Four truths about strategic leadership

Questions like ‘How will leading at that level be different from what I’m used to?’, ‘How will I be spending my time?’,  ‘How will I know everything about the business area that I’m going to be responsible for?’,  ‘What about the politics, how will I navigate that, I don’t do politics?’, ‘What will the purpose of my role be – it’s clear for me right now, but how will I define it there?’ keep coming up over and over again.

These are our four essential truths about strategic leadership to support making your career move to senior leadership and some home truths about what it means.

It’s really important to recognise that in a move to strategic leadership, you are generally less likely to be appointed to a role because of your expertise or content knowledge in a given area…in fact you may find yourself in a role where you are definitely NOT an expert. Strategic leaders are valued for what they think – the opinions they can offer, based on their experience, their ability to synthesise data to help make sound decisions, to predict disruption in the wider world, to say the unsayable, or to link the current situation to the future position.  Strategic leaders are valued for their role in creating lasting organisations by providing wisdom. And wisdom is rarely about content knowledge.

In fact, the wise approach is to recognise that you simply cannot know the detail of the content of the work of everyone who reports to you. They are the experts, and they are the people you need to rely on to get the job done.  We’ve heard too many stories of strategic leaders taking a super-detailed approach in their work, seemingly understanding more than any of their management team do about the content of the work of each department…and then moving role to a new context, where they try and take a similar approach only to find the experience overwhelming, stressful and unmanageable. In some cases, this can lead to complete burnout.

But this is a truth of strategic leadership – you can’t know much as they do, nor should you try to. But if you’re someone who prides themselves on their knowledge and you feel that it is important to have a technical understanding of what some or all of the people in your area deliver day to day, there are ways. What about carving out time each week to meet with a different member of your new team who can educate you on what they do. That way at least, you’ll keep learning, and you’ll be building trust and stronger relationships with members of your team who will sense your curiosity and humility in coming to them as the experts.

In making the transition to strategic leadership, you have to appreciate that politics are inevitable. You simply cannot ignore politics at the higher levels of leadership in most organisations. So strategic leadership isn’t just about what you think, it’s also about who you know, and how you manage your stakeholder relationships effectively.  You’ll experience a shift from a downward focus (on your team) to an outward focus (to peers), an upward focus (to senior stakeholders) and in some cases an external focus (for example into shareholders, customer groups, or even government or other bodies).

When you reach the upper echelons of most organisations, you find that there are some folk who aren’t the smartest or the bravest or the most visionary and you might well wonder what it is at that they’ve got that put them in such a senior position. Well, typically, they’re really good at relationships, at working the network, at leveraging who they know. And at the end of it all, however much baggage might come with the word ‘politics’, it’s really just a higher stakes form of stakeholder management and stakeholder engagement.

A top tip here is to do some of the groundwork before (or at least as soon as) you land in your new leadership role. Work out who the VIPs are in your immediate vicinity, what they expect from you, what they can give to you, and take steps to build those relationships – sooner rather than later.  In particular, get clear on what your immediate boss expects from you – what is their vision for your role and what it can achieve, what about timelines, what would success look like for them in year one? And how will you work together, how often should you meet, what’s important for them to know and what isn’t?

Once you’ve got a grasp of the knowns, ask around to find out about the unknowns, those folk who are more in the background but who are nonetheless major influencers of your stakeholder group – find out what’s important to them and build out those relationships too. Finally, it’s important to think wide when you’re at the top – ask yourself which external stakeholders or stakeholder groups might you need to engage with? What can you find out about the history of any previous relationships with your organisation or perhaps with your predecessor?

You have to be able to trust people before they’ve earned it. And that’s hard when your level of responsibility is that much greater, and particularly when you don’t know the people around you.  But you simply can’t know everything and be everywhere. You can’t roll up your sleeves and get stuck in if there’re a particularly difficult problem to deal with, at least not in the way that you used to. You need to do it through others. And that needs trust…as well as good delegation. We’ll come onto delegation but before that, when you land in a new strategic leadership role, it’s a good idea to keep a ‘watching/observing brief’ for a decent chunk of time, ideally the first 3 months. That way, you can check out the people you have, spot any gaps or issues and stay separate without getting too operationally involved in jumping in and fixing too quick. Once you’ve been through that first 90 days and you’re ready to start leading your team on a day to day basis, delegation will become your short cut to trust.

Our top tips for delegation are: Brief clearly, check in early, give honest feedback and stick to the plan you’ve agreed. That way, you can trust, because you will be much clearer on where someone is in delivering what you’ve asked.

This truth is probably the hardest to prepare for: the amount of space and time you’re likely to find in your working day. Now this isn’t true of every strategic leadership role of course but in my experience, most newly appointed strategic leaders find that, although they are still busy, they’re not as busy as they used to be, because the operational day-to-day is more distant. They have fewer people coming to them with questions, they don’t have to attend as many meetings, write as many reports, deliver as many presentations as they used to.  However, in the areas where their views are sought, they have a significantly greater impact on decision-making, on the direction of travel for a product or business area or organisation. While their impact may be greater, this is less frequent and less easily seen than the quick hit results that they’re used to getting through working with their team or when they sent off a weekly report or monthly management information pack.