What Made You A Stellar Individual Contributor is Holding You Back as a Leader
The mindset and behavioral shifts you need to become a great leader.
As leaders, one of the most difficult transitions to make is the one from extraordinary individual contributor to strong leader. For me, it took years to understand the difference in mindset I needed to adopt in order to motivate, inspire, and guide a team to success.
I struggled because no one told me about the shifts I needed to make and some of the ways to make those shifts happen. But you don’t need to be in the dark. Let’s dive in!
A Story
Early in my career, I was frequently recognized for going above and beyond in my work. To name a few:
Staying up late to deliver work early
Meticulously capturing the details of client or project requests and documenting them for my team
Stepping in to help colleagues resolve challenges that were outside of the scope of my job
Volunteering to take on special projects or initiatives
Diligently following all corporate policies and processes
Making suggestions for improvements as I observed them, regardless of whether I was responsible or if the work belonged to another team
When I was promoted to lead a team, many of these skills and proclivities appeared to work in my favor. My team felt that I treated them as equals and worked alongside them vs. above them, which built trust and strong loyalty. I knew every detail about what was happening within my team’s operations and could jump in and cover for them without hesitation. I was still volunteering for special initiatives, which strengthened my reputation as a team player.
What I wasn’t aware of was the parts of my leadership role I was not doing:
Understanding the broader context and strategy for the business so that I could help contribute to the big picture
Creating a vision and plan for my team that helped realize company goals and created a business case for our budget and resource needs
Spending time with other leaders, my peers, building those relationships, and creating pathways for sharing information and collaboration
Influencing how others in the organization engaged with my team and vice versa so that we could maximize our impact
Evaluating my direct reports and giving them prompt and direct feedback to help them improve
Giving my team more stretch project opportunities so that they could prove themselves just as I had
Resting — I was so busy trying to cover all the bases of my old job and my new oversight responsibilities, I was burning myself out
I also didn’t realize how important these activities were to my success and the success of my team. Over time because I neglected these incredibly important, but also very new tasks, I wasn’t as effective as a leader — neither in guiding my team nor in influencing the leaders around me. By sheer brute force, I covered some of the ground over time, but I also burned myself out trying to do too much.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
A Learning (or two)
Later in my career, I realized that a leader’s role is to:
Set strategic direction and goals
Align your team’s work with that of other departments
Hire and develop a great team
Foster a high-performance and rewarding environment where your team hits and achieves its goals and feels good about doing so
Secure and manage your resources well, including your own time and skills
Most importantly, as a leader, I needed to prioritize well, be OK with uncertainty, and make and communicate difficult decisions. The only way to do all of that was to manage my time and energy strategically. It meant saying “No” to myself and others even when I really wanted to say “Yes.” It meant avoiding the tasks that came easily to me before and instead, building new muscles to handle different types of activities that didn’t come as naturally at first. It meant delegating and being OK with my team taking longer to finish a task with more mistakes and requiring more of my time to help them learn and grow.
This is the leader mindset shift.
Take Action
So where do you start if you are struggling with the leader mindset shift?
First, ask yourself if you are committed to the change. You will only put in the work if you are committed to making the change.
Second, do an assessment so that you can choose an area to prioritize. People are more successful making a change when they choose just one area to focus on.
Bigger effort: Run a brief survey getting input from your manager, colleagues, and team, asking them what areas they think you should prioritize to become a stronger leader. Use the bullet points I shared above as a guide (either the longer list of what I was missing or the shorter, more generalized version). You can then review this feedback and conduct your own reflection of what you think will move the needle the most.
Smaller effort: Just conduct your own reflection in the leadership areas I listed above that are critical to becoming a strong leader.
In either case, once you know what you want to work on, make a plan for how you will tackle that area.
Start small and ask for tips from mentors, your manager, AI, or search online. Set small milestones to start and celebrate the wins. View setbacks as learning opportunities and not a reason to give up.
In the future, I’ll dive more deeply into the individual shifts you can make to becoming a stronger leader. Tell me which ones you would find most valuable:
Your Turn
I’d love to hear what the leadership mindset shift has meant for you. Share your thoughts in the Comments section:
What was the hardest shift you made to maximize your impact as a leader?
What tips do you have for making the leadership mindset shift?
Let’s all help each other make the shift to becoming an even stronger leader!
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Additional Resources
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (Marshall Goldsmith, video)
How Women Rise (Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith, book summary by Richard Hughes Jones)
The 6 Critical Practices for Leading a Team™ (Franklin Covey mini-online course)
Kathy! I really enjoyed reading your reflections on this mindset shift from IC to leader.
For me, one challenging part of the shift is redefining and reimagining what success looks like. When you're early on in your career and operating as an IC, the goals/milestones/outputs are more well defined. In leadership, part of the ambiguity is not only articulating (and creating buy in for) your vision, but also defining what it looks like for the team to be successful, and what it personally means for you to be successful as a leader.
This was thought-provoking and insightful. It's so easy to fall into old patterns and behaviors - where it's comfortable. This mindset shift is critical. The "how to" is very helpful in determining what I can do now, and what I will do later.