Three Essential Mindset Shifts When Becoming a Senior Leader

Leadership Series

Regardless of the organization's size and structure,?senior leaders?are the highest-ranking employees responsible for driving the organization to success. Their actions or inactions have a huge ripple effect, for better or worse.?

Rising to the top of the house is a career dream for those who make it. Unfortunately, many executives are not prepared to successfully transition to a new set of expectations and rules of engagement. Could you believe that nearly half of?leadership transitions fail? As many as 74 percent of US leaders and 83 percent of global ones think they need to prepare for their new roles.?

Here are three differentiators for Senior Roles:

1. An increased span of control and discretion on setting the way with a more significant impact organization-wide.
2. Less direct reports with more people that 'work for them.' Being a senior leader feels like a lonely place.?
3. Broader span of impact, sometimes with less control over the outcome of their work. They must get the job done through delegation and influence.

Many leaders get promotions because they get results and like to do things their way. Relying on their strengths, they get visibly rewarded and rise. Soon after landing a senior role, they realize that their formula for success needs to be revised to meet their new challenges. For example, overplaying a strength, a strength now becoming irrelevant, a flaw now matters, or a blind spot becoming a flaw. Tolerance for mistakes decreases because the stakes are too high, and they soon become exposed.?

Many newly promoted senior leaders need help navigating organizational culture, politics, people, and the increased complexity. They must let go of old approaches to adopt new mindsets, capabilities, and strategies to succeed.?

Here are three common challenges Senior Leaders face and how to navigate them:

Challenge #1: Crumbling under the pressure of the executive culture –?

Senior leaders are responsible for setting the business direction, challenging the status quo, and leading change. To get results, they need to understand the political landscape and secure sponsorship for their ideas and initiatives, leveraging their internal networks to stay on top of a fast-moving, complex, and uncertain environment.

Early in their careers, they had supportive bosses who invested time and resources to mentor them on how to get things done. When they rise through the chain, their bosses are not that available. They are flying overseas, sitting in board rooms or closed doors, deciding the company's future. An executive I coach who reports to a N-1 once told me that sometimes he would get a thumbs up in an email or text from his manager as a green light to proceed with his plans. The higher-up executives are, the less time they spend thinking about or attempting to make others feel comfortable around them, especially if they have big egos.?

Luis recently got the CIO role with a mandate to drive a digital transformation, an ambitious plan with a massive scope while he was dealing with data security threats and deploying AI. Luis brought a solid track record of implementing automation solutions and was confident about succeeding. Still, he needed sponsors to champion the change. When it was time to go in front of the execs, he struggled to read the room and came across as na?ve and not very astute in managing the political forces at play. He crumbled, feeling attacked on many fronts with questions he could not answer. The execs wanted to push him to see if he could handle the pressure, not with bad intentions, but to test his plan's robustness. Unprepared to handle a land mine of objections, he lost confidence, lowering his voice and shrinking in his chair. In the end, he did not get support for his proposal and left the room defeated, unable to sell his position. He needed to change his approach and learn how to navigate political waters.?

Mindset Shift # 1: Become more politically savvy.?

• Accept the importance of learning how to get things done and building trust and credibility at the top. Practice feeling comfortable with this audience.?
• Find out how executives think. A mentor can help you learn how top executives operate.
• Leverage your internal network to test ideas before presenting them to larger audiences.?
• Ask for support from internal sounding boards – have regular conversations to get perspective to learn to operate at this level in the organization.?
• Manage up checking the pulse with your leader and be process flexible to adapt as needed.?
• Know who the significant gatekeepers control the flow of resources, information, and decisions.?
• Listen to those who object to your positions to understand their concerns better. Build worst cases out of the objections to strengthening your views.
• Increase your influencing skills by pitching your ideas persuasively to your audience.?

Challenge # 2: Unable to deal with complexity –?

We are experiencing a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world where disruption is the norm. Organizations require leaders who can navigate through the choppy waters of constant change.?

Work becomes more complex at the top: time horizons increase and the number of variables increases. Because senior leaders make decisions critical for their organizations' vitality, they need to consider multilayer, fast-changing scenarios, constantly monitoring and testing assumptions to ensure sustainable results.?

The ability to lead through complexity and uncertainty is an untested area for many leaders rising through the ranks, especially if they have learned the ropes in mature organizations in stable markets. When their scope widens, they inherit pieces of the business they need to know more about or over-rely on irrelevant technical skills in their new roles.?

