Episode #287: The PRESSURES LEADERS FACE

It’s different at every level

As a leader, you face daily pressures which are quite different from the pressures that confronted you when you were a carefree individual contributor, responsible only for your own work.

The type of pressure, and its intensity, depends on a number of things: the sector you’re operating in; the organizational culture; the competence and demeanor of your boss… the list goes on.

But each level of leadership has pressures that are fairly common across the board, irrespective of other factors. Obviously, the pressures you faced as a front-line supervisor will be very different to the pressures you’re going to face when you become CEO of a large global business.

In this episode, I examine the pressures that you’re most likely to be facing at the level you’re operating at now. I can’t offer definitive answers, because of the complex factors at play - the permutations that determine your individual circumstances are almost limitless.

The value in this episode comes from your enhanced ability to identify, name, and understand the pressures you face. This’ll enable you to more effectively tap into our catalog of 300+ No Bullsh!t Leadership episodes.

Em and I started Your CEO Mentor to improve the quality of leaders globally, and in the last 5+ years, we’ve produced a vast body of knowledge, which you can access absolutely free, to help you handle virtually any challenge that comes your way!

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Episode #287 TRANSCRIPT:

The Pressures Leaders Face

It’s different at every level

LEADERSHIP IS DIFFERENT AT EVERY LEVEL

As a leader, you face daily pressures, which are quite different from the pressures that confronted you when you were a carefree individual contributor, responsible only for your own work.

The type of pressure and its intensity depends on a number of things: the sector you're operating in; the organizational culture; the competence and demeanor of your boss… the list goes on.

But each level of leadership has pressures that are fairly common across the board, irrespective of any of these other factors. Obviously, the pressures you faced as a frontline supervisor will be very different to the pressures you're going to face when you become CEO of a large global business.

In this LinkedIn Newsletter, I examine the pressures that you're most likely to be facing at the level you're operating at now. I can't offer definitive answers, because of the number of complex factors at play: the permutations that determine your individual circumstances are almost limitless.

My hope is that it will improve your ability to identify, name, and understand the pressures you face. This, in turn, will enable you to more effectively tap into our catalog of 300+ No Bullsh!t Leadership episodes.

Emma and I started this business (Your CEO Mentor) to improve the quality of leaders globally, and in the last 5+ years, we've produced a vast body of knowledge which you can access, absolutely free, to help you to handle virtually any challenge that comes your way.

I begin this article with a look at the pressures facing frontline leaders, before going on to discuss the different pressures that senior leaders face. But I'll place most of my focus on the biggest pressure point – mid-career leaders who feel like they're the meat in the sandwich.

For each of these situations, I'm going to recommend three hidden gems: the episodes in our back catalog that are guaranteed to make a difference to you, right now.

THE NEW LEADER CHALLENGE

As a new leader, you'll face one incredibly difficult challenge. After spending years of hard work and energy perfecting your technical capability – as a lawyer, or a marketer, or an architect – you have to step into a role that takes you away from your skillset. You start dedicating a portion of your time to managerial and leadership work.

You were probably promoted because you were the best person performing the technical work. In all likelihood, you could string a decent sentence together, and you probably had a solid work ethic to boot. Because of that, you're now asked to lead other people… with very little guidance, no formal training, and a scarcity of role models above you to show you how to do it.

Your natural tendency will be to fall back on the technical work, for a few very good reasons. Here's my top five:

  1. This is where you see your worth and your value. Any time you have to spend on managerial work is going to feel wasted. It'll feel uncomfortable, and it will feel as though you're losing ground with your hard-earned technical skills;

  2. Your technical identity is your identity. You don't see yourself as a leader – you see yourself as an expert practitioner;

  3. Delivering work produces tangible results. Leading people often produces nothing tangible. The transition to leadership requires a complete mindset shift, otherwise any time spent on managerial work is going to feel wasted and unproductive;

  4. You have to move from a task focus to a people focus. Having to deal with people is a completely different proposition from dealing with work content. It's uncomfortable, it's difficult, and when you first do it, you're going to be unskilled; and

  5. You have to accept that not everyone is as good as you. This can be a bitter pill to swallow. Work's going to be produced by your team that is, on some occasions, vastly inferior to the work that you would've produced yourself (remember, you're the one that got promoted). And it requires an enormous amount of self-control and restraint to stand back and let that happen.

