There are no “right” answers as an executive.
Early in your career, you may have clear ownership of an area and well-defined roles and responsibilities and priorities. With that direction, you can focus on solving the problems in front of you.
As an executive, you create that clarity and direction for others. Executive leadership means navigating between multiple priorities and values to choose which problems to assign to which teams. You are constantly looking for how to balance different tradeoffs in each moment:
— Do you optimize for revenue, or user experience, or your team’s workload?
— Do you focus on the immediate urgent problem, or build capacity for long-term company success, or develop new possibilities for the future?
Each of those could be a “right” answer, but which one is most important will change regularly.
To answer these questions, executives must strike a balance between confidence and curiosity. If they’re not curious and asking questions, they will not have the context from the team to make good decisions. But if they ask too many questions, they will seem anxious and looking for validation, rather than confidently leading. The “right” balance between confidence and curiosity will depend on the other members of the leadership team, the experience of the executive, and the context of the company, all of which could vary on a weekly basis.
This shift from operating within clarity to navigating ambiguity is a key part of the shift necessary to become an effective executive. I’ll be teaching a Maven course this fall on that mindset shift, and I’d love to get your feedback on how to make that course more valuable.
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