At some point in their careers, many professionals make the transition from individual contributor to manager. This can prove to be far more challenging and uncomfortable than it first seems. It requires taking your hands off the steering wheel and moving over to the passenger seat - i.e., accomplishing work through others. It requires shifting your paradigm to recognize that the way you now contribute is by guiding and supporting others to expand their contributions.

 

As difficult as that change is, the transition from manager to leader is even harder, and more ambiguous. As you make this move, you become responsible for guiding the work of a larger number of employees - many of whom may not report directly to you. I aim to support leaders in this ongoing journey by helping you think about:
 

• Developing a vision and articulating it in a way that every employee in your organization can see how their individual choices contribute towards a shared purpose. The process of creating a vision helps you and your teams simplify and prioritize. The vision itself lives on as a tool to continuously ensure that the strategies and tactics pursued throughout an organization are congruent and reinforcing rather than disjointed or at cross purposes.
   

• Measuring what matters to assess if you are achieving your vision. Too often, organizations get caught up with setting goals for goals’ sake or hitting metrics for metrics’ sake. Leaders must remind their teams that the reason for measuring and tracking things in the first place is to inform decisions. Which strategies should be challenged, which tactics may need adjustment, which resources could be redeployed? And what needs to be measured today - including objective and subjective measures, and quantitative and qualitative measures - in order to inform those decisions tomorrow?
   

• Creating a learning organization that continuously improves and transforms. Companies that consistently achieve above-market returns are ones that learn faster than their competitors and put those learnings to work faster than their competitors. What mechanisms will you put in place so that the growing knowledge and insights of each employee - even those far from you on the org chart - are harnessed towards this end? And how will you choose to approach the inevitable conflicts that arise when new perspectives challenge existing views?
   

• Thoughtfully distributing responsibilities throughout your organization. Who will you empower to make which decisions? And how will you hold employees accountable - ensuring they experience rewards when they are truly creating value (not just checking boxes and completing tasks) while experiencing negative consequences that help them recognize when they have destroyed value and need to adapt? How will you incent the specific behaviors that will help the organization advance towards its vision? What mechanisms will help align each individual’s interests with the interests of the whole organization?

 

• Setting the tone for hiring, promotions, and separations, especially when you will not be in the room for many of these decisions. This in turn requires thinking not just about what sorts of skills and capabilities that prospective employees need to bring to the table - questions that may be best for each hiring manager to define - but also the values and beliefs every employee needs to live out (including you) in order to help fulfill the organization’s vision.

 

Some people become leaders through evangelizing a particular idea or technology and building an organization around it. Others come into leadership roles having demonstrated success in a specific functional area, e.g., sales, operations, R&D, finance, or HR. They may be selected for their capacity to mentor employees within their function, or to bring their point of view and judgment to cross-functional c-suite decisions. These attributes may elevate you into leadership, but once there, you must embrace new responsibilities such as those described in the bullets above. Unfortunately, these responsibilities are rarely articulated up-front and are often uncovered on the job through trial-and-error - or they are ignored altogether, leading to missed opportunities and middling results.

 

I help leaders more fully understand their distinct roles and responsibilities. And I help them approach those responsibilities in a way that is authentic to their individual style and strengths, and in a way that responds to the unique challenges and opportunities they face at this particular moment. By doing so, I help leaders accelerate change and expand the long-term value they can create and capture for their organizations, their industries, and themselves.