The pressures on a new leader are rather unique. The interesting thing is, many simply ignore these issues and carry the problem with them deep into their careers.

A very common way to deal with this pressure is to dip down: that is to say, you do the work that your team members should be doing. Why on earth would you do that!? Because it's way easier just to roll your sleeves up and fix something, than it is to put in the hard work of leadership to lift someone else's capability so that they can do the job to the required standard, without your intervention.

This ultimately shows up for you as increased workload. You end up doing most of your old job – because you can… You take on a bunch of your people's work – because you feel as though you have to… And, you begrudgingly add the leadership and managerial dimensions, like meetings and leave approvals and work schedule planning – because no one else is there to do it for you.

The amount of time and effort you put in keeps growing, and often gets out of control. Even though you've just achieved a pay rise, your hourly rate shrinks.

Remind me again why I wanted to be a leader?!

Okay, so if you're a new leader, here's a few podcast episodes that might help to speed your transition:

THE PROBLEMS AT THE TOP ARE DIFFERENT…

I want to skip over to senior leaders next. If you make it into a senior leadership role, you've most likely learned how to get through many of the challenges at the lower levels.

For a start, you've actually been promoted, which confirms that you must be doing something right. Your confidence is probably a little higher, too – but if you're any good as a leader, you also have frequent waves of self-doubt.

You became more resilient by surviving the challenges of middle management, which are often some of the toughest you can face. And, now that you're in the rarefied air, you have a new set of problems altogether:

  1. You are highly visible. Everyone's watching you, all the time. You can't hide with the same level of anonymity that you could as a mid-level manager. Your actions, words, and decisions are on display for all to see, and that can bring with it a new type of pressure.

  2. You have way more accountability and way less control. This is the great paradox of leadership. You're a lot further away from the action and you have less direct control over what happens below you. Your hands simply aren't on the execution levers the same way they were when you were in middle management. As chief executive of a major industrial business, I had zero control over stupid decisions made by plant operators at 2:00 a.m. on a Tuesday morning… and I just had to live with it. The only thing you can do is to build the right leadership and culture below you, so the people are more likely to make the right calls in the moment.

  3. Politics becomes a daily sport. You’re swimming with the sharks now, and politics can get really vicious at the highest levels as executives jockey for position for their next promotion. And, when you focus on leading your team to superior performance and better results, every week you're going to be pulling knives out of your back.

  4. You deal with increasing levels of complexity and ambiguity. As an individual contributor, almost everything is black and white… it's certain… it's really well-defined. As a senior leader, almost nothing is. You have to learn how to work with increasing complexity and turn that murky gray ambiguity into clarity for your people. They need to know what they have to do right now in order to be successful. Your job is to chart a path through rough terrain – with no map!

  5. As a senior leader, your position is much more tenuous. Apart from the odd restructuring purge, which only happens in a handful of companies, and then only occasionally, you're normally reasonably secure as a middle manager, if you're any good at your job. Not so in the senior leadership ranks. Job security is much lower, and any incident on any given day can threaten that security. This makes many senior leaders fearful, conservative, and withdrawn. So you can put your game face on, but you can still feel incredibly insecure inside in your position.

For those of you who are senior leaders, here are my three favorite hidden gem episodes to help you deal with these pressures:

THE PRESSURE IS GREATEST AT THE CENTER

Mid-level leadership roles are often the toughest. I produced a podcast episode some time ago that's definitely worth your time. It's Ep.74: The Curse of the Middle Manager.

You're sandwiched in between the top management team and the workforce. You have significant accountability for performance, and often have to execute on decisions made above you whether you agree with them or not. But you're not really part of your team either – you're developing the art of professional distance.

Despite the pressures, I want you to remember one thing, if you are a mid-level leader: this is where your leadership capability and confidence is forged.

If you can make it through the trials and tribulations of middle management and reach the most senior levels of any organization, you will have developed an invaluable set of skills and a level of confidence that fuels your performance.

Mind you, it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be a great leader, but it does mean that you've likely developed the tenacity and resilience to deal with most things that come your way. And this is a great foundation to build upon.

