Congratulations! You’ve just gotten promoted to your first executive level job.
What do you do now?
One of the big reasons I wrote The Next Level almost 20 years ago was that the expectations of new executives are always very high but hardly ever clearly defined. My goal with the book was to make the implicit behavioral expectations of new executives explicit.
Since then, I’ve spoken with, coached, and taught thousands of new executives in dozens of industries. I’ve witnessed a lot of success stories and more than a few flameouts.
The flameouts tend to have some common denominator reasons – you could call them common pitfalls that new executives need to avoid. As a matter of fact, I will call them that – pitfalls. So, with that as preamble, here are three common pitfalls that new executives often fall prey to along with some suggestions on how to avoid them.
Running Without Reflecting
Taking on your first executive level job can feel a lot like the title of a recent Oscar winning movie – it’s everything, everywhere, all at once. The amount of people and issues you need to pay attention to can be overwhelming.
The first thing to realize is that they’re not really all your issues. The trick is to determine which ones are the highest and best use of your limited time and attention. That requires adopting a process of regular reflection.
One goal of reflection is to lengthen your gap between stimulus and response. Without working on that, you just end up reacting to whatever lands in front of you. To lengthen the gap, start with focusing on improving your neurobiology and getting yourself out of the state of chronic fight or flight that causes you to overreact to stimuli. A good way to do this is to push your mental reset button with deep breathing. I teach you how to do it in this video.
Once you’re out of fight or flight, you can break your day down into its key components and ask yourself two big questions about each event or conversation:
What’s the goal?
How do I need to show up to make that happen?
I’ve taught this simple reflection process to thousands of leaders and have around 100% agreement that it greatly improves the quality of their outcomes.
Still Being the Go-To Person
One of my favorite questions to ask a roomful of high potential leaders on their way to the executive level is, “How many of you have ever been called a go-to person?” Invariably, every hand goes up. Not at all surprising because being the go-to person is what got them into the room in the first place. As I often say, being the go-to person is a great thing to be until it’s no longer a great thing to be.
It stops being a great thing to be because it doesn’t scale. Even go-to people eventually reach the limits of their capacity. And, while they’re holding on to a bunch of stuff that is no longer the highest and best use of their time and attention given the executive role that they’re in, they’re slowing the development of their teams, thereby making the scaling problem even worse.
The challenge (and opportunity) is to make the shift from being the go-to person to building teams of go-to people. That’s how you scale your leadership.
Here are five questions to answer for yourself and to discuss with your team that can help you shift so you can scale:
What does 100% success look like for us a year from now?
What’s on the short list of things that, given the position I’m in, that only I can do that are going to make the biggest difference in creating the one-year success picture?
What do I need to let go of in my current operating rhythm to make room for the more important work that I need to pick up?
What tasks and actions do I need to delegate or assign to my team leaders that are going to have the biggest impact on achieving our one-year success picture?
What will they need to let go of to create space for the most important work?
Working through and following through on those questions with your team will go a long way towards making the shift from go-to person to building a team of go-to people.
Staying on Your Island
The third pitfall I regularly see new executives fall into is staying on their functional island instead of playing a bigger game.
When you become an executive, you start being an enterprise leader first and a functional leader second. Your primary commitment is to the success of your first team – the executives you serve with – and prioritizing long-term enterprise success over the short-term sugar rush of recognition for functional success.
That can be a hard shift to make when your career up until now has been built on successfully accomplishing your agenda. The requirement now is to let go of a “me” mindset and pick up an “us as the leadership team” mindset.
Here’s a simple self-assessment I regularly share with high potential leaders to help them identify any behavioral changes they need to make to play a bigger game as a member of the first team. Which ones are your biggest opportunities?
So, there you have it – three common pitfalls of new executives with some recommendations on how to avoid them.
Which pitfalls resonate the most with you?
What’s one step you’ll take this week to improve?
What kind of help will you need and who can provide it? (Consider tagging and sharing with a colleague who could also benefit from this.)
Share your thoughts in a comment on LinkedIn and we’ll all learn from each other’s opportunities and insights.
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