How to Cite the Harvard Business Review Can You Be a Great Leader Without Technical Expertise?
Reprint: R1206C Few managerial transitions are more hard than making the move from leading a role to leading an entire enterprise for the showtime time. The scope and complexity of the task increase dramatically, in ways that tin can go out executives feeling overwhelmed and uncertain. It truly is dissimilar at the summit. But how, exactly? Career transition good Michael Watkins gear up out to explore that question in an extensive series of interviews with leadership mentors, Hr professionals, and newly minted unit heads. What he constitute was that at this turning signal, executives must navigate a catchy set of changes in their leadership focus and skills. Watkins calls these the 7 seismic shifts. New enterprise leaders must motion from being a specialist to a generalist; from analyzing data to integrating knowledge from multiple sources; and from implementing tactics to developing strategies. They besides need to transform themselves from bricklayers into organizational architects; from problem solvers into agenda setters; and from warriors intent on chirapsia the competition into diplomats who engage with a total range of stakeholders. Finally, leaders must move out from the wings and become used to living on centre phase in the total spotlight. To make the transition, managers have to acquire new capabilities quickly. And though what got them to the top may no longer be enough, there are steps that they and their organizations can take to fix them to succeed.
Artwork: Adam Ekbergs Country Roads 2005, ink-jet print
Harald (not his real name) is a loftier-potential leader with 15 years of experience at a leading European chemical company. He started equally an assistant product manager in the plastics unit of measurement and was quickly transferred to Hong Kong to assistance fix up the unit's new Asian business organization center. Every bit sales there soared, he soon won a promotion to sales manager. Iii years later he returned to Europe as the marketing and sales director for Europe, the Heart East, and Africa, overseeing a group of fourscore professionals. Continuing his string of successes, he was promoted to vice president of marketing and sales for the polyethylene division, responsible for several lines of products, related services, and a staff of nearly 200.
All of Harald's difficult piece of work culminated in his appointment as the caput of the company'south plastic resins unit, a business with more than three,000 employees worldwide. Quite intentionally, the visitor had assigned him to run a modest merely thriving business organization with a potent squad. The idea was to give him the opportunity to move across managing sales and marketing, go his arms around an entire business concern, larn what it meant to head upwards a unit with the assist of his more-experienced team, and take his leadership skills to the next level in a situation free from complicating problems or crises. The setup seemed perfect, only a few months into the new position, Harald was struggling mightily.
Like Harald, many rise stars trip when they shift from leading a function to leading an enterprise and for the first fourth dimension taking responsibility for a P&L and oversight of executives across corporate functions. Information technology truly is unlike at the top. To find out how, I took an in-depth look at this critical turning point, conducting an extensive series of interviews with more than 40 executives, including managers who had developed loftier-potential talent, senior Hr professionals, and individuals who had recently made the move to enterprise leadership for the first time.
What I found is that to make the transition successfully, executives must navigate a catchy set of changes in their leadership focus and skills, which I call the seven seismic shifts. They must acquire to move from specialist to generalist, analyst to integrator, tactician to strategist, mason to builder, problem solver to agenda setter, warrior to diplomat, and supporting bandage member to lead function. Like so many of his peers, Harald had trouble negotiating most of these shifts. To run across what makes them so difficult, let'due south follow him through each of them, as he confronts unnerving surprises, makes unwarranted assumptions, encounters entirely new demands on his time and imagination, makes decisions in ignorance, and learns from his mistakes.
Specialist to Generalist
Harald'due south immediate claiming was shifting from leading a single part to overseeing the full set of business functions. In his kickoff couple of months, this shift left him feeling disoriented and less confident in his ability to make good judgments. And so he fell into a classic trap—overmanaging the part he knew well and undermanaging the others. Fortunately for Harald, this became crystal clear when his vice president of HR gave him some blunt feedback nearly his human relationship with his sales and marketing VP: "Y'all are driving Claire crazy. You need to requite her some space."
Harald'due south tendency to stay in his functional comfort zone is an understandable reaction to the stresses of moving upwards to a much broader office. It would exist wonderful if newly appointed enterprise leaders were world-form experts in all business functions, merely of course they never are. In some instances they have gained feel past rotating through various functions or working on cross-functional projects, which certainly helps. (Meet the sidebar "How to Develop Strong Enterprise Leaders.") Only the reality is that the motility to enterprise leadership always requires executives who've been specialists to quickly turn into generalists who know enough about all the functions to run their businesses.
