.
The Transition
to Leadership
When you become a manager, it isn’t just your title and responsibilities that
change. Your idea of work and your identity evolve, too. As an individual
contributor, you focused on your contribution to your team. As a leader,
you have to navigate a complex new landscape of authority to help others
do their best, too.
This journey is one of the most signifi cant you’ll experience in your
professional life, an exciting opportunity that comes with challenges, too.
Management represents a major departure from what you’ve done in the
past, and what made you successful so far won’t necessarily help you ad-
vance now. To stand out from the pack, you must understand the nature
of your new role as a manager and a leader, and prepare yourself for the
changes and stress that can accompany this period of intense growth.
Understanding your role as a manager
At its most basic level, your role as a manager is to set direction for your
team and coordinate resources to meet your organization’s goals. Your boss
8Develop a Leader Mindset
and your direct reports all have different expectations about what aspects
of this work are most important. Your supervisor may emphasize planning
and resource management, supporting corporate goals, managing risk, and
accepting fi nal accountability for your unit. Your employees likely have a
different view: they look to you to organize and direct the group’s strategic
goals, support them as they accomplish tasks, solve problems, and answer
questions decisively, and facilitate their long-term growth.
As for your own expectations, you’ve spent years watching other man-
agers and being managed by them. Along the way, you probably picked up
plenty of ideas about how to do this right (and certain ideas about what
wrong looks like, too). But as an individual contributor, you only saw a
small part of your boss’s life. How she thought about her role and the way
she interacted with peers, supervisors, and contacts outside the company
weren’t entirely visible to you. So as you navigate these experiences for
yourself, you may need to overcome two common misperceptions.
People versus tasks
When you were an individual contributor, success meant completing spe-
cifi c assignments: making a sales call, for example, or designing a pro-
totype. You may naturally assume that you’ll continue to use these same
skills as a new manager. But now your job is to help your direct reports do
these activities on their own. You coach the salesperson who makes the call
or secure resources for the designer who’s working on the prototype. Your
purpose has shifted from doing tasks to developing and directing people.
This shift may feel counterintuitive. You once had the best sales record
on the team, and now you’re watching a less experienced person struggle
with your old accounts. Resist the urge to show the person how you used
to do it; your own mastery isn’t the point. Instead, you must help others
thrive and develop their own competencies, redefi ning your own success to
include that of the people on your team.
Personal infl uence versus positional authority
New managers also often expect that their title will make it easier for them
to implement their ideas and are surprised to fi nd that the opposite is true.
The Transition to Leadership9
Managers have formal authority to make decisions, allocate resources, and
direct employees—in theory. In actuality, though, people won’t do some-
thing just because you tell them to, and they certainly won’t do it well.
Although you can use your positional authority to force compliance, your
team members won’t commit fully or deliver their best work under these
conditions. You also won’t benefi t from the value of their perspective.
Assuming a position of power means you must become more respon-
sive to the needs of your direct reports and the demands of your organiza-
tion. You can’t simply announce a new professional development plan to
your team; you also need to persuade them to take it seriously. You can’t
just decide on a budget for your division; you also need to convince the
executive team to allocate the funds.
By contrast, when you exercise infl uence, your people act because they
fi nd you personally persuasive—your character, your competence, your
words or actions. You’re not making them do something. They’re choosing
to do it because you are leading them effectively. That willingness makes
all the difference. It means they’re more likely to put forth their best effort,
and that you’re more likely to achieve higher levels of team performance.
To get to this point, you must meet your direct reports where they are
and engage their preexisting motivations. Down the line, your actions will
create a deep well of trust that will allow you to infl uence your employees’
behaviors, attitudes, and values. This is where your real power lies: not
in your job description but inside relationships, in the reciprocal interac-
tions of ordinary offi ce dynamics and politics. We’ll talk about this more
in chapter 2, “Building Trust and Credibility,” and chapter 5, “Becoming a
Person of Infl uence.”
The diff erence between management
and leadership
We’ve already used the terms “leader” and “manager,” but what’s the dif-
ference? This topic has been the subject of much debate since Harvard
Business School (HBS) professor Abraham Zaleznik published a Harvard
Business Review article in 1977 titled “Managers and Leaders: Are They
10Develop a Leader Mindset
Different?” The piece caused an uproar in business schools. It argued that
the theoreticians of scientifi c management, with their organizational dia-
grams and time-and-motion studies, were missing half the picture—the
half fi lled with inspiration, vision, and messy human nature. This, Zalez-
nik argued, was truly what leadership was about.
As HBS professor John Kotter later argued, management is about re-
sponding to complexity. To get a job done, managers must focus on con-
trol and predictability, and they must organize processes that will produce
orderly outcomes. Planning, budgeting, and staffi ng are all management
activities. When you draw up task assignments, for example, or discuss
optimizing a production line, you’re wearing the manager hat.
Leadership, by contrast, explains Kotter, is about producing and re-
sponding to change. Leaders see opportunities in the instabilities that
their managerial alter egos want to tame, and they emphasize ideas over
process. Setting direction, aligning people, and providing motivation are
all leadership activities. When you coach a star employee or decide to halt
your production optimization process because it’s just not working, that’s
leadership.
Kotter argues that management and leadership are complementary
modes of being and need not be in confl ict. The most successful managers
in today’s challenging business environment leverage both management
and leadership competencies selectively to benefi t the organization. In this
book, we’ll use the words somewhat interchangeably, preferring “man-
ager” for technical and administrative topics and “leader” for issues that
touch on vision, strategy, and motivation.
While your company determines when and how you transition to man-
agement, opportunities for leadership can present themselves at any time
in your career. That’s because leadership doesn’t always require formal au-
thority, but rather an array of intellectual and interpersonal skills.
Demystifying leadership
Although management and leadership are deeply intertwined in practice,
we have long put the idea of leadership on a higher plane. We often view
The Transition to Leadership11
it as requiring a set of innate traits: intelligence, self-confi dence, vision,
eloquence, and a mystical blend of courage, charisma, and decisiveness.
Those individuals with all of these traits were deemed “born leaders.” But
as science has revealed the plasticity of the human brain, we no longer
think about these qualities as inborn or fi xed. Instead we see leadership
as a constellation of skills that can be learned and capacities that can be
nurtured over time. In other words: just because you weren’t senior class
president doesn’t mean you’ll never be a leader.
This also means you’ll integrate leadership abilities into your personal-
ity differently from your peers, depending on your underlying disposition.
If you are more of an introvert, for example, you may be more eloquent in
writing than in spontaneous conversation. But many of the markers we
used to take as shorthand for “good leader” are irrelevant or incorrect. For
example:
• Leaders don’t just work in the C-suite. Leaders are everywhere,
and at every level.
• No one “looks” like a leader. Your gender, race, age, height, and the
like are utterly immaterial.
• Extroverts aren’t more effective leaders than introverts.
• Leaders aren’t always hyperconfi dent in their judgment. You can
change your mind and experience uncertainty.
• Leaders are as likely to be listening as talking.
Right now you already have some of the characteristics of a strong
leader. Instead of burdening yourself with the question “Am I a leader?”
push yourself to identify these abilities and capitalize on them. Using the
list in the box “Common leadership traits,” assess which of your leader-
ship traits are most valuable in your organization’s culture. Then think
about your own self-image as a leader and how you want others to see you.
This will help you identify what strengths to leverage and where you have
an opportunity to improve in your new role and over the course of your
career.
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