3 Tips to Become Your Company’s Go-To Strategic Leader
If becoming your company's go to strategic leader is your goal, I have three tips you’re going to want to know. Why? The transition between employee to visionary leader can be a little bit tricky. I want to do everything I can to help folks understand what is needed during and after this transition may be different than what got you ahead in the past.
Being too helpful: why doers don’t get ahead
So tip number one is the idea that being too helpful doesn't help you get ahead.
Let’s break this down. Being a doer, being the person who is known for getting shit done, that sometimes actually hurts you. This fixer, this reliable one, it doesn't always translate into higher paying roles.
When we think about our brand, realize we're all the go-to for something. Sometimes you're the go-to for the holiday planning, for example. It's unspoken, but people know that that's your role. They think that maybe you're the person who's the go-to for how to manage the client, you're the client whisperer. Those are reasonable brands. But we want to shift that to being the go-to for strategic leadership, we want to shift the brand to that.
You may not think you have a brand. But I promise, if you're not defining it actively, it's probably being defined for you. And sometimes this works out, you just have leadership vibes, and everybody hands you responsibility. I think most of us know some people in our offices for whom that is true.
But sometimes it can really backfire when you don't take control, because we're doing what comes naturally to us. Sometimes those are the things that keep us stuck in our older patterns, communicating that we're at this lower level than the one that we want to be at.
Here's the problem with that: we can get really held up by remaining in our regular patterns in that old brand that hasn't been defined. That isn't the strategic leadership brand. People don't see us as the leaders that we are.
At a certain level it means managing the vision and the strategy and less of the execution of those vision and strategy items.
You have these capabilities but they are under-emphasized. And if you want, they can be developed. I run an entire program about how to market them or develop them. But basically, you have these capabilities, but in your current brand that might be more on the side of being the doer, the executor and it can really end up costing you valuable time you could be using to flex these new strategic muscles or lean into the places that you want to grow your leadership, or influence, or definitely your impact.
This is a normal growth pain, even if you haven’t encountered it before. Previously, we were rewarded for helping out, executing and just ticking off those things off our list. You know, we were told that that was the right way to get ahead when there were more junior roles. But that might leave you like staying in this role that you probably have outgrown.
You've seen it done before. Now, it's more of you're you're pushing forward strategic initiatives, but you're not known for that.
Mary’s growth story
I tell you a story about a client, let's call her Mary; she was at the end of a long campaign. It was the time to take stock and her boss was giving the team accolades about how well the project had gone. And he was talking about how this part was great, the marketing was great, the making the graphics was great, you know, etc.
In that moment, Mary, who had been one of those strategic leads, realized that she had actually had her hands in every single part of the doing of that project. And while it's okay to do that in a major crunch time (you know, roll your sleeves up and get things going), she realized that brand of doing, of being the person who was going to be able to fix the graphic or write the email to the supplier was a bad thing.
The fact that she had done all those things actually wasn’t helping; she wasn't proud of the fact that she had a hand in every single piece, because for her, it was more important to start being known as the person who set the strategy. It was more important to delegate some of that other stuff for her own sanity, if nothing else.
She also realized it was training people to expect her to do their jobs. It forced her to take on these aspects of her role that were not really relevant to where she wanted to go. That was sort of the past. And it really detracted from the time that she could have been devoting to doing the things that she needed to do to change her brand.
How to shape what you’re known for
Let's talk a little bit about tip number two, how do we change our brand that we want to be known for? This is how we start taking control of that narrative.
Recommendation 1:
The very first thing I recommend in this is taking stock of:
the assignments that you're getting and
the problems that people are bringing to you.
When we do this in the onboarding of my online program to elevate your leadership and get you promoted and paid, and also help you with your new job search (Career Strategy GPS), we do an exercise that really helps you get to know where it is that you stand currently.
Recommendation 2:
The second question you ask yourself there is, are they the problems that you want to be solving?
Let’s walk through an example:
I have a client, Emma. She recognized that she was being seen as a firefighter. That is, people brought to her all sorts of “burning problems,” and she would put them out, right? That was her brand and how she spent the bulk of her time.
And sure, she was getting recognized in her reviews. Superiors were saying that that was helpful, but she wasn't necessarily getting rewarded in the ways that she wanted. She wasn't getting that promotion that she was looking for. She wasn't getting resourced for all she was capable of. These were all the things that were the next-level interests for her.
And that is the big difference. It's great to be recognized for what you're currently excelling at. But you want to be rewarded and well resourced for everything that you're capable of. That's a much better place to be.
After doing your role for a certain amount of time, you know that you can move to that next level, but you're going to need headcount and help. It's hard for people to give that to you if, again, the brand is something like a firefighter problem fix.
So, I've asked, you know, are these the problems that you want to solve? If the answer is no, this could be the result of a number of things. And I don't want to put it entirely at your feet. Because systemic racism, sexism, all those things have many women and women of color in particular, tasked with something called Office Housework. (Office Housework is taking notes of the meeting, organizing the office party, or any of those sorts of hidden tasks that help an office run smoothly, that don't really have an assigned person, and often tend to go to women.) You might end up with more administrative tasks; you can't really say no, you have to do these things to be able to stay at the table you're currently at when you really want to be at the next table, right?
So here's the bad news. It's a really hard for one if it is, in fact, something more systemic. It's difficult for one person, namely yourself, to shape and redefine an entire culture without being in leadership. And honestly, it's not your responsibility to fix it all. It's the responsibility of the leadership.
