Leadership Journey of Managers
Leaders climb up the ladders to take new roles and additional responsibility. Their adaptability from performing transitional activities to do the transformational activities will be evaluated. The most challenging transitions occur in moving from being a functional leader to being a business or enterprise leader for the first time and when there is a lack of clarity in the nature of those shifts.
1. From specialist to generalist. A company’s business functions largely run on manager and leaders planning and decisions. Managers moving to enterprise leadership roles work hard to achieve the cross-functional task. Someone who grew up in marketing obviously cannot become a native speaker of operations or R&D, but he or she can become fluent—comfortable with the central terms, tools, and ideas employed by the various functions whose work he or she must integrate. Enterprise leaders must know to evaluate and recruit the right people to lead functional areas to grow the experts' team
2. From analyst to integrator. The primary responsibility of functional leaders is to develop and manage their people to achieve analytical depth in focused domains. By contrast, enterprise leaders manage cross-functional teams with the goal of integrating the collective knowledge and using it to solve important organizational problems. New enterprise leaders make the shift to managing integrative decision-making and problem-solving and, even more important, to learn how to make appropriate trade-offs. Enterprise leaders must also manage and accept responsibility for issues that don’t fall neatly into any one function but are still important to the business.
From bricklayer to architect. As managers move up in the hierarchy, they become increasingly responsible for laying the foundation for superior performance—creating the organizational context in which business breakthroughs can happen. One must understand how strategy, structure, systems, processes and skill bases interact. They must also be expert in the principles of organizational design, business process improvement, and human capital management. Few high-potential leaders only get formal training in organizational development theory and practice. Other leaders not much trained to be the architects of their organizations.
From problem-solver to agenda-setter. Many leaders are promoted on the strength of their problem-solving skills. But when they reach the enterprise leader level, they must focus less on fixing problems and more on setting the agenda for what the organization should focus on doing. This means identifying and prioritizing emerging threats and communicating them in ways that the organization can respond to. The rest of the task calls for mobilizing preventive action and driving organizational change. And it ultimately means creating a learning organization that responds effectively to shifts in its environment and can generate surprises for its competitors
5. From warrior to a diplomat. Effective enterprise leaders see the benefits in actively shaping the external environment and managing critical relationships with powerful outside constituencies, including governments, the media, and investors. They identify opportunities for cross-company collaboration, reaching out to rivals to help shape the rules of the game. Functional managers, by contrast, tend to be more focused on developing and deploying internal capabilities to contend more effectively with key competitors.
Important to keep in mind that the biggest reasons why leaders fail in such transitions are because they don’t go back into a learning mode. Nothing fully prepares someone for becoming an enterprise leader for the first time but there is a lot that can be done in preparation and by knowing what the shifts to be done.
