Becoming an Enterprise Leader: The Seven Seismic Shifts

How Managers BecomeHere is an excerpt from an article by Michael Watkins for LinkedIn Pulse. To read the complete article, check out others, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.

Note: Links to posts and video on each of the Seven Seismic Shifts are provided at the conclusion of the article.

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Too many rising stars stumble when they move from managing a function to leading an enterprise and take responsibility for a P&L and oversight of leaders across functions. It truly is different at the top. To find out how, I took an in-depth look at this critical career transition point, conducting an extensive series of interviews with more than 40 executives, including managers who had developed high-potential talent, senior HR professionals, and individuals who had recently made the move to enterprise leadership for the first time.

What I found is that to make the move to enterprise leader successfully, executives must navigate a challenging set of changes in their focus and skills, which I call the Seven Seismic Shifts.

[Here are the first three.]

Shift #1: From specialist to generalist.

A company’s business functions are managerial subcultures with their own rules, values, and languages. Managers transitioning to enterprise leadership roles must therefore work hard to achieve “cross-functional fluency.” Someone who grew up in marketing obviously cannot become a native speaker of operations or R&D, but he or she can become fluent—comfortable with the central terms, tools, and ideas employed by the various functions whose work he or she must integrate. Critically, enterprise leaders must know enough to be able to evaluate and recruit the right people to lead functional areas in which they are not experts.

Shift #2: From analyst to integrator.

The primary responsibility of function heads is to develop and manage their people to achieve analytical depth in focused domains. By contrast, enterprise leaders manage cross-functional teams with the goal of integrating the collective knowledge and using it to solve important organizational problems. As you might imagine, then, it’s important for new enterprise leaders to make the shift to managing integrative decision-making and problem-solving and, even more important, to learn how to make appropriate trade-offs. Enterprise leaders must also manage in the “white spaces”—accepting responsibility for issues that don’t fall neatly into any one function but are still important to the business.

Shift #3: From tactician to strategist.

More so than functional heads, enterprise leaders establish and communicate strategic direction for their organizations. So they must be able to define and clearly communicate the mission and goals (what), the core capabilities (who), the strategy (how), and the vision (why) for their businesses. Additionally, they must be able to switch gears with ease, seamlessly shifting between tactical focus (the trees) and strategic focus (the forest). Critically, they must learn to think strategically, which means honing their ability to (1) perceive important patterns in complex environments, (2) crystallize and communicate those patterns to others in the organization in powerful ways, and (3) use these insights to anticipate and shape the reactions of other key “players,” including customers and competitors.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article and aforementioned links.

Michael Watkins is the author of The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter (my copy is the Updated and Expanded edition) and specializes in First 90 Days Coaching, Programs, and Team Acceleration Workshops as well as E-learning. To learn more about Mike and his work, please click here.

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