What is "enough"? Enterprise leaders must be able to (one) make decisions that are good for the business every bit a whole and (2) evaluate the talent on their teams. To do both they need to recognize that business organization functions are distinct managerial subcultures, each with its ain mental models and language. Effective leaders understand the dissimilar ways that professionals in finance, marketing, operations, HR, and R&D approach business issues, and the various tools (discounted cash flow, customer partitioning, process flow, succession planning, phase gates, and the like) that each discipline applies. Leaders must be able to speak the language of all the functions and translate for them when necessary. And critically, leaders must know the right questions to ask and the right metrics for evaluating and recruiting people to manage areas in which they themselves are not experts.
The good news for Harald was that, in addition to assigning him to a high-performing unit, his company had strong systems in place for evaluating and developing talent in key functions. These included well-crafted systems for performance reviews and 360-caste feedback, and for collecting input from corporate functions. His heads of finance and Hr, for case, while reporting directly to him, also had dotted-line reporting relationships with their respective corporate departments, which assisted Harald with their evaluation and development. So he had plenty of resources to help him sympathize what "excellence" meant for each function.
By investing directly in creating standardized evaluation schemes for each office, companies can ensure that new enterprise leaders get the lay of the country faster. Just even if their firms don't have such systems, aspiring enterprise leaders tin prepare themselves by building relationships with colleagues in other functions, seeking to learn from them (perhaps in commutation for insight into their own functions) and so that they can develop their own templates.
Annotator to Integrator
The primary responsibleness of functional leaders is to recruit, develop, and manage people who focus in analytical depth on specific business activities. An enterprise leader's job is to manage and integrate the commonage cognition of those functional teams to solve important organizational issues.
Harald found himself struggling with this shift early on on as he sought to accost the many competing demands of the business organization. His sales and marketing VP, for example, wanted to aggressively get to marketplace with a new product, while his head of operations worried that product couldn't exist ramped up quickly plenty to meet the sales staff'south demand scenarios. Harald's team expected him to balance the needs of the supply side of the business concern (operations) with those of its demand side (sales and marketing), to know when to focus on the quarterly business results (finance) and when to invest in the futurity (R&D), to make up one's mind how much attention to devote to execution and how much to innovation, and to make many other such calls.
Again, executives need general knowledge of the diverse functions to resolve such competing issues, but that isn't plenty. The skills required have less to do with analysis and more to do with agreement how to make trade-offs and explain the rationale for those decisions. Here, too, previous experience with cantankerous-functional or new-production development teams would stand newly minted enterprise leaders in skillful stead, as would a previous apprenticeship every bit a primary of staff to a senior executive. Just ultimately, as Harald found, at that place is no substitute for really making the calls and learning from their outcome.
There is no substitute for actually making the calls and learning from their issue.
Tactician to Strategist
In his early months, Harald threw himself into the myriad details of the business. Being tactical was seductive—the activities were so concrete and the results and then firsthand. Consequently, he lost himself in the day-to-day flow of attending meetings, making decisions, and pushing projects forward.
The problem with this, of class, was that a cadre part of Harald's new part was to be strategist-in-primary for the unit he at present led. To exercise that, he had to let get of many of the details and free his mind and his fourth dimension to focus on higher-level matters. More mostly, he needed to prefer a strategic mind-set.
How exercise tactically strong leaders larn to develop such a heed-set? Past cultivating iii skills: level shifting, pattern recognition, and mental simulation. Level shifting is the ability to move fluidly amongst levels of assay—to know when to focus on the details, when to focus on the big motion picture, and how the two chronicle. Pattern recognition is the ability to discern of import causal relationships and other significant patterns in a circuitous business and its environment—that is, to separate the signal from the dissonance. Mental simulation is the ability to anticipate how outside parties (competitors, regulators, the media, key members of the public) will respond to what you practise, to predict their deportment and reactions in order to ascertain the best course to take. In Harald'due south first year, for instance, an Asian competitor introduced a lower-cost substitute for a cardinal resin product his unit made. Harald needed non only to consider the immediate threat but also to think expansively virtually what the competitor's hereafter intentions might be. Was the Asian company going to apply this low-cease product to forge strong customer relationships and progressively offer a broader range of products? If so, what options should Harald'southward unit of measurement pursue? How would the competitor answer to what Harald chose to exercise? Those were not questions he had been responsible for as head of marketing and sales. In the terminate, after analyzing various courses of action with his senior team, he chose to lower prices, forgoing some current profits in an effort to slow the loss of market place share—a move he did non live to regret.
Are strategic thinkers born or made? The answer is both. In that location's no doubt that strategic thinking, similar any other skill, can exist improved with grooming. Just the ability to shift through different levels of analysis, recognize patterns, and construct mental models requires some natural propensity. I of the paradoxes of leadership development is that people earn promotions to senior functional levels predominantly by being good at blocking and tackling, but employees with strategic talent may struggle at lower levels because they focus less on the details. Darwinian forces can winnow strategic thinkers out of the developmental pipeline likewise soon if companies don't prefer explicit policies to place and to some degree protect them in their early careers.
