You’ve had great successes in your career, possibly even having managed a very small team before. You get on well with peers and management alike and when you put your mind to something it gets done, and done well. This is usually when you, or someone else in your company, starts thinking it’s time for you to make the leap to a more senior leadership role.
If this is happening to you in a large, established business you’ll likely have had mentors or a boss who’s shown you what this senior role looks like. You’ll have watched them take company goals and translate them into departmental strategy and targets. Then you’ve been a part of executing the day to day delivery to achieve success and can say with confidence how strategic leadership delivers real end value.
However, if you find yourself in a fast paced, SME going through rapid growth and you’re being asked to step up into a new role with little to no guidance you may find yourself very quickly sinking with no idea where it all went wrong.
Making the move from being a do-er, to managing a strategy or people is a big change to your day to day. You’ll need to quickly learn to let go of the more hands on work you’re used to and experience a mind shift for what adding value in this new role looks like.
The biggest point most new managers need to get around is fully understanding that their new work is adding value. But
it can be hard to release the mental connection between creating/ selling or launching things and adding value.
Look to the other members of Management in your company – are they coding, selling or building marketing campaigns? Or are they strategizing, roadmapping and tracking performance of others? Hopefully you’ll see they’re mostly doing the latter and that, in turn, is the key to delivering the former.
One of the biggest motivators in your career will be knowing where you’re adding value, so when you’re thinking about a more senior position you need to ask yourself if in this new role you’ll feel that you’re adding real day to day value to the company. If the answer is no, then you’ll find yourself drifting back to the hands on tasks you’ve held in the past and you’ll quickly find that you’re falling behind the new standards expected.
The simplest way to overcome the feeling that your new role isn’t adding value is to talk with those directly above you. Get really explicit agreement that the things you’re worried about spending your time on are what’s needed.
I vividly remember a conversation I had with a boss where I told him that 60% of my time was spent ‘just talking’ to people. Rather than confirming my fears that this would be seen as a waste, he asked me what I got from this activity. I soon realised this time spent ‘just talking’ to people meant I had a steady stream of up to date information to feed to him, was able to prevent project overlap before time and money was wasted and I was able to stop people from missing critical elements to their work by having a robust knowledge of all the moving parts of the business. Since then, I am proud to tell people that most of my role involves talking, and I love dedicating my management time to doing just that.
As soon as you can articulate the bottom line value of those activities you undertake not as a do-er but now as a strategic leader, you’ll be able to throw yourself wholeheartedly into your new role and every aspect of it.
Laura Kelly 