Troubles with level-up leaders? Too soon for that big job?
Few people are truly ‘ready’ for that big promotion. The bet is that the individual can learn and adapt on the run without causing too much damage. It works. Sometimes. And sometimes the newly promoted individual flails, leaving a trail of stress and strife in their wake. In the latter case, results suffer, people feel disenfranchised, and a toxic environment settles over the organization’s culture.
While some individuals are genuinely one layer beyond the Peter Principle and shouldn’t be in a bigger role, possibly ever, others lack context for the real job. Here are the challenges many people face when stepping into big, new roles, along with ideas to help them move beyond or avoid them.
Tone Deafness
They don’t ‘hear’ how their words and actions land, and they come off as too demanding and even dictatorial, or too tentative and unconfident. In my experience, the former — too demanding and dictatorial — is the most common response. Both are problems, breeding different levels of dysfunction and culture stress.
Performance Anxiety
It’s a big deal when you feel accountable for ‘everything’ with a board or top leaders breathing down your neck, demanding results. The tendency is to shift to what you know: ‘getting sh@t done,’ which can lead to dictatorial behavior and a micromanaging style. In some cases, the performance anxiety is so bad that the newly promoted leader resorts to taking on much of the work themselves, frustrating everyone around them and setting the stage for their burnout.
Trust Trials
All of the behaviors in the above maladies weaken the tensile strength of trust in the culture, breeding a set of cascading bad behaviors. Communication quality deteriorates, tough issues go ignored, decision-making stalls, and trust bonds quickly disintegrate. The problem worsens as the leader responds to the dysfunction they’ve sown with behaviors that clearly communicate a lack of trust.
When the Issue Isn’t ability, but context
While my experiences can’t be generalized to the world at large, in many instances where things go horribly wrong with a new level-up leader, the issue isn’t potential or core capabilities; it’s the lack of context for how to do the work. In other words, the individual might have the skills but little sense of how to apply them in this new environment and at this new level. Organizations and top leaders, including boards of directors, can do a much better job arming these emerging leaders for ‘next’ with these steps:
1. Emphasize building a healthy working environment.
The most important role of any promoted leader, whether CEO or manager of managers, is to build a healthy working environment for their people to do their best work. While ‘healthy’ can mean different things, it’s, effectively, an environment free from fear, organized around clear, expected, desirable behaviors for communication and collaboration, and grounded in a clear understanding of accountability. (I expand on this a great deal in my book Wake Up Calls for Managers.)
Too often, the focus is on results, without considering the cost of achieving them. Focusing on a healthy work environment acknowledges that the best results come from motivated individuals who are comfortable tackling tough topics, offering innovative ideas, and working with others who share their drive to excel.
2. Help them define the leader they truly want to be
Instead of rushing pell-mell into accountability for results, coach your level-up leaders to tune in to the leader they truly want to be in their careers and lives. I do this in my workshops through a series of exercises that offer opportunities for reflection and projection. The goal is always to identify the behaviors they need to start and stop to succeed in the level-up role.
Our histories show us the leaders we’ve admired and the behaviors we’ve valued. Reviewing our values and desired impact helps us tune in to the behaviors we need. Asking our team members what they need from us helps gain relevant context. Synthesizing all of this helps us define, and then share, who we are striving to be as leaders and how we’ll get there. Sharing the level-up leader’s aspirational leadership self and asking team members to hold them accountable to it creates accountability.
3. Awareness of Trust-Building and Trust-Damaging Behaviors
Another exercise I run with level-up leaders involves identifying the transactional trust-building and trust-damaging behaviors that exist in every encounter. The brainstorm lists for each tend to run 20 or more. Recognizing how easy it is to innocently damage trust through our communication and leadership behaviors is powerful. Eliminating those damaging behaviors and replacing them with positive ones is hard work.
(I often have leaders keep a Trust Journal to track behaviors that build or damage trust in their daily travels. Early in the process, they are horrified by how many damaging behaviors they bring to their encounters.)
The Bottom Line:
If you are coaching a level-up leader and they’re struggling, the three exercises above are great performance improvement tools. Just be careful not to spend too much time with someone who was a bad choice. How they respond to these exercises, and, importantly, how their teams respond to the leader’s work on themselves, will tell you what you need to know.