Bricklayer to Architect
Too often, senior executives fiddle in the profession of organizational design without a license—and terminate up committing malpractice. They come into their get-go enterprise-level role itching to make their mark and then target elements of the system that seem relatively easy to modify, similar strategy or structure, without completely understanding the effect their moves will have on the organization equally a whole.
About four months into his new role, for example, Harald concluded that he needed to restructure the business to focus more on customers and less on product lines. It was natural for him, equally a quondam head of sales and marketing, to retrieve this way. In his optics it was obvious that the business organisation was too rooted in product development and operations and that its structure was an outdated legacy of the style the unit had been founded and grown. So he was surprised when his restructuring proposal was met first with stunned silence from his team and then with vociferous opposition. It rapidly became clear that the existing structure in this successful sectionalization was linked in intricate and nonobvious means to its key processes and talent bases. To sell the company'southward chemicals, for example, the salespeople needed to have deep product knowledge and the ability to consult with customers on applications. A shift to a customer-focused arroyo would accept required them to sell a broader range of complex products and acquire huge amounts of new expertise. So while a motion to a customer-focused structure had potential benefits, certain trade-offs needed to be evaluated. Implementation would, for instance, require significant adjustments to processes and substantial investments in employee retraining. These changes demanded a groovy deal of thought and analysis.
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Equally leaders movement up to the enterprise level, they become responsible for designing and altering the architecture of their arrangement—its strategy, structure, processes, and skill bases. To be effective organizational architects, they need to call back in terms of systems. They must sympathise how the key elements of the organization fit together and not naively believe, as Harald one time did, that they can alter i element without thinking through the implications for all the others. Harald learned this the hard way because nothing in his experience as a functional leader had afforded him the opportunity to think about an organisation as a organisation. Nor did he have enough experience with big-scale organizational modify to develop those insights from observation.
In this Harald was typical: Enterprise leaders need to know the principles of organizational change and change management, including the mechanics of organizational blueprint, concern process improvement, and transition management. Nevertheless few ascension executives get any formal training in these domains, leaving nearly of them ill equipped to exist the architects of their organizations—or even to be educated consumers of the work of organizational development professionals. Hither Harald was in one case again fortunate in having—and having the sense to rely on—an experienced staff that offered him cogent advice virtually the many interdependencies he had not originally considered. Non all new enterprise leaders are that lucky, of class. But if their companies have invested in sending them to executive pedagogy programs that teach organizational modify, they'll be better prepared for this shift.
Problem Solver to Agenda Setter
Many managers are promoted to senior levels on the strength of their ability to set up issues. When they become enterprise leaders, nonetheless, they must focus less on solving problems and more on defining which problems the organization should exist tackling.
To do that, Harald had to perceive the full range of opportunities and threats facing his business, and focus the attention of his squad on but the most important ones. He also had to identify the "white spaces"—bug that don't fall neatly into any i function only are even so important to the business concern, such as diversity.
The number of concerns Harald at present had to consider was caput-spinning. When he had run sales and marketing, he had gained some appreciation for how hard it was for business heads to prioritize all the issues thrown at them in any given twenty-four hour period, week, or month. Still, he was surprised by the telescopic and complexity of some of the bug at this level. He wasn't sure how to allocate his fourth dimension and immediately felt overloaded. He knew he needed to consul more, but he wasn't clear yet about which tasks and assignments he could safely leave to others.
Y'all may exist surprised past the intensity of the attending at center stage and the almost constant need to proceed up your guard.
The skills he had honed as a functional leader—mastery of sales and marketing tools and techniques, organizational know-how, and fifty-fifty the ability to mobilize talent and promote teamwork—were not enough. To work out which bug his team should focus on—that is, to set the calendar—he had to larn to navigate a far more uncertain and ambiguous environment than he was used to. He also needed to learn to communicate priorities in ways his organization could reply to. Given his sales and marketing background, Harald struggled less with how to communicate his agenda. The claiming was figuring out what that agenda was. To some degree he just had to larn from experience, but here again he was aided by the members of his team, who pressed him for guidance on issues they knew he needed to consider. He also could rely on the company'southward annual planning procedure, which provided a structure for defining primal goals for his unit of measurement.