But that's the catch 22. That's why we need you in leadership.
Here is the good news. You can shape your own story; this is a place you do have control. It's a resource that you get to own all on your own. If you're finding that you're not happy with the work that's being assigned to you, or the brand that you're currently communicating, I would consider reflecting about what it is that you're communicating with your words and your actions, and to start communicating something differently, to control that story.
To do that it helps to know a couple of things.
What do I want to be known for?
What problems do I want to solve?
And that really energizes me?
What's that thing that you do really easily, almost in your sleep, this zone of genius idea?
And then what's the new level I can offer professionally?
So maybe you have your zone of genius, but it's only a little bit of what you do; we may want to make that thing the brand.
If you want to have people see you in a new way, you got to give them something else to associate yourself with. That's a great way to do this.
It doesn't work to go to your manager and say, Hey, how do you see me? That’s still asking people to define you. And we want to change that and have you be super clear about where you stand and start communicating that yourself.
When I designed Career Strategy GPS, it was super clear to me that people wanted to know their mission, their value proposition, their brand, that elevator pitch. These are all similar facets of the same thing. But you still need a way to express that succinctly.
There's a formula that I walk people through to unpack all the elements of that brand and value prop in the third module of the Career Strategy GPS program that I run. It's really valuable when you want to know what opportunities to say yes and no to, or how to talk about yourself in these 1:1s, or in a job search, when you go into that next role or promotion.
So I'm going to go back to that story, to the client, Emma. When it came to choosing her brand, moving away from this firefighter role that she had developed over time, what did she do? Her situation is that she worked at a huge Fortune 100 company. It's hard to know, because of the breadth and scale of the place, where exactly you might go for that promotion. Being able to communicate what you wanted was a little bit of a challenge because there were so many options.
The very first thing we do in this program is get super clear about what the ultimate career vision is. And that's exactly what Emma did. She recognized she loves coaching and leading, that's the problem that she wants to solve, coach up other people in her organization. And so her brand wants to be leading leaders, being a manager of managers. She cared less about what she did day-to-day, more about coaching and bringing others up. For the value prop, she needed to figure out what was going to be valuable enough to the organization that was going to get her promoted to that next level, so she could keep moving up and become more of a mentor.
Emma pulled back into her past, her most impactful and really fun projects. And she found that for her it was updating legacy systems. She was already in IT systems. In order to get that in front of leadership for promotion in this space, she needed to then start communicating that as the value prop and also her work as a mentor, a coach, somebody could bring people up. Once she figured out what it was that she could offer, it was much easier to navigate the huge organization that she was currently in to start figuring out who to talk to and who to pitch that to. She got the promotion in this space. And now she is the Team Lead for two teams with multiple people.
So with that mission statement, that value prop, she navigated her way through her company. She knew who to talk to and what to say to position herself for that promotion. And she said yes to the things that put her on a faster track than another promotion, or certainly saying yes to the firefighting that she was constantly doing.
All came from answering that question, what is the problem I'd like to solve, what do I want to be known for? And how do I start communicating that more effectively? Leading can mean a lot of things. And definitely, it means taking charge. And not just doing every single thing in a project, plugging in all the holes, like the story I mentioned before with Mary.
The next level really means next-level behavior, experiences, projects, so we have to break free of our earlier tendencies to be a helper. We need to include what we say yes to and also how we frame our work. So that includes how we act and communicate.
If you are curious about that next level of value, articulation, and storytelling, I've got a newsletter that we run every week. It sets you up with tips and inspiration frameworks to really supercharge that promotion and job search. And it delivers more on what I’m about to share next…
Supercharge your influence with a communication hack
Let's talk about supercharging your influence with this with a communication hack that I think is really, really valuable when it comes to this.
There are tons of ways to start changing how you're communicating. I've already talked about the almighty elevator pitch and its power to filter a lot of complicated career decisions for you. And all of this falls under this executive communication umbrella. That's a very complicated term because often it means communicating like the cis white men who set the standards of what looking, acting and speaking like an executive means.
However, being clear about what you offer is just one part of the code. Another is changing the frame of your communication from me to we. Let’s break down what that looks like.
So before, when we were in our old brand, or former brand, we would do things that maybe weren't aligned with our next-level self. I’m talking about our older, but yeah, less useful habits. We're in this very “me” mentality. That is to say “I make my case to bosses, decision makers, stake holders, based on what is meaningful to me.”
So let's be clear, knowing what's important to you is really helpful for your own sanity and clarity, as showcased by Emma’s story! And you should definitely own those achievements.
But it’s less powerful to communicate you want to make changes to how you work when you frame it in the me context. It’s more effective to update your brand with those who have really only ever known past you by sharing why it’s good for the organization and/the specific decision maker you’re speaking with. When you want to make changes that are more aligned with who you’re becoming, what is the benefit to everyone else?
So that shift from me–like, hey, you should promote me or hire me because I’m so great–to WE– hey, I understand that the organization is interested in completing X, Y, and Z this year, here's how my skills really helps us do that.
That shift, that way of framing, you might even be talking about the exact same achievements. You're simply talking about them in a larger context. The bigger picture, the we frame, that shift is going to be felt and noticed and recognized immediately by the people who you've been interacting with before, if you're making a promotion within your organization as well as those doing the hiring at a new organization. They like team attitudes, strategic thinking, thinking beyond just what you can offer but what the entire organization is looking for.
That, I find, is one of the biggest ways to start being recognized more as a leader and more importantly, or as importantly, being rewarded for those abilities.
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