5 Things to Help Prepare Yourself Mentally and Practically for a Senior Leadership Promotion

If you want to get promoted to a senior leadership role and are feeling a bit overwhelmed by the thought of it, here are 5 things that you can do to help mentally and practically prepare yourself.

Believe you can achieve

If you think you are not good enough or that you will never make it, that is what you will believe, and that will become your reality.

Start to believe that you can do it. You may need to do some personal development work on yourself. Or you may need to get some practical experience or even do some training to develop your skills. However, rather than having a flat out belief of ‘I can’t do this’, with the right preparation and development, you can.

Believe that you can do it. This is one of the biggest challenges that I come across in my work and I will cover it more in Overcome Barriers to Senior Leadership Promotion, for Introverted Women my lunch and learn LinkedIn live session on 19 July at 1pm BST.

Visualise yourself in the role and close the gap

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Observe successful senior leaders in your organisation that you admire, what is it about them that makes them so successful? What do you admire? What skills and behaviours do you see them displaying? Doing this is not so that you can copy them, but so that you can learn from them.

Likewise, observe those senior leaders who you don’t admire and who are less effective as senior leaders. What is it about their behaviour why you think they are not as effective? What can you learn from them?

Create a vision in your mind of the kind of leader you want to be. What will you be doing? How will you conduct yourself? How will you interact with people? What does it feel like? Don’t let fears and insecurities get in the way of you visualising yourself in a senior leadership role.

Now look at where you are now. Get 360 feedback from colleagues, managers, people you manage, and stakeholders as to how they perceive you as a leader. What are the gaps between where you are now and where you want to be? Develop a plan to close that gap and get the necessary support if you need to.

Think bigger picture

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Don’t be solely focused on what is going on in your immediate department and only be concerned with issues your department is facing. Understand the dynamics of the wider organisation and the impact of how what your team does has on other departments and stakeholders.

Gain an understanding of the link between internal and external factors. Develop an awareness of the political, economical, sociological, technological, legal, and environmental (PESTLE) influences on the organisation. How are these affecting strategic decision-making?

You will need to be able to see the bigger picture and join the dots at a strategic level so start developing your strategic thinking now.

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Get practical experience

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Take every opportunity you can to get practical experience at the level you want to go to. Offer to stand in for your manager when they are on leave or represent them at meetings they cannot attend.

Identify stretch projects that they can delegate to you (without overburdening yourself). Do some job shadowing or apply for a short-term secondment if available.

If you are unable to identify opportunities within work, get practical experience from outside work such as on the board of trustees of a local charity and even take a lead on one of the committees.

Keep a record of your successes and achievements

When it comes to going for promotion, it can be easy to forget your successes and achievements over the past year when you have so many other things to think about. This makes it difficult to recall specific examples that demonstrate that you meet the criteria or show that you have the required competencies.

Keep a record of your success and achievements as and when they happen, so that it is easier to then recall them as and when you need to. This will also serve as a reminder that can help inspire and encourage you when you’re feeling de-motivated.

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What has your journey to senior leadership been like? What challenges have you faced getting promoted? I would love to hear what your experience has been so please let me know. And if you are finding it challenging to get promoted to a senior leadership role, remember to register for next week’s Lunch and Learn, LinkedIn Live .

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Research suggests that extraverts get more opportunities at work because their performance is more visible. Unfavourable bias towards introversion in the workplace can make it challenging for some introverted women leaders to get promoted to senior leadership roles.

If you are struggling to get a senior leadership promotion, on this LinkedIn live, I will share what you can do to overcome some of the barriers preventing introverted women from being promoted to senior leadership roles, so you can confidently position yourself and pursue your next promotion, whilst being your authentic self. Register for it here .

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In this episode of the podcast, Ruth Stuart , Head of Strategy Development at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), shares her personal experience of being an introverted leader and the challenges she has faced, the benefits she has gained and embraced from being an introvert. Ruth also provides tips for others in a similar situation and shares some advice that organisations who are looking to develop introverted leaders, support career progression and close the gender pay gap, can take on board.

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