How to navigate leadership transitions

Four transitions that will enable leaders to achieve their full potential:

Our leadership transitions report outlines four key transitions that newly promoted leaders need to make to be successful.

• From personal growth to the growth of others: Stepping into a leadership role means that your performance is dependent on the degree to which you can achieve goals through enabling others, while simultaneously holding accountability for the outcome. This will require you to empower and delegate effectively, to bring out the potential of your reports, as opposed to benchmarking your success purely on your performance.
• From specialist to integrator: Becoming a leader requires you to stretch yourself to integrate collective knowledge from many different functions to achieve results, as opposed to relying on just the specialist knowledge from your area of expertise. Becoming an integrator makes you more interdependent. This brings with it a greater need for connections and social skills; relationships must actively be built and maintained, not left only to be resurrected when needed. 
• From directive to diplomatic: The notion of influencing without authority is crucial here; the new-found authority that comes with the job must be handled carefully, and persuasion skills honed. Leaders must also learn to deal with the various polarities and dilemmas, particularly in the form of conflict management and compromise.
• From tactical to strategic: A shift from focusing on the details to appreciating the bigger picture is imperative for new leaders. Effective performance as a leader will be reliant on your ability to engage in long-term strategic thinking. Instead of fixating on the details of everyday procedural problems, leaders must put the organisation at the core of what they do and find ways to sustain growth and completive advantages in the marketplace.

Creating a culture where successful leadership transitions happen

Making the jump to an esteemed leader does not happen overnight.  Leaders will have to develop high levels of self-awareness to recognise their areas of strength and weakness. This will enable them to identify where they need to deliberately practice, refine and exercise the skills to make the transitions happen.  

It is also crucial that organisations help leaders to thrive by breaking down some of the obstacles that get in the way of high performance when shifting into a new leadership role. Our whitepaper highlights some best practices that organisations can use to create development plans to support transitioning leaders.