@Parkmama I had some good mentors early in my career but also some excellent examples of how not to do it!
I was selected for a leadership program and I learned and applied a lot from that. Specifically the difference between managing and leading.
It helps that I was passionate about my job and this was infectious.
The biggest difference that I could see between me and the other directors was that I made sure that everyone in my team knew everything I knew - about how I ran the business, why and how decisions were made and how every single department were part of the same effort to get to the same goal.
Everyone knew what good or bad looked like and I ran a meritocracy where people who were good at their jobs got rewarded and those who were not did not get away with it.
I hired/promoted the very best people to head up my departments and invested a huge amount of time and effort making sure we were a rock solid team with the same values and vision about how to run the business. It was tough, fair but most of all fun.
I never shied from difficult decisions and make sure every single person in the division was personally rewarded for the groups success as well as their own. Everyone had an achievable commission scheme not just the sales people.
I was a board director and reported directly into the CEO and I had a lot of autonomy.
I'm not blowing smoke up my arse (that much!) I have 35 LinkedIn recommendations that broadly say inspirational leader. I've also mentored lots of people from my organisation and outside of it. I was pretty well known in my industry - which was in a period of massive change so I made sure I knew a lot about what was going on in our competitors and shared a lot of information with them to move the industry forward.
I saw my job as yes, hitting the numbers, it mostly spotting, nurturing and promoting talent from every corner of the division.
I really gave a shit about the people who worked for me. I cared but could also make decisions based on business needs rather than people.
Didn't always get it right by any means but I was honest about it.
If you met me in real life you'd be surprised as I'm a classic introvert but in a work environment I'm extrovert, a risk taker, forward thinking yada yada.
They main thing is honest communication. I used to bag my head in frustration that somehow what was said/discussed in board meetings was some kind of ratified secret.
It's really not. Same shit, slightly older people. So I'd tell everyone what we talked about. No ivory towers bollocks.
It helped make a bunch of people who could and did easily act as silos all fighting with and blaming each other work as one most of the time.
I mean they still fought and blamed each other but got pretty short shrift from me and my management team.
My management team were fabulous. Best people I've ever worked with. It took me quite a few years to build the perfect (ish) team but it was so worth the effort.
I've done slightly smaller (in terms of people managed) jobs since and the same principles apply. Treat everyone like grown ups. Set high standards, have a single goal and a broadly agreed way of getting there and communicate everything. Good and bad. All the time, much more than you think you need to.
I managed over 100 people. I'd say 20% thought I was the best thing since sliced bread, 30% liked me, 40% didn't much care either way and 10% actively hated me.
The 10% that hated me did so with good reason. Because I mostly got rid of them.
So yeah, weird natural skill that I find easy because I enjoy it. And because I enjoy it I work hard at being good at it.
I was promoted to a very senior role aged 30 and for 2 years I was pretty crap at it and after that got progressively better at it.
I love responsibly. I'm motivated by the buck stopping with me. Does not scare me at all. In fact I couldn't do a job now where that wasn't the case.
I'm ENTJ in Myers Brigg if that means anything and off the scale red:leader type in all other psychometric tests.
So I made sure my management team was a mix of totally different types and was very very careful not to just hire/promote mini me's - rather the opposite - and took a pretty scientific approach to this.
Hope that helps.
If you are thinking/worrying about how effective you are then you are quite some way toward being good at it!
You'd be amazed (or perhaps not) at the number of director level people I've worked with who had zero self awareness, no desire to get better at their job or any interest at all in the people who worked for them.
One used to refer to his staff as "them, people like them, not people like US".
We didn't get on.