Recruiters usually look for leadership attributes on your resume, they look for roles where you have taken charge, built strategy, and led a team of people. From a very young age, we have been told to choose to be a leader and to have leadership qualities whenever opportunity knocks.
However, many of us are not built to be leaders. Companies have realized this and created individual contributor roles for such subject matter experts who are not built to lead but rather they specialise in that subject and can execute well.
So, is it better to be a manager/leader or an individual contributor? Both have their benefits:
🔸Individual contributors are rewarded based on their tactical skills, while managers are rewarded for their leadership skills.
🔸For managers to get the job, they do not need specialized knowledge or technical expertise. On the other hand, individual contributors require good skill sets and technological expertise.
🔸Careers for managers progress faster than those for individual contributors. However, they may get stuck in one department for too long. The advantage of individual contributors is their versatility. They can change positions, departments, and even jobs relatively quickly.
If you are an individual contributor, here are some ways you can demonstrate leadership. You can teach, lead by example, set higher standards, communicate, give credit, and have hard conversations.
Some management experts insist that every employee should be a leader. In my view, true leadership is defining the vision, inventing the future, communicating this vision to everyone and getting them on board. If everyone did that, nobody would be left to implement the work and we would end up with a lot of contradictory visions.
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