Beyond being the expert doer.Becoming the strategic senior leader.
This is relevant to you if you are:
- Stepping into a more senior leadership role
- Growing or changing your business
- Leading through a period of change
- Moving from doing to leading
- Finding a different way to create impact
There is a point in many leadership careers when the things that made you successful start to create a different kind of challenge. You may have built your reputation by being knowledgeable, capable and dependable, and by being someone who can step in when something needs to be solved. These qualities can take you a long way, but as your role becomes more senior, you are increasingly being asked to create value in different ways.
You may need to spend more time thinking about the wider organisation rather than the detail in front of you. You may need to create more space for other people to take ownership, even when you know you could do something yourself more quickly. And you may find that the problems you are dealing with have no obvious answer, so that influencing people, holding different perspectives and making considered judgements become more important than simply knowing what to do.
This can be an uncomfortable transition, particularly when being the person who knows, solves and delivers has become an important part of how you see yourself at work. You may understand what you need to do differently, while still finding yourself returning to familiar ways of working when the pressure rises.
The difficulty is that this is not always a skills problem. Your behaviour is connected to how you see yourself, what you believe you are capable of, how you understand the world around you and what gives you a sense of value. If much of your success has come from being the expert who can solve the problem, stepping back from that role can feel like more than a change in behaviour. It can feel like a change in who you are at work.
This is what I call the strategic leadership shift. It is not about leaving your expertise behind, or becoming a different kind of person. Your knowledge and judgement still matter. The shift is about developing a broader way of creating value, so that you can think more strategically, enable other people, work with the wider system and make decisions when there is no clear answer.
The aim is not to become less expert. It is to become less dependent on expertise as the main source of your value, while developing the capacity to lead in ways that fit the role you have grown into.