One of the proudest days of Jing’s professional life was when she was promoted from VP to the C-suite of a large global technology company. In her prior role, Jing led a team of 600 people and oversaw a single function. Now her team includes 8,000 employees spread across several business units. Jing is a rising star and is widely seen as a potential CEO successor.
Within three months, however, Jing began to realize she had entered a completely new world. The ambition and strong personalities of her direct reports, some of whom used to be her peers, make it hard to form a collaborative team under her. She senses one or two want her job—the ground beneath her is not solid. Meanwhile, her relationships with peers feel like complex geopolitics, with areas of partnership around aligned interests, and unresolveable tensions in other areas. Her manager, the CEO, is distracted and alternates between being supportive and expressing concern about her progress. Jing isn’t sure who to trust.
While these dynamics were surprising to Jing, much of what she experienced is predictable. As leaders move into large roles in the C-suite, they must understand the dynamics that come with so much power and learn to navigate the often turbulent waters. When I work with executives who are new to leading large organizations, I’m mindful that much of their learning will be related to the new context, even though the basics of effective leadership still apply.
Be intentional in your communication. Imagine that everything you say is broadcast across the entire company. That is something like the day-to-day reality of people who lead large organizations. Even your quiet or stray comments are hugely magnified. This is true at all-hands meetings, of course, but it’s also true in your team meetings and even your casual one-on-one hallway conversations.
This means you have to be extremely intentional: entering every meeting with clear outcomes in mind and calibrating your words and style for each audience. It also means remembering the people in front of you are not your sole audience at any given moment. When you talk to your leadership team, for example, you are indirectly communicating a message down to their direct reports and organizations. Your days of accidental or unconscious communication are now over.
Keep in mind though, as you master adapting your communication to influence different audiences, that if your style changes too often, people may say, “Who is she, really?” Or, “He’s a politician.” People don’t forgive a lack of authenticity because it’s so foundational to trust. That’s the paradox: you have to be fully authentic and fully strategic. So it’s crucial to frequently re-ground yourself in your core values and speak from the heart while also practicing the nuance, flexibility and thoughtfully honed messaging required of communication at the highest level.
Expect constant scrutiny. As the leader of a large organization you will no longer have the same privacy and anonymity you previously enjoyed. Instead, you are now under a constant microscope. Your every word, facial expression and gesture is observed and interpreted not only by the people you lead but also by the public. Any time you leave your home you are officially “on stage.”
Fully accept this new reality. Give some grace to people who critique and misunderstand you. It’s not you, it’s the role you now play. And forgive yourself when you “get it wrong” by unintentionally giving off signals that work against your purpose. Given the extraordinary challenges they face, even the best, most senior executives in the world get things wrong all the time. But they course correct and adapt quickly.
Also, stay grounded. Invest time with long-time friends, colleagues, family members, and others who knew you before you stepped into the big role. Though you may be able to hire out all your mundane tasks, continue to do simple things you enjoy, like cooking, gardening or a hobby. I recall coaching a leader who hired out so many personal tasks, she was no longer doing some of the things she loved most.
Lead with a clear, inspiring vision. The most essential task of leadership is to ensure that people are inspired by an exciting vision for the future. There’s more to this than most people realize. First, there’s the vision itself. Not the same thing as a vision statement, which is a sequence of words, a vision is an idea or collection of ideas. It’s a picture of the future. Before you attempt to capture that picture in language, you have to ensure the picture itself is clear, inspiring and, as one author puts it, “ennobling”—bringing out the best in people.
Once you and your team have the vision in mind, the task of communicating it requires much more work than you might expect. Why? Think of it this way: you spent months thinking about, wrestling with and trying to depict the ideal vision for your organization. Now, the whole organization will need to go on a similar journey. Not only do they need to see the words, they need to go through a parallel process of their own, wrestling with the vision, trying to understand it and seeing themselves in it.
For a senior executive, this means communicating in ways that ensure the vision reaches the hearts and minds of everyone. That must include opportunities for two-way dialogue. People need to be able to ask questions and talk about what the vision means to them. They need the opportunity to critique and poke holes in the vision and point out where it could improve or how it can be misunderstood given what they know at their level.
It also means that you’ll need to engage in the difficult task of talking about the vision over and over with dozens of different audiences. Make this less difficult by finding a variety of ways of talking about the vision, by sharing stories and analogies related to the vision, and by offering personal anecdotes about how you connect to the vision personally. Be patient when, after months of this sort of drum beat, people still come up to you and say, “I don’t understand our vision,” or worse, “We don’t have a vision.” Take that as a gift, an opportunity to communicate and engage yet again around the exciting future you will create together.
Finally, use frequent discussion about the vision as a method to bring together your direct reports as a team. There’s an old saying, “Without a vision, the people perish.” The centrifugal forces already at work within very senior leadership teams are countered, in part, by a constant dialogue about where you are headed together.
For more, read Part 2 in the series.