Copyright Forbes
You’ve just been promoted into leadership. Congratulations. Now you have to figure out what to do next. If your new role is a big step up, it may be intimidating at first. But you’re in good company. Entrepreneurs go through this transition every time they face a new stage in their company. You may not think of yourself as an entrepreneur. But like a founder, you have to learn fast, influence people all around you, and make calls in real time with imperfect information. Here are six practical strategies you can steal from founders to help you excel rapidly in your new role. 1. Look In The Mirror You can only grow when you take an honest look at yourself so you can double down on your strengths and develop your weaknesses. The best entrepreneurs do this regularly. Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean, an AI company that helps employees find knowledge inside their organizations, schedules a personal check-in every 6 to 12 months and asks himself: “Am I still the right CEO for this company?” Jain said that he always gets insights out of that question. “I’m a conservative person by nature,” he said. “We’re supposed to generate profits. In the AI world there’s a fundamental shift in technology and a land grab becomes much more of a strategy.” MORE FOR YOU “I’ve had to learn to adjust and go against my own instinct,” he added. “You need to understand what you’re weak at and actively work against those weaknesses.” You can do your own version of this even if you are running a team of five, not a company of five hundred. Sit down privately and ask yourself questions like: What did I learn in the past six months? Where are my strengths serving me best? Where did I struggle? What do I need to get better at to lead this team well? Your insights show you exactly where to focus your development. Block time for this. Treat it like any other strategic review. 2. Adapting Is Your Strongest Strategic Move Founders are forced to adapt fast to new markets, new threats, and new customer behavior. They either evolve or they get wiped out. The same muscle applies to leaders inside established companies. Your environment is going to change. Your playbook has to change with it. Sadie Lincoln, cofounder and CEO of Barre3, confronted a massive disruption during the pandemic. She and her cofounder had built a very successful in-person fitness studio business. When Covid hit, every studio shut down. That crisis could have ended the company. Instead, she and her leadership team adapted immediately. They trained instructors to teach remotely, set up virtual classes, and enabled merchandise sales on Instagram so each instructor could keep serving their community. Now Barre3 operates both an in-person business and a digital platform featuring thousands of on-demand workouts. They also have an e-commerce arm that offers Barre3-branded activewear, props, kits and beauty and wellness items. These business lines would never have existed without the pandemic forcing them to be agile. You may not be dealing with life or death issues in your company. But the leaders who are the most respected and get the most out of their teams are the ones who are able to accept reality and shift quickly in response. You can practice this with a few simple exercises. Create a decision journal. Capture regular decisions you make big and small. Then review the journal to see what you decided and how it played out. That will help you tune your judgment. Ask your colleagues what they’re seeing in the marketplace, with customers and competitors. Create a mental map of your industry and your company to give you a radar of what may be coming in the future so that you have time to prepare your mind. Practice making quick decisions without perfect information. As a leader your strategic advantage is to stay nimble and keep adjusting in real time. 3. Practice Tough Talks As a new leader, your need to deal with conflict, tough decisions, and unhappy team members goes up exponentially. It’s easy to put off these conversations. As a new leader, you may worry about not having knowledge or credibility so you may hesitate. Most founders can relate to this. "My greatest strength is deep empathy and that shows up in listening to what my team needs,” said Joe Thomas, cofounder of Loom, which was acquired by Atlassian for $1B. He also realized that this quality is his biggest weakness. The need to make everyone feel comfortable all the time made him reluctant to confront performance problems directly. To get over this, he purposely started to give more feedback. “I saw that giving tough feedback is actually okay. People are fine. They actually appreciate it a lot of times.” You can practice having hard conversations by simply sharing feedback directly with your employees. You can start with people you feel most comfortable with and give messages which feel easy. Over time, increase your comfort by branching out to people you feel less secure with and be honest about harder topics. The only way to get better and more comfortable with hard conversations is to practice them repeatedly. 4. Do Less Lead More As a new leader, you may be tempted to continue taking on new work yourself. After all, you know how to do it and you can do it faster and better than anyone else. You may also want to make sure that nobody around you thinks you’re “above it.” This is a classic trap for new leaders. And it will get in the way of your effectiveness as a new leader. Serial entrepreneur Matt Blumberg codified this concept in his “french fry theory.” “The French fry theory is that you’re never too full to eat one more French fry. There may be a moment where you're too full to order another plate of French fries, but you can always eat one more.” Blumberg compares this to work: “There's always one more task you can do. There's always one more request that comes in, there's always one more email you can send.” Blumberg learned to manage his own tendencies by learning to say no and redirect work back to his team. “All of that comes down to being very clear about priorities and very clear about strategy,” he said. “And particularly as a founder or a CEO, get very clear on what things you can uniquely do, that no one else can do in the organization. Then you’ll see that you must do them or they don’t get done. That's the foundation of understanding what to say no to.” One practical tool that Blumberg suggests is to add healthy friction to requests. For example, if someone asks you to send an email to an executive on their behalf, ask them to draft the email first. They will often realize they can handle it. Even if they still want your signature, most of the work is already done. Remember that as you become a more senior leader, your value translates less into what you can do and more into what you can get out of your team. Learning to be a first-class delegator is the only way to get there. 5. Vulnerability Wins Allies Many new leaders feel like they are not ready. Most founders do too. Paul English, cofounder of Kayak, (acquired by Priceline for $2.1B) described what it felt like to suddenly be in charge of a big team before he was a founder. “Earlier in my career, when I was at Interleaf, I had massive imposter syndrome. I was 29. I was a VP running a big team of engineers. It was a big organization and I was not qualified for that job. I used to have chest pains since I felt so in over my head.” Technically, he was confident. On leadership, he was insecure. His breakthrough came when he decided to stop pretending he knew everything. “One day I started being open about my imposter syndrome, initially just to a few selected people. You literally could watch their body language change and they suddenly would become your ally," he said. The counterintuitive truth is that when you let people see that you are figuring it out, they often stop resisting you and start rooting for you. Start opening up a bit to people you feel comfortable with and see how it goes over. If you’re honest with your team and show your commitment to learning, they’ll help you succeed. 6. Train Your Discomfort Muscles Leadership will put you into situations you have not mastered yet and where you’re not sure what to do. It’s uncomfortable and sometimes terrifying. Those feelings are not signals to pull back; instead they should encourage you to keep going. Nick Huber, serial entrepreneur and author of The Sweaty Startup, started his first business from his college dorm room. As he’s built various businesses, he’s seen the necessity in expanding your comfort zone. There’s only one way to do it: "The way that you get comfortable in uncomfortable situations is to progressively put yourself in more and more stressful environments," he said. Stress is not something to avoid. It is something to train. When you are new in the leadership seat, don’t shy away from challenges. Find the opportunities to stretch yourself and get genuinely uncomfortable. That’s the way you can build the nervous system and the skills you’ll need to succeed in your career. Your most important job as a new leader is to learn rapidly and adapt to your new role. Use these principles from great founders to inspire you.
