The Leap to Leader

To succeed as a senior executive, you need more than just special skills and competencies. You need a new mindset.

by

Adam Bryant

by

Adam Bryant

From the Magazine (July–August 2023) · Long read

Frank Moth

Summary.

The author has conducted in-depth interviews with hundreds of CEOs and other executives for the New York Times feature “Corner Office” and his leadership series on LinkedIn, and he has coached hundreds of high-potentials. In this article he shares the lessons that emerged about the mental shifts needed to make a successful transition to a senior leadership position. The process involves identifying and communicating your core values and learning how to approach tough decisions. It requires setting the bar for your team’s performance and learning to compartmentalize so that you can find the right pace for yourself. And it requires expanding your self-awareness and paying attention to the stories you tell yourself about your experiences—your successes and failures, your bad times and good ones—when you contemplate the arc of your career and life.

Idea in Brief

The Challenge

Much has been written about the hard skills needed to become an effective leader—but mental shifts are just as important.

Why It’s Crucial

The intensity of leadership roles today—the variety of problems encountered, the need to spot patterns early and often, the sheer amount of work—requires the human equivalent of machine learning.

How to Meet It

Aspiring leaders can prepare by developing a “personal leadership brand” that reflects their values, honing their decision-making, being clear about what’s needed from their teams, learning how to compartmentalize, expanding their self-awareness, and crafting a personal narrative that accepts the possibility of failure and avoids the role of victim.

When Penny Herscher stepped into her first chief executive role, at the tech firm Simplex Solutions, she felt sure she was prepared. After all, she had held marketing, business development, and general manager positions at her previous company, Synopsys, and she was comfortable taking on difficult challenges. Even so, her confidence quickly evaporated. “I had no clue how to be a CEO,” she says. “I kept finding myself in situations where I didn’t feel I had the experience and the tool set to know what to do, and I kept waiting for permission to make decisions.” Then one of the company’s directors took her aside. “You’re looking to the board for permission,” he told her. “We’ll give you advice, but you have to make your own decisions.” With that nudge she found her footing and went on to lead her company to a successful IPO.

A version of this article appeared in the July–August 2023 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Adam Bryant is the senior managing director of the ExCo Group, an executive mentoring and leadership development firm. He is a coauthor, with Kevin Sharer, of The CEO Test: Master the Challenges That Make or Break All Leaders (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021) and the author of The Leap to Leader: How Ambitious Managers Make the Jump to Leadership (Harvard Business Review Press, 2023).

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The Leap to Leader

Idea in Brief

The Challenge

Why It’s Crucial

How to Meet It

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