Those who still need to transition to a senior role get entangled with too much detail. Perfectionism, a need to control the outcomes, and relying too much on their technical domain are obstacles that limit their impact. It is like looking through a microscope when they need a telescope. Giving up to the old ways of operating is essential to succeeding at more complex assignments.?

When Michelle got her promotion to SVP of Marketing for an editorial firm, she was thrilled and scared at the same time. She had gained a reputation as a results-oriented and flawless executor. Now, she needed to drive a marketing strategy for three new divisions. It was a fast-paced and rapidly changing set of demands. Michelle's new role required her to handle complexity and see the forest and the trees. She realized that the only way to perform was to learn how to operate with ambiguity, becoming more agile and taking more risks instead of over-relying on her strengths as tactical manager.

Mindset Shift # 2: Operate from a Broader Perspective.?

• Get on the balcony to gain a more expansive view of the problems. Zooming in and out will give you different angles when focusing on the detail vs. the big picture.?
• Balance thinking and action. If you tend to collect a lot of data and need to be right before deciding, stretch your comfort zone, making steps toward small decisions with little data.?
• If you tend to believe you're an expert in a particular field or domain, realize that it is essential to broaden your horizons, increase your curiosity, and learn more from other areas.?
• Accept the uncertain nature of the problems you are facing. Complex processes with a lot of uncertainty are hard to understand. Define the clear pieces and ask many questions to close the gaps. Please do it with help because your sandbox has expanded with talent of diverse backgrounds and expertise.
• Accept that failure and mistakes are part of the journey through complexity and uncertainty and find ways to learn from the mistakes.?
• Talk to experts in different fields, inside and outside the organization, to gather ideas and viewpoints.?

Challenge # 3: Failing to transition from doing to getting results through others.?

Becoming a senior leader who leads other managers is the next stage of evolution on that leadership journey. Because senior leaders get most of their work done through influence and delegation, they need excellent leadership skills. Now, they are directing managers who direct their respective working units. They must inspire others through a shared vision and gain their trust and confidence in the organization.??

Delegating effectively and developing others is essential at a senior level and seem the most difficult transitions to make. Most successful risers have been great at producing high-quality work by themselves or by selectively delegating specific projects while keeping the best ones. When the scope of responsibility widens so much, it is virtually impossible to keep the same approach. Many senior leaders who have yet to learn to let go end up focusing on the tactical and let everything strategic go until last.?

Stephanie was one of those high flyers who got promoted quickly to a senior level. She now oversaw a Customer Success team of 250 dispersed in three geographical regions impacted by geopolitical forces. She needed to assess her team's capabilities before trusting them to take on critical assignments. To make things worse, once she delegated, she looked over people's shoulders, micromanaging them instead of giving them autonomy over allocating responsibilities. Her direct reports needed more context since Stephanie had not communicated the big picture or rationale for the relevance of the project. Her manager, a busy executive with no patience for this flaw, started seeing Stephanie as an individual contributor dressed in a senior leader's clothes. After getting worrisome feedback from her manager, she knew delegating more was the only way out.?

Mindset Shift # 3: Delegate effectively.

• Understand the vision and strategy before you delegate. Articulate clear messages that reflect your leadership philosophy and what you value about your team.
• Ensure there are clear roles and responsibilities in your organizational structure. Delegation involves dividing the work in such a way that allocates authority, responsibility, and accountability.?
• When delegating to managers, provide enough organizational context and shared vision on the relevancy of the work so they can effectively cascade critical information to their respective teams. Get their input on what they see as potential threats and how to mitigate them.?
• Assess capacity. Spend enough time coordinating actions that will set direction, enrolling others, and making requests that others can commit to.?
• Check progress completion, provide feedback, and make room for recognition and celebration.?

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Because of the nature of their roles, senior leaders have the potential to impact the performance of the whole organization directly. Making sure these transitions are successful greatly matters because the impact is enormous.?

Executive coaching can help leaders navigate the turbulent VUCA waters while they find their inner compass for more impact and resilience. Other approaches, such as customized assimilation plans and buddy systems, can also help new executives to successfully manage the culture, people, and demands of these high-stake roles.?

Those who succeed transition to another set of competencies and approaches to leverage their experience, strong business acumen, strategic planning, leadership and relational skills to navigate both the rational and emotional organizational systems.

Increasing the success rate for recently promoted executives is a twofold approach: Inside-out driven by their own desire to grow, leaving behind old paradigms and - outside-in when tapping into resources available to them to elevate their game.?