The Shift

A different way of thinking about senior leadership

As people move into more senior leadership roles, the things that made them successful earlier in their careers can start to create a different kind of tension. The organisation needs them to think more broadly, create space for other people and take responsibility for outcomes beyond their own area of expertise, while the habits that helped them succeed can keep pulling them back towards the detail.

This is one reason I think the move into senior leadership is about more than learning another set of skills. You can understand that you need to delegate more, think more strategically or give your team greater ownership, and still find yourself stepping back into the old pattern when the pressure rises.

Why skills alone don't always make the difference

Our behaviour is connected to how we see ourselves. If being capable, knowledgeable and dependable has become an important part of your identity at work, then being the person who solves the problem can feel like a natural way of creating value. It can also make it difficult to step back, even when you know that the wider role now asks something different of you.

This is why the shift involves identity as well as behaviour, not just new skills stacked on top of it. Most leadership development adds tools, skills and techniques on top of an unchanged sense of identity, and under pressure that arrangement tends to fall over: the new layers hold up when things are calm and disappear when they're not. Robert Kegan's work on adult development points to the same thing from another angle — the more durable shift starts with how you make sense of yourself, not only with what you've learned to do. The aim is not to replace the expert doer with a new version of yourself, but to broaden the way you see your contribution so that your expertise can sit alongside strategic perspective, executive presence, systemic awareness, enabling others, relationships and influence, and the capacity to work with ambiguity and uncertainty.

The six leadership capabilities

The expert does not disappear. You can still solve a difficult problem, use your judgement and step in when the situation genuinely needs your expertise. The difference is that you have more choice about when to do that and when another way of contributing might be more useful.

A deeper kind of development

This connects with the idea of vertical development: the possibility that we can develop not only what we know and what we are able to do, but also the way we make sense of ourselves, other people and increasingly complex situations.

As leadership becomes more senior, there are often competing interests, incomplete information and no obvious answer. A decision that makes sense for one part of the organisation may create difficulties somewhere else. In those situations, simply knowing more is not always enough. We may need to become capable of seeing the situation differently.

The work of William Torbert and others on developmental action-logics offers one way of understanding this. It describes different ways of making sense of the world, including Expert and Achiever, and later action-logics that allow for broader and more systemic perspectives. I do not think the point is to reach a particular stage or leave earlier ways of operating behind. The more useful question is whether the way you currently make sense of your role gives you enough room to meet what the role now requires.

So what actually changes?

The shift tends to happen through experience rather than insight alone. We try something different in a real situation, notice what happens, reflect on it and try again. Over time, those experiences can begin to change what we trust, what we believe we are capable of and how natural a different way of leading feels.

This is also why the social environment matters. When you begin to show up differently, other people have to respond to that change. Sometimes they recognise it and give you more room to lead in a new way. Sometimes they continue to treat you as the person you used to be. Both can become part of the learning.

There is more to the idea

There is a good deal more behind this than can usefully be explained on a webpage. The downloadable guide brings together the ideas around identity, vertical development and the practical aspects of making this kind of shift, while keeping the focus on what they might mean for you as a leader rather than treating them as abstract theory.

If you are beginning to recognise some of this in your own experience, I would suggest starting there. You can use the guide to explore what resonates, what does not, and where you might want to experiment with a different way of leading.