Warrior to Diplomat
In his previous roles, Harald had focused primarily on marshaling the troops to defeat the competition. Now he found himself devoting a surprising corporeality of time to influencing a host of external constituencies, including regulators, the media, investors, and NGOs. His support staff was bombarded with requests for his fourth dimension: Could he participate in industry or government forums sponsored past the government diplomacy section? Would he be willing to sit for an interview with an editor from a leading business publication? Could he meet with a key grouping of institutional investors? Some of these groups he was familiar with; others not at all. But what was entirely new to him was his responsibility not just to interact with various stakeholders but as well to proactively accost their concerns in ways that meshed with the firm's interests. Picayune of Harald'southward previous experience prepared him for the challenges of beingness a corporate diplomat.
What do effective corporate diplomats do? They use the tools of diplomacy—negotiation, persuasion, conflict management, and alliance building—to shape the external business environment to support their strategic objectives. In the process they often find themselves collaborating with people with whom they compete aggressively in the market every mean solar day.
To do this well, enterprise leaders need to embrace a new mind-gear up—to await for ways that interests can or practise align, empathize how decisions are fabricated in different kinds of organizations, and develop effective strategies for influencing others. They must also understand how to recruit and manage employees of a kind that they have probably never supervised before: professionals in primal supporting functions such as government relations and corporate communications. And they must recognize that these employees' initiatives have longer horizons than the ongoing business organization, with its focus on quarterly or even almanac results, does. Initiatives similar a campaign to shape the development of authorities regulation can accept years to unfold. It took Harald a while to empathize this, as his staffers educated him about how painstakingly they managed problems over protracted periods of time and how they periodically bemoaned the results when someone took his heart off the ball.
Supporting Cast Fellow member to Lead Role
Finally, becoming an enterprise leader ways moving to center stage under the bright lights. The intensity of the attention and the near constant demand to go along up his guard caught Harald by surprise. He was somewhat shocked to observe how much stock people placed in what he said and did. Not long after he first took the job, for example, he met with his vice president of R&D and mused about a new manner of packaging an existing product. 2 weeks afterward a preliminary feasibility written report for it appeared on his desk.
In part, this shift is about having a much greater affect as a role model. Managers at all levels are part models to some caste. But at the enterprise level, their influence is magnified, equally everyone looks to them for vision, inspiration, and cues well-nigh the "right" behaviors and attitudes. For expert or ill, the personal styles and quirks of senior leaders are infectious, whether they are observed directly by employees or indirectly transmitted from their reports to the level beneath and on down through the organization. This consequence tin't really exist avoided, merely enterprise leaders tin make information technology less inadvertent by cultivating more cocky-sensation and taking the time to develop empathy with subordinates' viewpoints. After all, it wasn't so long ago that they were the subordinates, drawing these kinds of inferences from their own bosses' behavior.
And so there is the question of what it ways, practically speaking, to lead large groups of people—how to define a compelling vision and share information technology in an inspiring way. Harald, already a strong communicator who was used to selling ideas along with products, still needed to suit his thinking in this regard (though perhaps less and then than some of his counterparts). In his previous task he had maintained a reasonable caste of personal, albeit sometimes desultory, contact with most of his employees. At present that he was overseeing iii,000-plus people scattered around the globe, that was but impossible.
The implications of this became articulate as he worked with his team to arts and crafts the almanac strategy. When the time came to communicate it to the system, he realized that he couldn't simply exit and sell information technology himself; he had to piece of work more through his direct reports and find other channels, such as video, for spreading the word. And after touring near of the unit'due south facilities, Harald too worried that he'd never actually be able to figure out what was happening on the front lines. And then rather than meet simply with leaders when he made site visits, he instituted chocolate-brown-bag lunches with small groups of frontline employees and tuned in to online word groups in which employees could annotate on the visitor.For the most part, the seven shifts involve switching from left-brain, analytical thinking to right-brain conceptual heed-sets. But that doesn't mean enterprise leaders never spend time on tactics or on functional concerns. It'due south just that they spend far, far less time on those responsibilities than they used to in their previous roles. In fact, it'south frequently helpful for enterprise leaders to appoint someone else—a chief of staff, a chief operating officer, or a project manager—to focus on execution, every bit a way to free up fourth dimension for their new role.
As for Harald, his story ended well. He was fortunate to be working for a company that believed in leadership development and to take an experienced team that was able—and willing—to give him constructive counsel. So despite the many bumps in the road, the business continued to thrive, and Harald eventually found his step as an enterprise leader. Three years later, armed with all this experience, he was asked to take over a much larger, struggling unit of measurement of the visitor and initiated a successful turnaround. Reflecting back, he says, "The skills that got you where you are may not exist the requisite skills to get you to where yous need to get. This doesn't discount the accomplishments of your by, but they will not exist everything you lot need for the side by side leg of the journey."
A version of this article appeared in the June 2012 upshot of Harvard Business concern Review.
Source: https://hbr.org/2012/06/how-managers-become-leaders
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