Which competencies are essential for you as a team leader?

My sport is rock and mountain climbing. In that world, the concept of a 'middle manager' doesn't exist. What is essential in climbing is that you can 100% trust your fellow climbers, that you are 'allowed' to stay in constant training, that your team dialogue works as optimally as possible, and that you continuously align each other's expectations.

Being a middle manager in your organization or company is a profession. And as a professional, you are challenged to keep growing.

In our book Mastery 4.0, we describe what the modern career of a skilled professional can look like. Professor Ericsson has been studying for decades how professionals grow and which phases they go through. In his study 'The Expert', he shows that a professional who wants to grow from skilled to professionally mature needs 5,000 hours of challenging work to get there. Through this continuous training, the 'head, heart, hands' coordination becomes so refined that the mature professional enters a flow of producing consistent quality.

Isn't that wonderful? Anyone with a basic foundation of leadership talent can embark on this journey to mastery. As a student, you can enjoy experimenting and, above all, discovering where your strengths and your challenges lie. Ideally, you keep learning and tackle the right challenge in your field year after year. It's even better if you have a mentor along the way who meets with you three to four times a year, gives feedback, and challenges you to grow.

A initial career goal as a middle manager could be: to keep growing until you reach the level of a true professional middle manager—a mature middle manager in your field. Therefore, your growth process is about developing both competencies (skills) and attitudes that are specifically needed to become a professional middle manager. In this chapter, we first focus primarily on competencies. In our work with many different middle managers, we have summarized 7 core competencies that we see popping up again and again in most job profiles. These are the following skills:

1. Communication

2. Teambuilding

3. Leadership

4. Execution

5. Agility

6. Professionalism

7. Self-leadership

Where do you stand today?

How would you rate yourself on each of these 7 skills on a scale of 1-10? And how would 2 of your colleagues rate you on these topics?

Then choose one topic for the next 6 months where you want to grow to a professional level, so you can shape your leadership in the middle with more joy and effectiveness.