Navigating Leadership: 5 Learnings from Becoming a Department Head at 29

When I think back, I always had the goal of becoming successful. But what did (professional) success mean to me? I imagined success as being exceptionally good at a particular subject, having a job of high status and earning lots of money.

Apart from the entrepreneurial route, achieving this goals meant becoming a manager with personnel responsibility. It meant becoming a leader.

I envisioned the skill set of a leader akin to university professors, gaining exceptional expertise (the first part of success) through years of study and numerous publications. I believed all leaders gained their authority for leadership roles solely from their expertise—until reality proved otherwise: There is more than one leadership style as I delved into within this article.

In today’s article I unveil 5 leadership lessons I learned after becoming Department Head at the age of 29.

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5 Learnings about Leadership

1. Don’t micro-manage.

This was my very first big challenge. I was promoted from a position where I was an expert. My job had been to actively work on a handful of projects and I always found a lot of pleasure in spending hours thinking deeply about a problem and solving it. I frequently found myself immersed in the sought-after flow state.

When I was promoted to Department Head, I continued straight away with my working-style. However, instead of a single handful of projects, I suddenly had several hands full of projects - far too many for me to think my way through each one in detail.

But I didn’t know that at the time.

I fell into the trap that many young leaders fall into: I was micro-managing and I had to learn two disadvantages of micro-management:

• Disadvantage for the team:
  • If you take over an existing team that has already acted very independently, micro-managing is an absolute motivation killer. The team members feel that they are not being taken seriously or are being outvoted.
  • For newly established teams, micro-management can lead them to not being able to make any decisions themselves, which, in the long term, leads to an additional burden on the manager.
• Disadvantage for your company: Let’s be frank: even if you are an exceptional expert in your field, you cannot have the same depth in a project as a whole team. Therefore, micro-managing and centralizing all decisions might result in a worse outcome overall.
• Disadvantage for you: It is extremely time-consuming. If you want to be deeply involved in all topics, you have to invest a lot of time.

But how can you avoid micro-management? For me, it was a long process that is still ongoing today. Implementing the following two strategies significantly reduced my micro-management over the past two years:

• Being a part-time expert: I always really liked my work as an expert and that was the main reason why I overdid micro-management at the beginning. But fortunately, I’ve since learned that I just can’t be that deep into everything (otherwise it’s the perfect route to a burn out). Instead, I have a few projects close to my heart that I actively work on myself. I block off about half a day every week to swap my manager hat for my expert hat and actively work on these projects myself. Other projects have to be delegated.
• Learning to delegate properly: More about that one in the next section.

2. Delegating is a skill that needs to be learnt.

I was not very good at delegating first, but I found out that delegation is a skill that needs to be learned.

Actually, delegating is the highest class of management. Delegating does not mean handing over just one action, it means handing over a collection of tasks (entire projects for example).

Delegation would deserve its own article and there already exist many books about how to delegate effectively. I found the rules from One Minute Manager Meets The Monkey by Ken Blanchard helpful. He suggests that in order to delegate successfully, you have to trust your team and ensure that they have all the necessary skills they need to carry out the delegated tasks.

Your tasks as a manager are the following:

• Formulate the objective clearly: Clear communication is key here. Take enough time to formulate what the objective is and what your expectations are. But don’t offer a solution path. Let your team figure out the solution by themselves.
• Offer your help, if they need it: Act as a coach to give employees new ideas, but don’t just solve the problem for them.
• Ask for progress reports (optional): This depends on the size of what you’ve delegated. You might skip this for smaller collections of tasks, but for bigger project it might be important to request regular progress reports and check whether the tasks are developing in the right direction.

3. Listening is crucial.

Listening is not as easy as it sounds.

• It means that you take the time trying to understand what the other one really wants to tell you.
• It means taking the time during a stressful day to engage in a conversation.

Listening needs time; this can be particularly challenging for a stressed manager. When I think back to my first weeks as Department Head, my seemingly endless to-do list full of little things comes to my mind. All the to-dos insisted on being implemented immediately. A relaxed conversation was simply not possible - said my inner self keen on being as productive as possible. Back then, I didn’t take enough time for conversations: apart from the usual “How are you?”, I was too busy with a hundred little things instead of really listening.

It took a few months, but luckily I soon learned the importance of listening. I now take the time to really understand the problems of my team and not to think about the next 27 tasks. Cutting down on micro-management also helped here: By delegating more, I was able to free up time to really listen and be more present for my team.

4. Leadership needs trust and trust needs patience.

It might sound odd, but professionally I never had to be patient. I always worked hard, but I also consider myself being lucky: I studied in minimum time and after my studies, I found a position (without ever having to apply openly) where I was allowed to do my PhD while working. After finishing my PhD, I was offered my first corporate job - again without having to apply openly.

But there was one thing I didn’t learn from everything working out that smoothly: patience.

When I was promoted to the role of Department Head, I thought back on what being a leader always meant to me: drawing authority from being an expert. So I started with a lot of micro-management. We already discussed why this does not work in (1).

I wanted to be seen as a leader from day one. But when it comes to taking responsibility for a new team with members you haven‘t had much contact with before, this is simply wishful thinking.

In order to be truly accepted as a leader, your team must trust you, fully. They must know that you would always make decisions best for the team, even if these decisions might harm yourself.

These are the trust-building tactics I’ve read about and also personally applied:

• Listen: Take the time and really listen to your team’s needs.
• Provide security: A crucial need that all human-beings have is safety. It is the task of a manager to ensure that every individual in a team feels secure. Only if security is guaranteed (no attacks from within), teams can be innovative and creative. Providing security can even mean that you as a leader intentionally circumvent rules to aid your team if necessary.
• Integrity: Integrity means more than honesty. It is important to stand by your decisions and values, even if they are not advantageous in certain situations or could even be to your own disadvantage.

Trust needs time to build. You need to be patient, be there for your team with integrity, listen to what they have to say and provide a secure environment where your team can thrive.

5. Leadership needs empathy.

Listening is a first step each leader needs to learn. Listening actively and being empathetic is an essential trait of a leader.

The key to team spirit is mutual empathy and trust. If present, one person stands up for the other and extraordinary results can be achieved. To trigger this mutual empathy, you have to start as a manager:

• Give your team self-determination: The more people feel they have control over their tasks, the higher their job satisfaction and the lower their stress levels.
• Making decisions based on more than just numbers: As Simon Sinek shows in Leaders Eat Last, abstraction kills. Be as close to your team as possible and not just make decisions based on numbers. If this happens and employees lose their sense of security, their motivation and ability to innovate suffer greatly.
• Corporate culture of collaboration: People work better in teams and it is the task of you as a leader to create a culture in which employees enjoy working together. It is even better if they feel confident enough to improvise - this creates extraordinary solutions and innovations.

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The insights for this articles are learnings from my journey. If you are interested in my personal story, please check out my recent article on my transition from academia to the corporate world.

Additionally, I used the following sources:

• Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek
• One Minute Manager Meets The Monkey by Ken Blanchard