Stepping Up: Changes & Challenges

Stepping up to bigger roles is incredibly tough: we need to adapt in multiple areas, including our knowledge, behaviour, attitudes and values, often leaving behind techniques and approaches which have served us very well so far... In some ways, it requires us to undergo painful metamorphosis, like shedding our skin. 

Often we can make these changes more easily and more quickly with support from others as we:

• identify what the critical issues are, and seek external perspectives on them 
• define the expectations of our stakeholders 
• communicate more widely and more effectively 

Some examples of the challenges that leaders stepping up face include: 

• Shifting away from operating at our previous level / letting go (which can be especially tough when we're still doing our old roles too!) 
• Balancing competing priorities, and strategy vs execution 
• Generating and growing profit, and meeting other key performance indicators 
• Managing our time effectively, including delegation 
• Staying informed about what is happening when we're further away from the detail 
• Building new skills, including sufficient technical knowledge of the areas within our expanding responsibility, plus assertiveness, EQ, executive credibility and more 
• Influencing people to buy-in to our new strategy/direction
• Appointing new people, and putting our best people in the most suitable team positions 

Do any of these sound familiar? 

For models of different leadership levels/passages, see the work of Charan et al on the "Leadership Pipeline model", Freedman's "Pathways and Crossroads" model, and Jaques' "Stratified Systems Theory" which defines strata of work based on decision-making complexity.