Successful Leadership at Every Level by Bill Hawkins
Every time you’re promoted, the factors that differentiate average performance from superior performance change. In that first big promotion, typically you become responsible for people and the dynamics change. You see that before it was all about you and your productivity. Now it’s about productivity through other people. And pretty early on, you learn other people don’t plan the way you did, they don’t organize the way you did, and they don’t execute the way you did. It’s really difficult getting work done through other people. And, in fact, you’ll discover that many of these people have problems at home. They’ve got health problems, they’ve got marital issues, and this can overflow into the job. At the first level, managing people is the problem, and you have to learn to do that and do it effectively.
But eventually you do and then you’re promoted up to another level, to what we call middle-level management. Three predictable areas will distinguish reasonably good or average middle-level managers from the superior middle-level manager. First, give up the technical mastery. You see, back when you were an individual contributor or a first-line manager, it was important to have technical mastery. You had to do the job or you had to teach other people to do the job. But now you have people who do that every day. It’s not your job to be the technical master anymore. Let it go.
At the middle management level, you’ve already kind of learned how to get your people to show up on time, and how to deal with some of their personal issues. Now the next challenge becomes determining how much direction to provide your people. If you don’t provide enough, they don’t feel like they’re properly oriented for the assignments you’ve given them. If you give them too much, it feels like micromanagement. What’s the proper amount of direction to provide your people? And the other challenge is how to motivate and engage your people. Direction and motivation.
And the third challenge at the middle-management level is learning to become a creative problem-solver. You see, the problems earlier in your career that seemed tough at the time, in retrospect, they’re not so tough. The solutions were often: on, off, black, white, do it, don’t do it. Once you make it to the middle-management level, the problems are much more intricate and require more creativity in solving. But eventually you do well at these, and you may get promoted to the senior level.
At the senior leadership level, once again there are three key areas that distinguish average leaders from knock-it-out-of-the-ballpark leaders. First, be strategic. This is easy to say and hard to do, especially if you’re a well-respected, well-liked senior leader, because you know what you’re going to get on your door? Knock-knock-knock. “It’s just going to take a second”; “We have a problem here”; “We have an issue there, and don’t forget, you need to be in Albuquerque for the customer meeting tomorrow.” You end up getting sucked into the day-to-day tactical issues, but that’s not your job anymore. Your job is to get up there at 30,000 feet. Think of the president of the United States. There’s foreign policy; we have a military presence, we have foreign aid, we have friends, we have foes. It’s your job to look out over the horizon six months or a year from now and say, “What’s the plan?” In your leadership of your organization, be strategic.
Next, learn to handle ambiguity. By the time the decisions get to you, they’re going to be difficult. Traditionally, the outgoing U.S. president leaves a message for the incoming U.S. president in the upper left-hand drawer of the desk in the Oval Office. Now, most presidents don’t share what’s in that letter, but John Kennedy did. He followed Dwight Eisenhower, who was in a different political party, so they weren’t buddies. But Eisenhower left Kennedy a message, which said, “There will be no easy decisions.” Kennedy’s initial response was, “I think he might have been blowing some smoke,” but later on, he said, “I realized Eisenhower was spot-on.” By the time a decision makes it to the top of the organization, it’s going to be ambiguous. There’s not going to be enough information; the information you do have is conflicting. There will be factions on both sides of that decision; no matter what decision you make, they’re going to be angry. Learn to handle the ambiguity.
And finally, learn to recognize when jobs are too big. Too big for what? Too big for one person. When do I put a person on this project? When do I put a team on it? The challenge for you is, after your promotion, to understand that the reason you were promoted is because you competently handled the previous level of issues. Now you need to prepare for this new level of issues, and this will make the difference between an average or extremely effective performance on the job. Good luck.