Step Up. Stop Doing What's Made You Successful.

There’s an abundance of leadership advice on LinkedIn. This often comes from incredibly impressive people who have been at the very top of very large organizations. People like Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Arianna Huffington, Angela Ahrendts and LinkedIn’s very own Jeff Weiner. Their advice is inspirational and I often find ways to apply it to my (more modest) context.

Still, there is an important career transition that I haven’t seen get much attention, even though it is directly applicable to so many more of us. I’m thinking of the transition from front-line manager to next-level leader. The move from managing individual contributors to managing managers is full of pitfalls. This is a critical transition for both the individual and the organization because it is all about scale. If you can’t make the transition then you will definitely limit your organization’s success. And therefore your own career growth.

I’ve mentored a number of people who have made this transition and I’ve done it myself (more than once), so I have some thoughts about how to do it effectively. There is one piece of advice I give that sometimes comes as a surprise: I tell people to stop doing some things that earned them that management position in the first place.

Stop making so many good decisions

As a front-line manager you’ve spent a lot of time making decisions yourself. Hopefully you’re not micromanaging, but your scope of control is small enough that you can probably involved in most or all of the important decisions.

As a leader you need to shift your thinking. You can’t and shouldn’t make most of the decisions yourself. Your team should be making them. You need to coach them to be good at this by asking the right questions rather than giving the right answers. You do need to give them the context they need to make good decisions. You even need to let them make bad ones (as long as they aren’t catastrophic). And you need to take the blame if things don’t turn out well.

Otherwise you will burn yourself out, demoralize your team, and be unable to attract and keep top talent. In short you won’t be able to scale. Which means you won’t get that next big opportunity.

The importance of formal communication

In a small team there isn’t much need for formal communication. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing. You talk every day. Formal communication seems wasteful, even bureaucratic. But, as a leader, communication means leverage. Because you can’t talk to everyone everyday, you need more structured communication. Also, your increased scope means that more people care about what your team is doing. You have a larger and more diverse audience. These people don’t understand as much about what you do, so the content of your communication needs to shift (less about activities, more about results and roadmap).

So think about your audiences and the form and cadence of communication. Set time in your calendar to make sure you communicate. It is no longer a nice to have.

Manage results, not activity

Many front-line managers earn their first management promotion because they excelled at the job. They are subject matter experts and good coaches. This can lead to a habit of managing activity rather than results.

As a next-level leader you need to shift your focus away from the activity and towards the results that your team is producing. Leave it to your managers to figure out how to get the results (assuming they do so with integrity!). Ask questions and offer advice but don’t dictate. You should examine the details when the results don’t materialize.

On a related note it is important to set goals together. Don’t simply give your team the goals and don’t let them simply give them to you. You need to spend a lot of time with your managers collaborating on goal-setting. They need to be ambitious but achievable and the team needs to feel ownership over them.

The vision thing

Leaders have vision--a “true north” for their organization. Of course you’re not the company’s founder or CEO, so your vision is going to be smaller in scope and may feel less...well...visionary. That’s okay, you still need to have one. Your team needs aspirations. You need to be heading in a clear direction. It helps in so many ways:

• People know whether they are a good fit for your team. Not everyone will like the vision. That’s okay and even desirable.

• Your team will have more and better ideas about how to improve. It’s hard to have good ideas if you don’t know where you’re headed.

• The rest of the organization will know where you’re taking your team. This helps them help you. It may also surface potential conflicts with other teams. This can be uncomfortable and, in some organizations, confrontational. You shouldn’t shy away from this--resolving conflicts early and openly is much better than the alternative.

Spring cleaning for your calendar

The overall point is that managers establish habits that won’t necessarily serve them well as next level leaders. You need to break some of those old habits so you can create new ones.

How? One recommendation is to remove all recurring meetings from your calendar and start fresh fresh. The demands for your time will increase significantly and you could be dragged into a huge number of meetings, so block time on your calendar for working & thinking. Block time to write formal communications. And eat lunch. And exercise. Schedule skip-level meetings with individual contributors. Plan an offsite for your team.

There are many new things you need to do to be successful. That means clearing out much of the old. Think of it as Spring Cleaning for your calendar.

I’d love to hear your comments and suggestions….

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/27598027