Emerging Leadership - The Art of Managing Managers
When an employee first becomes a manager, it's a significant transition to a new role that looks and feels quite different to being an individual contributor. Additional training and development often follow this shift. But what about the next promotion to managing managers? This is an equally significant and yet more subtle transition. Many leaders struggle with this transition, in part because there are fewer development resources around this transition. I have worked with many emerging leaders and have seen their challenges and uncertainties. This post lays out the most common challenges.
Here is my Top 10 list of challenges for emerging leaders:
You will likely be more involved in strategy or at minimum shaping / (re)designing the future of the organization. You will need to consider the wider system in which your team operates and have a longer term orientation. Change management will likely be part of this role.
It will be increasingly important to foster relationships with people outside your direct line of authority, both internal and external to your organization. ln fact, effective relationship management might one of the most impactful skills you need to develop in this new role.
This also calls for more advanced communications skills, including advocacy and public speaking
Your new role likely requires more leadership skill than management skill. Some see this as a transition from management to leadership. In reality you have to lead and mange in these roles.You will need to advocate for decisions you are now responsible for.
You are now even more removed from front line work, and the role parameters are often fuzzier than for front line managers. This can make it harder to define success and thus to focus. The separation from front line work can lead to a loss of identity. You are less reliant on technical skills that likely got you promoted in the first place, and many new leaders experience imposter syndrome.
In this new role only a fraction of your team reports to you directly, so you can’t know all things about how your new organization works. This raises the bar on effective delegation, and the concurrent issue of figuring out what you really need to know about how your team works.
Emerging leaders need to be thinking about how to optimize the structure of their teams, not just filling positions. This requires stepping back and assessing what you need for the future and how this might impact (positively and negatively) your current staff.
This type of leadership often draws on greater fluency with the principles of coaching, including asking thoughtful questions vs leading with answers. Active listening is another valuable skill for these roles.
As you become more senior in the organization the quality and quantity of feedback often drops, so you need to find new ways to get feedback, e.g., through a robust 360 mechanism.
The most important resource you have is time, so allocating your time effectively will be a crucial aspect of how you do your job.
These are not all just new skills; many are really about shifts in mindset and awareness. The point is not that you need to be proficient in all this on Day 1; rather it is about thinking differently about your role. I have found the following questions are helpful yo help with this:
What is the essence of my job, really? What do I need to stop doing to make room for all this? What is success in this new role?
What’s my unique value to the organization in this role? What do I actually need to be good at to do this new job well?
What is my responsibility for making change happen? How clearly defined is this?
How will I know if I am doing this right? How strong is the feedback?
What must I know about how my new organization works, and who does what? What should I rely on others to know and do?
How well do I know (and should I know) my new extended team?
How should I use my time differently than before?
How will I recharge myself?
These issues can be explored effectively through conversations if other colleagues are experiencing similar challenges. Coaching can be a good option to help new leaders handle these transitions.