You’ve got questions. We’ve got answers. Hi, I’m Kevin Eikenberry, answering the questions that new leaders ask us. Actually, it’s our goal to help all leaders become more productive, successful, and confident. And this set of videos is just one way we do that. Today I’m answering this question. What should I be reading? Are you ready? Let’s get started.
I’ve been asked this often. Kevin, now that I’m in my new leadership role, what should I be reading now? It’s a great question because if you’re a leader, you probably need new and different kinds of information than you may have needed before. And if you’ve moved from one leadership level to another, the same might be true. What we read or listen or watch is all something that we can think about here.
So we use the word reading, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be reading. It could be listening or even watching. So here are some things to consider.
First of all, you should be reading or taking in more information about your organization. You need to really understand the business that you’re in. And perhaps if you’ve been inside of one part of the business, it’s time for you to understand more about how it all fits together. And even if you did have a pretty good picture of that, you would make sure that you’re continuing to read about what’s going on in the organization, how it’s being seen in the greater outside world, etc.. Learning more about your organization
Next, learning more about your industry. About your industry, like what’s going on around us? What are other people? What are our competitors doing? What are our customers needing? Learning more about all of that so we can put our work into better context, and we can help our team have a better context, too. As a leader, we should be looking up. And so that’s one way that we can do that.
Next, you should be reading more about specific leadership topics. There may be specific things that your leader has already coached you on trying to get better at. Or you might know you want to get better in those areas. So a specific leadership topic might be where you need to focus.
And some say, Well, Kevin, what about trade publications? To which I would say a distinct maybe. If we’re using trade publications to learn more about our industry, fantastic. If we’re reading the trade publications about the details of our team’s work, of our former work, of our former subject matter expertise, you want to be careful.
Sure. You want to be up to date and up to speed, but you probably will never need the level of depth and detail the expertise that you once needed to have or wanted to have. One of the big challenges is to start to lift our eyes beyond those details. Trust our team to get and have that up to date information, while we take a different picture.
So as a general statement, I’ll close with this and say more big picture and less details. It doesn’t mean we don’t need to know any details. It doesn’t mean that we become broad without any context beyond that. But it does mean that we need to read and think about different things than we did before. So choose both your topics and sources wisely.
So it’s a great question. This is by the way, is a great question to ask people that you admire. Perhaps a mentor, perhaps your boss, perhaps someone else. Like what are they reading? Because chances are they will readily share and might be a great source of this information for you.
Let me close with today’s tweet. Picking your information, sources and topics as a leader is important to your growth and effectiveness. Well, one of the places that you can get information. One of the places you could be reading is more of what I write. And one of the best places to do that is to follow me on LinkedIn. I hope you’ll do that.
And by the way, if you’ve got questions that you’d like answers to here, make sure you put them in the comments or send us an email to info@KevinEikenberry.com, and we’ll point you to where we’ve answered that question or perhaps answer it right here in the future.
I hope you’ll be back to watch for more questions and answers here.
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