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One of the biggest challenges we all face as leaders on a development path is the move out of our functional area of expertise into the space of general management .An excellent article was published in 2012 in the Harvard Business Review (   https://hbr.org/2012/06/how-managers-become-leaders )  . For those keen on a video interface (    https://hbr.org/video/5420288136001/how-managers-become-leaders )  . In essence. on becoming a leader of multiple functional areas, you need to develop new skills and cultivate a new mind-set.  Here are the 7 shifts you need to make:

#1 – Specialist to generalist:  This shift will make you feel disorientated and less confident in your ability to make good judgements.  Be cautious not to over manage the function that you know well and under managing the others.

You have to (1) make decisions that are good for the business as a whole and (2) evaluate the talent on your team.  To do both you need to recognise that each functional group have distinct subcultures (the way they go about doing things), with their own mental models, language and different approach to business problems.  Know the right questions to ask and the right metric for evaluating and recruiting people to manage areas in which you do not have expert knowledge and skill.

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#2 – Analyst to Integrator:  The primary responsibility of functional leaders is to recruit, develop and manage people who focus in analytical depth on their specific business activities.

Senior Manager (leading multiple functional areas) job is to manage and integrate the collective knowledge of those functional teams to solve important organisational problems.

Each functional team will at time compete for resources and demand for action, which you will need to balance.  The skill you need has less to do with analysis and more to do with understanding how to make trade-offs and explain the rationale for those decisions.

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#3 – Tactician to strategist:  Being tactical can be seductive – the activities is so concrete and the results so immediate.

To develop a strategic mind, you need to cultivate the following three skills: (1) level shifting is the ability to move fluidly among levels of analysis – to know when to focus on the details, when to focus on the big picture and how the two relate. (2) Pattern recognition is the ability to discern important causal relationships and other significant patterns in a complex business and its environment – that is, to separate the signal from the noise. (3) Mental simulation is the ability to anticipate how outside stakeholders will respond to what you do, to predict their actions and reactions in order to define the best course to take.

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#4 – Bricklayer to Architect:  As leaders move up the leadership ladder, they become responsible for designing and altering the architecture of the organisation.  To be an effective organisational architect you must understand how the key elements of the organisation fit together and not naively believe that you can alter one element without thinking through the implications for all the others.   You need to know the principles of organisational change and change management, including the mechanics of organisational design, business process improvement and transitional management.

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#5 – Problem Solver to Agenda Setter:  Leaders are promoted to senior levels on the strength of their ability to fix problems. When in the senior position leaders must focus less on solving problems and more on defining which problems the organisation must tackle.  Leaders must also identify the “white spaces” issues that don’t fall neatly into any one function but are still important to the business.   To work out which problems his team should focus on (set the agenda) the leader need to learn to navigate a far more uncertain and ambiguous environment that they were used too.  Leaders also need to learn to communicate priorities in ways the organisation could respond to.

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#6 – Warrior to Diplomat: Shift your primary focus from “marshalling the troops to defeat the competition”, to influencing external stakeholders.  What does an effective diplomat do?  They use the tools of diplomacy – negotiation, persuasion, conflict management and alliance building to shape the external business environment to support their strategic objectives.  To do this well, leaders need to embrace a new mind-set – to look for ways that interests can or do align, understand how decisions are made in different kinds of organisations and develop effective strategies for influencing others.  Leaders must understand how to recruit and manage employees of a kind that you probably never supervised or led before and that their initiatives might have a longer horizon than the ongoing business.

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#7 Support cast member to lead role:  Moving into the lead role, means that the leader finds him in the centre stage under the bright lights.  As role model (what you say and do), the intensity of the attention and the almost constant keeping up the guard significantly increases.  Your followers will be looking at you for vision, inspiration and cues about the “right” behaviour, attitude and mind-set.   For good or ill, the personal styles and quirks of senior leaders are infectious, whether they are observed directly or indirectly transmitted from their reports to the level below and on down through the organisation.  Cultivating more self-awareness and taking time to develop empathy with subordinate’s viewpoints.

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The seven shifts involve switching from left-brain, analytical thinking to right-brain conceptual mind-set.

“The skills that got you to where you are may not be the requisite skills to get you to where you need to go.  This doesn’t discount the accomplishments of your past, but they will not be everything you need for the next leg of your journey.”

A Key fundamental building block is our ability to Master our Confidence….this entails balancing our Confidence with our Competence !