I'm going to cover off briefly on the seven greatest challenges for mid-career leaders, and I'm sure that many of you are going to relate to these:

  1. You have to deal with pressure from above and pressure from below. The boss puts constant pressure on you to deliver more with less. But at the same time, your team pushes back constantly claiming to be under-resourced. You don't necessarily feel as though you have the autonomy to call the shots on the work program. So, more often than not, you just choose to do what you're told. You're also not sure if you'll have the boss's support if you actually screw it up. You have to take decisions to your people that either aren't sensible, aren't value accretive, or are just really hard to explain. And this can damage your credibility in the eyes of your team.

  2. Lack of resources. The only thing I know for sure is that you will never have enough people, money, and time to do all the things you'd ideally like to do. But most middle managers feel as though they have to try to deliver everything they're asked to. So, you end up putting inappropriate pressure on your people, who in turn end up doing things half-arsed, even missing delivery on some objectives altogether. In the absence of clarity from above, you don't even know how to articulate the value of the work program, so you have no basis for debating what should be in the work program and what shouldn't. You're set up to fail because you can't find a way to push back on the boss. And your boss generally won't push back on her boss, so there's no air cover for you.

  3. Lack of access to information. Because you're not privy to discussions that are held at executive level, you often feel like you're operating in the dark. This results in a lack of context, making it more difficult to explain the what and the why of certain decisions to your people. But the information you get from your team is also often sanitized to either hide or downplay the negatives, making it harder for you to report upwards accurately. Information in many organizations is disseminated on a ‘need-to-know’ basis, and most of the time middle managers are deemed to not need to know. This can result in you losing confidence in your decision-making capability because, in the absence of quality information, you frequently make dubious calls.

  4. Insufficient strength to hold people accountable. Most mid-career leaders haven't yet mastered the art of handling conflict. Without this skill, it makes it incredibly difficult to apply any of the tools, techniques, or remedies that would actually improve team performance. So your own capability and confidence are eroded. The inability to handle conflict comfortably can prevent you from pushing back on more senior people. It can even hold you back from expressing your views in group forums. This exacerbates any feelings of helplessness and victimhood that you may already be harboring. Your team becomes weak, and when you constantly avoid difficult decisions, you begin to rationalize. For example, “I have to have someone in the role, otherwise I'll be short-staffed, and that's why I have to keep this underperformer on the team”. As the performance failures mount, they begin to outnumber the successes. The only way back from here is to make excuses and to blame external forces.

  5. Inability to influence across boundaries. It's hard enough to get people who you (theoretically) have control over to do what you want. As a mid-career leader, you'll experience the much greater challenge of getting people who you don't have control over to do what you want. Influencing peers and external stakeholders is a critical but incredibly sophisticated skill and you'll now find yourself at the stage where you can't be truly successful without it. Learning this is sometimes made harder because your boss may be adversarial, having never developed those skills herself.

  6. Feeling like you've hit a promotion ceiling. Virtually all mid-career leaders are trying to get to the top. You're motivated, ambitious, and career-oriented. You'll be incredibly conscious of not stagnating at your current level. You'll be eyeing off the money that comes with your next promotion. And you'll almost certainly feel the pressure of your life stage – many of you will have young children and big mortgages. You'll want to get to the next level as quickly as possible. But you'll also feel the competition from your peers. And if you miss out on a promotion, it can sow seeds of doubt and discontent.

  7. Lack of access to guidance and support. Very few mid-career leaders have great leadership role models. So you try to play the game based on what you see others doing, especially those who might appear to be more successful than you. This often leads you to focus on politics and appeasement of people in positions of power, rather than on your own personal growth and performance. With all the noise that's out in the world about how to lead, you may find it hard to know where to turn to for guidance and support.

All right, for those of you who are mid-career leaders, let's face it, pretty much every episode is designed for you. You are our core audience. But I do want to give you a few hidden gems that you may not yet have come across:

YOU CAN ENJOY THE RIDE!

Getting through each level of leadership is an ordeal that you have to pass through in order to acquire the skills and capabilities that you need for the next level. Even the relatively straightforward start of being a frontline leader, where you only have to manage direct reports, has its unique challenges. But every level you climb to beyond that brings increasing complexity, new challenges, and inevitable feelings of insecurity and doubt.

Nailing the core skills of leadership as early as possible is the one thing that's going to speed your progress through the ranks and even enable you to enjoy the journey. Don't be one of the senior leaders who relies on their intellect, experience, and power to get things done. The earlier you learn how to get the most out of the people on your team, the more effortless your own rise becomes.

 
 

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