separation in hierarchy.