Last year I worked with an absolutely brilliant woman called Jenny.
Jenny had recently taken on her first senior leadership role. She came to me for coaching because it wasn’t going as smoothly as she had expected.
She’d been pretty confident about moving up: she was already proven to be an excellent team leader and a strategic thinker who really knew her stuff. She was smart, confident and dedicated to her role.
But six months in she was frustrated. She didn’t seem to be able to make the impact she wanted.
She felt like she was ‘pushing water uphill’ all the time, trying to get other Heads and Directors to engage with what she needed from them. A lot of her time was spent fire-fighting emerging conflicts between different teams and writing long reports for the Board.
She was beginning to wonder whether this was the right role for her after all.
Jenny is not unusual. In fact, her experiences are very common.
There is a huge, steep learning curve when we step into senior leadership that is rarely spoken about or acknowledged.
Most people get promoted because they’re good at their job. They have a proven track record of success in their field of expertise. They’re ready to step it up a notch.
The vast majority of people who step into a leadership role are also fine with the leading-a-team bit. We’ve all had some experience of managers - good and bad - and come into the role with an idea of how we want to approach it. If we struggle there are thousands of books, podcasts, blogs and gurus to help us out.
What is often more difficult is the other side of leadership - being part of a leadership team that is trying to make an organisation successful.
Any leader should recognise that they sit in two teams – their own team and the leadership team. They will play different roles in each, but to be effective they need to pay attention to both.
The reality is that, in most workplaces, we regularly need to collaborate and negotiate with the leaders of other teams. How successfully we do that not only affects how work gets done, it also shapes the organisational culture.
Take time to listen to your colleagues, to understand their priorites, pressures and challenges. Not only will this build rapport, it will help you better understand issues across the organisation.
If you're pointing out a problem or issue, do so constructively. If you can't offer a solution or suggestion, offer to have a conversation to see if you can help.
Most importantly, develop your organisational awareness. This means understanding what’s going on across the business, not just in your team.
It means having a really clear sense of what the overarching priorities are, and then being able to apply these to your role.
Frame conversations with other leaders around shared objectives and try not to be territorial. If the organsiation does well, you all do well.
Jenny and I worked together to “zoom out” from her role and what she was focused on. We looked at the organisation as a whole, the challenges of the sector and the priorities of the chief executive. This gave her loads of new insight and built her confidence in her own knowledge and judgement.
We also spent some time thinking about the dynamics of the leadership team and how she fitted in, and the stress that some of her colleagues were experiencing. Again, this gave her more confidence in her ability to understand them, which meant she was better able to communicate and influence within the team.
Six months later, Jenny was seeing a real difference in how she worked. She was making much more of an impact and, most importantly, she felt happier and more fulfilled.
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