If you just live a life of ease, then you fashion a mind that can only handle ease.

Hi everyone, welcome to the show! Today’s episode is all about Management with Ryan Hawk. Ryan’s a keynote speaker, author, advisor and host of the wildly popular podcast, The Learning Leader Show. He has millions of listeners in over 150 countries so he’s a great person to talk to today about your first endeavor into management.

He’s been a professional quarterback in the football world, a VP of sales at a multibillion-dollar company and currently heads Brixey & Meyer’s Leadership Advisory practice.

We also dive into:

• His experience in sales,
• Developing self-awareness,
• Leading yourself,
• Creating your personal board of advisors,
• How to build and lead your team,
• Developing self and spatial awareness, and a whole lot more.

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Why Welcome to Management is a great book for new leaders

The specific topic I wrote about in Welcome to Management is really personal to me because I vividly remember when I got promoted at a young age, from an individual sales professional to leading a team of 16 people, and how ill-prepared I was. I thought I was fully prepared because I had been a leader on the football field as a quarterback. I had some success, and I thought that would transition into the business world.

While some of those experiences and actions were helpful, for the most part not much transitioned into the business world and so I had so much to learn.

Unfortunately, I learned the hard way by making many mistakes over years before I became an average manager. So I thought there wasn’t really the manual or playbook out there to help somebody in my position when I was making that leap, so I wanted to solve that problem and write that book.

Have your own Personal Board of Advisors

One of the keys when you become a person in a leadership role is you have to get very clear on creating your personal board of advisors. Who are those people that you’re going to surround yourself with, that you can go to when you have questions, problems, issues?

Who are those few people that you can go to to say, “Wow, I had no idea this was going to happen. This was really surprising. How would you handle this?”

You need to be intentional about creating that board of advisors – just a handful of people who are there for you, care about you and willing to be honest with you. That’s something that I would get set and get clear on right away as you’re working to get promoted or you’ve been promoted. You’re going to need those people, so get it set up properly from the beginning.

Find the right people for your team

Be very intentional about first identifying what excellence looks like, what are the qualities you really want, what are the types of behaviors of people that you really want – getting really crystal-clear on that – then creating a system before identifying if the people you are interviewing possess those behaviors and qualities.

That’s something I was not very good at when I was a new manager. I just had a list of questions forwarded to me by another manager who had been in the job for a few years, that had been forwarded to them, and there was no real rhyme or reason for the questions we were asking in the interview. We didn’t even fully know what we were looking for. I would just ask questions and then use my gut instinct to make a call.

When you're talking about the building of your team and the people, they’re going to make or break you as a leader.

 

Links and Resources

Connect with Ryan: Twitter | LinkedIn

https://learningleader.com/

Welcome to Management: How to Grow From Top Performer to Excellent Leader by Ryan Hawk

Ryan’s Productivity Tools: Calendar, Google Suite, Google Keep, Kindle, Evernote