Why Leadership is Not About You

Lessons for Leaders

Today I’m joined by Tina McDonald who is a workplace trainer for leadership and management apprentices. She talking today about how leadership is not about you.

• Listen for some fabulous info about how Tina trains our leaders of the future.
• A great example of influence, empowerment and changing culture
• What common themes does Tina see with Leadership?

I think you’re going to love this episode

Tina works at Milton Keynes college with apprentice managers at Level 3 who are on a journey of improving themselves as managers or potential managers across the course of a year.

It’s quite gruelling for them and Tina spends 12 months highlighting all the great things about leadership and turning them into leaders she would want her children to work for.

Emma shares a popular phrase of her about there is no ‘management manual’ because people get promotions because they’re good at what they do but then they don’t have the additional skills to lead and manage people.

Tina shares that it’s not about ticking boxes but understanding what the boxes are there for so that you’re doing 70% of the job really well and 30% is the leadership stuff that no-one understands until they actually do a qualification.

She shares an example of aligning a SMART Goal around making a cup a tea. And the conversation flows about knowing where to improve, to increase performance, carry out good evaluation, reviewing goals, looking at targets and seeing if things are fit for purpose.

Tina talks about the value of leadership models on such as evaluating and giving feedback but following a model so that it’s done well.

The lessons learnt are always “I won’t do that again” and it might be simple but without the training and support they will end up with no-one who wants to work for them.

What common themes does Tina see with Leadership?

In operational management they look at operational strategy and look up. Where do they want to be, how do they know when they’ve arrived. You can see the fear come in because they know there’s a task to do at the end of every learning. They realise quite often that some of the senior managers don’t always have a clue what they’re doing.

We also look at culture in the workplace. She uses Charles Handy’s model because it’s simple. They get to start to see how cultures become a concrete thing that they think they cannot change. It can be damaging if it’s not the right fit for the organisation

Tina shares a fabulous example of how one of her apprentices made a change in the workplace as a result of a talk that happened on her course.

The reason Tina is passionate about ‘it’s not about you’ is because these are the leaders of the future. If they’re not passionate about that, they don’t start the course because they don’t like the work that has to going into it right from the beginning. Those that do get to the end, realise they’ve learnt so much about themselves, they’re doing for everyone else, not just themselves.

Leadership allows people the self confidence to do things, try things and not carry guilt or shame around the decision and actions that they take or the things that don’t go well.

Connect on LinkedIn with Tina: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tina-leigh-mcdonald/

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