Stepping up into a senior leadership role is a pivotal career moment.
For many leaders, the promotion comes after success in a role where they excel in their technical and operational abilities. However, the role they are promoted into requires a very different skill set. They now have to be “strategic”.
The skills that they are well known for, made them stand out, got them to where they are now are no longer a big part of the new job. This change in role is a point at which many leaders fail, not because they can’t do the job, but because they fall into the trap of being pulled down into the technical and operational tasks that their team should be doing.
Here is the trap: The leader continues to do the old job, to some degree, and the work of setting a vision, strategy, culture, team alignment and motivation to deliver outcomes just doesn’t happen. Not only does the leader not do their new job but they rob their team of the opportunity to step up. Instead, the leader jumps back into the detail, problem-solves and comes to the rescue of their team. This is demotivating, and disempowering and pushes a team into a comfort zone that’s hard to recover from coupled with turnover of your best people*.
Put another way: the new leader doesn’t do the job they are being paid to do. In time this turns into a failure to perform, as a leader and a team….and you can guess the rest.
This dynamic has a few variations, we could call them “the 4 excuses leaders give for not being strategic”.
Here are the 4 excuses and what you can do to resolve them.
- “My team don’t have the skills/expertise”
The leader still sees themselves as the person who can do the technical stuff quickly, and accurately. They instinctively know what is needed, and their stakeholders still see them as the best go-to person to get these things done. They have built their stakeholder relationships on this ability to deliver.
If this continues, then 2 things happen: firstly the leader gets sucked back into their old role every time that something needs to be done “quickly” (which is almost always) or to a high quality (which is almost always). This is a never-ending cycle.
The solution is to train and develop the team. First, get clear on what the specific training needs are. Ideally look for ways to get team members to mentor, train and coach each other. Create a plan to get the level of expertise up. The leader needs to let stakeholders know that this is what is happening and for them to be patient whilst skills are being developed. They should put in quality checks where needed, short term, to ensure quality. The end goal is to have their team quickly developed, freeing up the leader to do their own job.
2. “My team have too much on”.
Instead of delegating the leader takes on some of the workload that the team should be doing, so that the team are not overloaded.
The solution is to delegate. It might seem as if the team can’t take on more but by delegating tasks to them they will find ways to re-prioritise their legacy tasks. Work always expands to fill the time allocated and the team have a much better view of what they can reduce or stop doing than the leader does (because the leader can’t see everything they do). If there is lots of push back then the leader can go through a prioritisation exercise with them to jointly agree where their focus needs to be and what they can deprioritise.
3. “I don’t like doing strategic work”.
This is one of the deeper reasons the leader may find themselves masquerading under either of the excuses above. Not everyone likes strategic thinking and planning. However, this is a key decision point for the leader: do they really want to be a leader (in which case strategic thinking comes with the role) or would they prefer to be a subject matter expert? To try to be both doesn’t work, they will need to choose.
4. “I don’t know how to be strategic”.
No one is born strategic, some people may have a natural preference for it, but we can all learn how to be more strategic. It’s just some know-how, a set of skills, practice and a mindset shift. If you need to get yourself, or a leader, upskilled in strategic thinking then find a mentor in your business, an external coach, or a training program.
All 4 excuses have one thing in common, a very human tendency to want to be in our comfort zone. Taking on a new role is hard enough but when we also have to shift our mindset to a completely different way of operating it’s no surprise we feel tempted to retreat to our comfort zone. The reality is that this never ends well.
(* Whenever you see turnover of good people coupled with an underperforming team look for a leader who is not operating strategically, you will usually find them there)
I work with leadership and culture development consultancy Corporate-Edge to support leaders through this transition. If you, or a leader you work with, is facing this challenge then book a discovery call to start a conversation.
