As managers advance professionally and move to the next level in their careers, they need to consider new strategic approaches. How are we sharing our insights? What are the highest-priority projects we need to focus on? Here are three key shifts to be aware of as you progress as a leader.
Shift from Owning All Tasks to Thoughtfully Delegating
In today’s fast-paced environment, it’s impossible to do everything yourself, even if you can do it better and quicker. You must delegate strategically to be an effective leader.
Delegating isn’t about off-loading the least desirable projects, but rather about thoughtfully and strategically identifying the right tasks, deciding who is best suited to working on them, and then communicating your expectations and providing support along the way. Delegation serves several important purposes: It empowers others to take on new challenges and learn more skills, and it allows you as a leader to focus on the top-priority issues, gain visibility, share your strategic vision, and ultimately move the company forward.
You want to ask: Do I need to be at this meeting or on this call? What part of this project does it make sense for me to focus on versus someone else on the team? How can that help their development? If you’re frequently working on Tier 2 tasks instead of Tier 1, you’re effectively holding yourself back. Gradually, you’ll start to rethink when to say yes or no so that you can focus on the highest-priority projects.
Effective leaders understand that delegation is a skill that can be learned. Moving from owning all tasks to delegating allows for better time management, helps team development, and frees up your time to move to your next level.
Shift from Spreadsheets to Strategic Thinking
Another important shift for leaders is to evolve from making the spreadsheets to using the data in the spreadsheets to tell a compelling story. Data is critical to examining past and current performance.
Strategic thinking pulls information together to inform decisions, anticipate future challenges, assess risks, identify growth opportunities, and drive innovative business solutions. You may be great with the analytical piece, but combining your strategic vision with your understanding of industry trends lets you shine and add value as a leader and critical thinker.
While spreadsheets are invaluable tools for data analysis, the real value lies in helping others understand what the numbers are telling us. Strategic thinking requires sharing a broader perspective, considering the big picture, and thinking through possible future scenarios. As you tell a compelling story with the data, you become a thought partner and add more value to the team and organization.
Shift From Being a Know-it-All to Being a Learn-it-All
Learn-it-all leaders are curious, value the opinions of others, admit their own knowledge gaps, listen to different perspectives, and step outside their comfort zones. A know-it-all leader can close off the conversation to new ideas, thus limiting opportunities for others to share their input. It’s important to take a moment and think about which approach you use as a leader, how that approach impacts the team, and any shifts you may want to make.
Adam Grant, a Wharton professor and organizational psychologist, interviewed Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft, who is known for transforming the culture and turning people from know-it-alls to learn-it-alls. Nadella’s credo: “If you take two kids at school, one of them has more innate capability but is a know-it-all. The other person has less innate capability but is a learn-it-all. The learn-it-all does better than the know-it-all.”
To use a learn-it-all approach, you need to improve and learn new things continuously. This also requires shifting from a fixed mind-set to a “growth mind-set,” a term that Stanford psychologist Carol S. Dweck coined in her 2006 book Mindset. With a fixed mind-set, people believe their intelligence, talents, and skills are fixed and can’t be improved, whereas with a growth mind-set, you can learn, grow, and improve. With a fixed mind-set, if you play a bad round of golf, you might conclude golf isn’t your game. People with a growth mind-set welcome feedback, see challenges as learning opportunities, and believe that with more practice, one can improve.
Leadership takes practice and requires that we are continuously learning and improving. I invite you to try some of these suggestions and add those that are helpful to your leadership tool kit.
Alissa Finerman WG98 is an executive coach, a Gallup-certified Strengths Coach, and the author of Living in Your Top 1%. She works with leaders and teams to improve performance and engagement levels. She is on the executive coaching team for the Wharton Executive MBA program and on the board of the Wharton Club of Southern California.