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I’ve been working with a senior leader in a tech business, and he’s got to the point where the CEO has given him some feedback that he’s not ready for top level leadership.
And so they’ve given him some coaching, and it’s been a pretty tough thing for him to swallow. And he’s been trying to get his head around what that means and what he needs to work on.
I work all the time with people that are trying to shift their thinking to get to the next level. What I’m gonna share with you are three things I’ve learned while working with him because he’s been amazing. He’s really worked on himself. That will help you shift from your current level leadership into the next level.
The Challenge
Every time we make a transition between the level we’re at to the next level we need to let go of something, we need to embrace something new. Every time we do that, we have to learn something else, we have to let go and embrace the new.
From an individual contributor to team leader we have to let go of the fact that the performance is all our responsibility and the fact that we have to bring performance out of other people.
From team leader to leader of leaders, we have to recognise that we have to coach because we can’t have a relationship with every single person that interacts with the customer. And it’s this final transition between leader of leader, and leading the organisation I’m most interested in. That’s when you’re able to really be pegged as a future leader, a potential CEO of the organisation or to essentially run one of the businesses.
The Three Big Shifts
- The first shift was what I call the I-You reframe, which was that he would go into meetings thinking he knew the solution and how the meeting would turn out.
Sometimes that got him into trouble because he would damage relationships because his analysis said we needed to go one way and in fact, the other people in the meeting either had questions or they might have a different opinion.
And the I-You reframe literally says that the ability to put yourself in the shoes of others is more important at this level than your ability necessarily to come up the right answer all the time. He had to take a step to work a little bit more in the grey of saying, “Sometimes I may need to go into meetings and situations where I won’t know the answer and I have to create them with the people around me.”
- The second is the shift from using his head to using his gut in his decision making.
So our head tells us sometimes the right answer and it tells us, it gives us all the analysis to justify our decision making but often we don’t have time to make decisions and we have to back our gut.
At this level, often speed is more of an issue than having literally the best idea, and so sometimes we need to do the analysis but then back our gut on a decision and spend the time then the helping the people around us understand why that’s the right decision. So it’s trusting yourself and using your gut rather than your head.
- The third one is what becomes really important at this level is the decisions you make.
And I think what great leaders do is when they’ve got to make a tough decision they get the smartest people around them together in a room, they listen to them, and then they make a decision.
Summary
What he was able to work out was that the more he gets senior, the more people are relying on him that when things go wrong he needs to make a decision about how to move the business forward. His reframe was then being able to say, “You know what? That is my primary job,” and then engaging team around how to make that happen.
Think about the next level for you, whether it’s leading the organisation, it’s leader of leaders. What way of thinking about the way you get stuff done now may you need to let go of? And what new way of thinking may you need to embrace that would help you be more successful at that level?
I’ll give you three examples,
- the I-You reframe,
- trusting and backing yourself
- and focusing on your decision making as a way of making that shift.
Leave me a Comment or Get in Touch
When you turn this video off, I want you to write down what’s one thing you could let go of and what’s one new way of thinking that you could embrace to get yourself to the next level? And send me a note or leave a comment below.
