How to Deliver Results, Meet Increasing Demands, and Thrive as A Newly Promoted Senior Leader
What got you here…won’t get you there.
Today, we’re talking about the critical factors that contribute to effective leadership, productive teams, and high-impact results for senior leaders new to their role.
You’re here because you got it! Finally! That leadership role that once felt out of reach or unattainable — it has finally landed at your feet. Congratulations! You must be thrilled.
But, if you’re really honest with yourself, you’re likely getting a bit nervous as you start settling into what’s expected of you. There is a lot riding on this position and the results you are expected to deliver.
Luckily, you have a clear vision for what you want to achieve, and you’re passionate about where the team and the company are headed. In fact, it’s likely this clear vision and passion have landed you in your new leadership seat! But, if it hasn’t already, the excitement may start to wear off as the magnitude of your responsibilities start to sink in.
This is normal. After all, you’ve never done this exact thing before. You were likely handed this new responsibility because of your excellent work delivering results. But this level of leadership responsibility? It’s a whole new set of skills and expectations — and there are no playbooks. Mentors, yes, but playbooks? Nope.
So, how do you start? You’re not going to get it all right. You will make mistakes, and there will be failures. For many new leaders who have been promoted due to their consistently high performance, this is such a terrifying prospect that they live in a perpetual state of anxiety. And, counterproductively, their fears and anxieties often show up in their leadership in detrimental ways. They exhibit behaviors that they think signal “good leadership,” without ever stopping to assess the bigger picture of what would serve them, their team, and the organization as a whole most successfully.
Your first step, therefore, needs to be committing to a journey of self-exploration and investing the time for critical self-awareness to build amidst the challenges that organizational leadership poses.
What kind of leader will you be?
The list of challenges that organizations are facing at the moment is long. As a leader, you’re probably swamped by critical questions, without the time or guidance to know where to start — much less how.
- Will you focus on outcomes first, or will you focus on people first?
- How might you combine both approaches, instead of thinking of them as separate and distinct?
- How will you weather challenging circumstances, mistakes, and failures? Will they be tolerated by others?
- Which challenges and mistakes are yours to own?
- Where will you need help from others?
- How will you enroll others in your vision? Will they get to have a say in that vision, too?
There is an age-old debate in the leadership space. Some argue that if you focus on the product or outcomes and you get them right, the other issues will go away or become less important. Others advocate that if you get the right people on board, help them communicate well, and focus on your group process (your HOW, as I like to call it), the right product will emerge in a way that is more sustainable, resilient, and repeatable.
What do you believe?
Here’s what we know at TeamCatapult: there are two kinds of successful leaders. Those who recognize that investing in themselves and their development as leaders is the only pathway to being successful in their role — and those who are getting ready to learn the value of investing in themselves and their leadership development.
It’s about people
Investing in your leadership is the only and best way to navigate the high-stakes landscape of leading people through the organizational challenges we’re facing in this moment.
Here’s what a leader said to me recently: “I thought I was starting the job that I had dreamed of. But before I could get my feet under me and start to put my vision into action, I was confronted by the challenge of all challenges — a breakdown between two senior leaders in my team who were critical to my vision. Until I could help them solve their issue, we were not moving forward. I would go home at night thinking, ‘I did not sign up for this!’ I felt like I needed to send them out for counseling or therapy. How did I get into this? I just wanted to get back to what I enjoy doing and stop navigating this interpersonal drama. Can’t people just come to work and get their job done?”
It seems simple, doesn’t it? If only other people would pull themselves together, everything would go smoothly, right? But here’s the crazy thing about delivering amazing outcomes or products: unless you are a team of one, you will need to work with other humans. And working with other humans is neither straightforward nor linear.
Humans are complex. When we gather with others, there are so many dynamics at play in the room. As leaders, we will likely have deep technical expertise in our domain that our careers have been focused on — but most of us lack deep expertise in working with other humans. And that’s the real role of successful leaders.
The ability to work with others and effectively navigate interpersonal dynamics and behaviors is table stakes for the successful leaders of today.
We live in a world where change is a daily, hourly event. It is not going to slow down or stop. We cannot continue to be the hero — the single person who solves all the issues. We need others to join us, to fight alongside us, to be a team. And we all want to thrive. We want to do good work and live a life worth living outside of work.
This doesn’t mean you need to become a therapist to be a leader. But it does mean you need a model that allows you to work with relationships and be able to see the visible and invisible dynamics that create ineffective conversations — as well as how to change the nature of the discourse when things are moving off track.
At TeamCatapult, we offer programming to help you develop a leadership model for yourself, but we often hear things like “but what does that really mean?” or, “what will the outcome be?” The truth is that what it means and what the outcome will be are unique to you and can only become clear by participating in a sustained exploration.
To help leaders get a sense of the work to come, I’ve developed a multi-part series depicting one leadership cohort’s experience in a leadership development program. I encourage you to read it!
We need skills for working with other humans. Individual and collective leadership development is the key for thriving at work and in life — no matter what obstacles show up.
What kind of leader do you hope to be?
