Manager to Leader - What’s the difference?
5 principles to accelerate next level growth on your journey to becoming an exceptional leader
Career transitions are both exciting and challenging. Few are as difficult as transitioning from being a manager to a leader. Manager to leader - what’s the difference? Becoming a leader requires a change in mindset, capabilities, relationships, and focus. I share 5 principles to accelerate your next level of growth on your journey to becoming an exceptional leader. You’ll get smarter faster, be more effective, and succeed for yourself and your organization.
Recognize that expectations have changed
The expectations of you as a leader differ from those of a manager. Managers are expected to be tactical and action-oriented. Leaders are expected to be strategic, visionary, influential.
Several years ago, I got a coveted promotion in consulting: engagement manager. One of my first assignments was to lead a team to craft the strategy for a multi-billion dollar merger.
I no longer simply executed the strategy - I set it. I was also responsible for managing client relationships, mobilizing and motivating my team, creating an environment for high performance execution, and managing upwards to senior leaders.
I learned quickly that the capabilities that got me to my role were no longer sufficient.
Change your mindset
Focus less on how to solve a problem. Focus more on defining and deciding which problems should be solved.
In the first two weeks of the project everything seemed to go awry. Client leadership were misaligned, bankers wanted to push up timelines, deal assumptions and deliverables were constantly changing. The scope, scale, magnitude of complexity, and responsibility felt overwhelming.
I needed some serious coaching. I called the Partner in charge of the project.
Me: “I’m managing the situation and stakeholders as best as I can. I’m quarterbacking, but the plays aren’t landing. Things are going south.”
Partner: “sometimes you need to be the quarterback. Other times you need to be head coach or general manager. Watch from the sidelines, observe the people and situation, and re-strategize the play”. Timeout. Anyone close to me will tell you that sports, especially American football is not my strong suit. But the analogy made sense. I was experiencing a new dimension of growth, one that felt familiar, yet distinctly different.
I needed to shift from running plays to recognizing when to shift roles and influencing the game strategy and dynamics.
As a manager, your focus is on designing process and tactical execution. As a leader, your focus is on
aligning people
driving clarity
influencing outcomes
This requires you to think fluidly - zooming in and out of details, inferring patterns from various data points, and generating conclusions that lead to decisions. It also requires you to have the confidence to “call timeout”, regroup the right set of thinkers and players that can help you draw up new plays.
An HBR Study found that 70% of employees are most engaged when senior leadership continuously communicates strategy.
Pro tip: You don’t need to know all the details; but you do need to know how to ask questions that lead to meaningful insights. This will help you define the people who can give you the right insights on work that should be done to deliver exceptional results.
Read: A more beautiful question
Expand your trusted mentor circle
Leadership is a team sport.
While there are many books on leadership (Developing The Leader Within You 2.0, Good to Great) there’s no playbook for every scenario you’ll encounter. You’ll need a set of people you can trust and with whom you can bounce ideas.
Why should you have more than one person to reach out to? I believe in having a set of thinking partners.
You’ll encounter scenarios that will require you to have different leadership modes and outcomes. In one day expect to make swift decisions, learn a new domain, deliver tough news, or be an inspiring speaker. Each of these require different capabilities.
In my situation, I looked to the project Partner for coaching on overall leadership acumen. I also tapped subject matter experts in my client’s industry to sharpen my technical acumen and understand success factors for similar transactions.
Having a set of trusted mentors that you can reach out to and help you get smarter faster is mission critical.
Broaden your business acumen
One of the most distinctive shifts from managing work products to leading an organization is making decisions that are good for the business as a whole.
Your performance is tied to the performance of the entire enterprise. This means you’re dependent on lots of teams and people to make you successful.
How do you do this? Leaders must build meaningful connections and broaden business acumen. Learn about functions beyond your own - finance, engineering, HR, marketing, product, procurement, sales, customer success, among others. Understand what matters to these teams, how they measure success, and where they fit into the broader picture of the business.
You’ll have a deeper sense of how you might partner for better shared outcomes. You’ll also learn to speak and understand the language of other functions. This is important as you’ll be in a better position to make trade-offs and explain the rationale for decisions.
Pro tip: tap people outside your firm who have a similar role. This helps with alternate views to compare and contrast approaches.
Spend time on what matters most
“Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.” Peter Drucker
How you allocate your time and your presence is crucial for your effectiveness and for the success of the organization you lead. Where you spend your time is also a reflection of how you lead and what matters most to you -- which trickles down to the organization.
The key to spending time on what matters most is to make room for those things.
Critical question: how do you spend your time now?
In my example, I took an inventory of meetings I attended, activities I spent time on, and compared these to achievement points. I found that I needed to reallocate my time to more value added areas that enabled important priorities: reset strategy, align stakeholders, re-direct my team. (see principles 2, 3).
Read: How CEOs Manage Time
The transition from manager to leader is an exciting journey. It’s also hard work. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you simply took on a similar job with larger scale and scope. You took on an entirely new responsibility with a new set of performance measures and expectations. Be proactive about attaining the next set of tools for your success toolkit.
Schedule time with me here if you’d value a focused conversation.
Read widely, learn deeply, be On Point.
Joselle
Musings on management, leadership, and strategy to help you stay On Point in today's fast paced, tech-forward, global business world.
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Great read and very insightful. Really cuts to the core message of making sure you manage what is important and demonstrating the leadership that it takes to achieve success.
Nice! Love this advice!