Are you underappreciated in your job, working hard, indispensable in your area of expertise, and yet not being given opportunities to reach the next level?
That’s because you’re doing it wrong, thinking like an individual contributor rather than the executive who creates impact beyond their personal output.
You are likely:
— Taking on the hardest problems yourself. You run towards the fires and lead the effort to put them out.
— Getting into the details. It’s faster and better for you to do things yourself than let somebody else do it because you’ve spent years developing your expertise.
— Saying yes to most of what is asked of you. Your can-do attitude got you where you are, so you keep taking on more.
All of these are great traits to have…as an individual contributor or front-line manager. They brought you success and promotions for the first 10+ years of your career, and so you naturally expect they will continue to bring you more success. But they are now becoming the limits that prevent you from scaling your impact.
Instead, your job becomes to give the work away.
— Instead of doing the work yourself, you train and develop others to deliver the same quality of work that you used to do yourself.
— Instead of putting out fires, you develop the good practices so that those situations don’t arise. Fire prevention, not fire fighting.
— Instead of getting into the details, you tell others what good output looks like, and you trust them to deliver it. If they don’t, you give them constructive feedback on how they can do better next time (see the point above).
— Instead of saying yes, you say no most of the time. You are clear on what will drive the most value for the organization, and you focus your team on those projects. You realize that your time and attention needs to be focused on the work that _only_ you can do, and ruthlessly delegate or automate everything else to an uncomfortable extent. You are doing a different job now.
What’s particularly difficult about this transition is that nobody prepares you for it; you are expected to just figure it out. I’ve had many clients come to me in frustration that they are no longer exceeding expectations as they once were, and I’m the first person to tell them that their job has changed. I’ve also had clients who feel stuck and can’t figure out what is keeping them from reaching their next level of leadership.
After learning from the top Google execs as the Search Ads Chief of Staff for many years, and coaching dozens of executives through this transition over the past six years, I have distilled the secrets of this transition into a Maven class on How to Become a More Effective Executive. The next cohort starts this Thursday at 9am Pacific, so sign up now!
The link to the class is in my bio, and I’ll add it to the comments so you can learn more and sign up. Let me know if you have any questions!