How much authority do you need to take charge at work? What can you do as an employee who’s not in a leadership role?
One kind of external leadership is leading your environment, which are the elements of an organization that you interact with regularly. These elements can be intangible, like the processes you use in your role, or tangible, like the way an office is arranged.
Learn the three ways you can embrace your inner leader at work.
Stepping Up in Your Work Environment
Clay Scroggins says you should constantly look for new ways to improve your environment to practice employee leadership. He presents a three-step method for taking this kind of initiative. (Shortform note: We’ve reordered these steps to boost clarity.)
1. Remain attentive to your boss’s priorities. Scroggins says this gives you a direction to take initiative in: Once you understand how your boss wants to direct the company, you can identify ways to change your environment that’ll support them in reaching their goals. (Shortform note: This could be especially difficult if your boss is indecisive about their goals. When dealing with an indecisive boss, ensure you understand their expectations by raising specific queries—for instance, what are the exact benchmarks they want to meet—and recording their responses, some business experts suggest. Also, regularly check in to review your boss’s expectations so you can pivot quickly if their goals change.)
2. Select a persistent issue and take full responsibility for addressing it. Knowing that you’ll be held responsible for the result will encourage you to take initiative and work hard to solve the issue. Your ground-level position is an advantage here, Scroggins says, as you have firsthand insight into what works and what doesn’t since you interact with your team regularly.
(Shortform note: In Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin say you shouldn’t just take full responsibility for addressing one issue that affects your job, but all of them, even if they’re not your fault. This helps your team—or, in our case, your environment—continually improve, as you find ways to prevent other people’s mistakes as well as your own. It can also improve collaboration across an organization’s hierarchy: To avoid problems stemming from a lack of information or misunderstandings, you’ll likely be more diligent about communicating with your boss to ensure they have all the ground-level information needed to make good decisions and ensure you understand their reasoning for the decisions they make.)
3. Create a plan to resolve the issue before mentioning it to your boss. This shows that you’re thinking ahead and can be trusted with responsibility. As discussed previously, this makes you more trustworthy and increases the chances of your boss giving you a position of authority. Thus, Scroggins recommends adding regular planning time to your schedule. Make sure you allocate enough time to be thorough: The better planned your idea is, the more likely your boss is to accept it.
(Shortform note: In The Leadership Challenge, James Kouzes and Barry Posner suggest that you should not only make a plan, but also test that plan through experimentation. People may be unwilling to accept an unproved plan, they explain. So, test your vision or strategy on a small scale before proposing your plan. This lets you refine your plan to be more effective and collect proof that it’s viable. And if making a plan demonstrates forethought and proves your trustworthiness, going the extra mile to test that plan will arguably be even more effective. Depending on the kind of plan and its thoroughness, this testing process could have many steps, so factor that in when adding planning time to your schedule.)
