Stepping Up

At least once in your career, you'll find yourself in a position in which you've increased your responsibilities, whether through an official job change like a promotion or growing your scope as the team and business needs evolve. It's an exciting moment, and sometimes you don't even have to change a thing about your current environment to step into this new job—not even your desk, your commute, your laptop screen saver, or even your passwords. But what you might not realize is that you're the one who needs to change some things about your habits and routines to step up into your new situation. Too many people slide back to their old habits or retreat into their comfort zone, which is not only going to get in the way of their ability to succeed but also hinders a whole team or organization's ability to adapt and adjust to new attitudes and altitudes required to take itself to the next level.

First, adjust your altitude. By definition, increasing your scope means you need to keep your eyes on a broader set of problems, challenges, and opportunities at any given moment. The time horizon against which you need to think about your business and your team's work also start to stretch into years, not just a matter of weeks and months. You need to think about the present more and more in the context of the future, and many versions of them. Depending on your product and business, this can get even more complex when accounting for various dependencies like your partner ecosystem or marketplace dynamics upon which you're integrated and built upon. Your job is to think and act at a higher level, broader aperture, and longer timeline than those you're asking to play a specific part as a function or a component of running and growing your business. This is what sets the vision, clarity, and the plan that has a purpose and a hypothesis to be proven or disproven.

Next, assess your time spent. I mean this literally. Look at your calendar. Has anything changed in how you spend your day? What standing meetings are you still showing up to that someone else can now run or attend on your behalf? What decisions are you making vs. delegating? What's the purpose of all of those meetings in the first place—to share information, make decisions, bring people together, etc? And what role do you need to play to make those meetings productive or not? Are you setting aside enough time for your own thinking and strategizing? How and when do you communicate to your teams or partners now that the number of people who need to know and understand how you think has increased by a few folds? Are the habits of an individual contributor still the best ones to relay on, or do you need to spend your time differently as someone who is trying to maintain a POV and many plans at a different altitude? Does your calendar reflect the intent of your new job or scope and how you should be spending your time differently?

And as scary as this might sound, go make some new friends. I don't mean you need to abandon your existing friendships at work. But if the scope and desired impact of your job changed, so will your influence mapping across the business, inside and outside. Think about which of your existing relationships at a peer level that you can now invite someone from your team to be a part of and own over time. Consider how building new relationships is a part of increasing your impact and influence when it comes to decisions and actions that permeate throughout the business. You're no longer just responsible for one dish out of the kitchen but the whole menu, so it's time to get to know the supplier for the whole kitchen.

Go deep only when necessary and do it in a time bound way. Staying at a higher altitude and longer time horizon doesn't mean you don't have the right to care deeply about how the business run at a day-to-day level. But do it strategically. Do it to make a point and teach the team something, not to retreat to your old comfort zone. Before you start asking questions, ask yourself first, are you trying to fix something quick and dirty here, or is this a symptom of something bigger in the way we operate that you'd like to take the opportunity to shift? Am I gravitating towards this topic because it's a familiar territory for me (and therefore more fun and easier to feel productive) or is this truly a topic worth creating some high focus around? Why and why now? When doing this, always have a specific timeline in mind, i.e. have some "exit criteria" in mind based on what you're trying to do (process shift, team mentality shift, accelerate progress, etc). Linger here too long, and you'll soon find yourself suffocating your team with your micro managerial vibes.

Try practicing some combination of these even without a job or scope change. You don't need a promotion to set intentions about how you'll design your perspective, time, space, and relationships to drive different outcomes. This is mostly about habit building for yourself and for your own benefit. But let's be honest. Stepping up to new, bigger jobs, especially internally, is an even trickier one at times, because people who've known you don't stop seeing you as old you. Whatever habits and routines you create to step up to the job will help other people see and understand how you as a person and your job as a component of the organization can evolve into something bigger or different. Changing other people's perception and behavior is hard, but at least you can start with things you can control and take up space in the direction you want to grow.

Last but not least, all of this isn't just about you and your growth, especially the higher you go in an organization and the broader your impact and influence become. Your ability to recalibrate yourself is critical in creating the necessary shift in altitude and attitudes of the people around you now need to take, too. Organizations are surprisingly organic in nature, meaning one person can have a tremendous impact in how an entire team or a business can shift its mentality and behaviors to step up to the tasks ahead. Self-instigating those changes in mentality and behavior is not an easy task, and it will take intention and consistency until new habits and routines stick. And once in a while, it's only human that we will want to retreat into our comfort zones. When that happens, find something to do that fulfills your need but don't slide into old habits or disrupt the rhythm of an entire team or a business.