Stepping Up to Senior Leadership

Leaders tend to arrive at the top of organizations by a kind of osmosis. Individuals who have been exemplary practitioners their specialization—marketing, finance, engineering, project management, design, etc.—are promoted to lead their unit or product line. Out of this constituency leaders are promoted to the C-suite, and from here prospective COOs and CEOs emerge. Missing in this description is any acknowledgement of the vast gap, in terms of outlook and capabilities required, between leading a business unit and leading at senior organizational level.

When your leadership needs to impact organizational outcomes, things change. Senior leaders, leaders of functions or divisions, need to make high-stakes decisions in complex situations and in alignment with others on the leadership team. They need to build the organization of tomorrow while addressing the needs of today. For specialist and unit managers, stepping up to this senior level requires a whole different mindset and a different set of skills.

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Join CCL’s Leading for Organizational Impact: The Looking Glass Experience

Dates: 20-24 May  |  Format: In person  | Location: Brussels

Also available in Singapore and at San Diego CA and Greensboro NC, U.S.

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Moving to a senior organizational role, leaders take on a much broader scope of work and must address this work at a strategic organization-wide level. They need to expand their focus to see the big picture, learn to be agile in their strategic thinking, build relationships across the organization and outside it, and balance complex competing priorities. Developing these new capabilities can be a daunting challenge… A challenge The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)^® —the foremost global executive development organization with a sole focus on leadership—takes head-on in its Leading for Organizational Impact: The Looking Glass^® Experience program.

Whether taking on the top job at a small company, managing a key function of a mid-size business, or running a division of a global multinational, C-level executives must lead in ways that build on their experience, but also go beyond it. It is their role to set the organization’s mission and vision for the future, to develop a value-driven culture that embraces inclusivity and ESG goals, while at the same time, dealing with a constant flow of short-term decisions and the pressure to meet economic expectations.

Four essential skills for senior leaders

The best senior leaders learn and develop with the job, but this must be built on a sound base. From its decades of experience in training top executives, CCL identifies these 4 essential foundation skills executives need to step up to senior leadership:

1. Self-awareness. Senior executives set standards of behavior—work ethic, values, commitment to the mission—that echo through the organization. It is essential that they understand the impact of their behavior on organizational outcomes.

2. Communication. There is significant performative aspect to senior leadership. Communication skills—written, face-to-face, speaking publicly, online—are a fundamental trust-building part of a leader’s skillset.

3. Influence. Rather than telling and commanding, successful senior leaders get things done through influence and negotiation, and are comfortable persuading, promoting, and delegating.

4. Learning agility. To stay ahead, the best CEOs and senior executives continually learn and improve performance. Through learning they can know when to change course and through agility manage change and help others to do so.

Beyond these fundamental skills, and in addition to their basic people-management and strategy-setting skills, senior leaders need to be able to drive organization-level results. For this, first they need the ability to balance short- and longer-term strategic actions, and the vision to see how these actions will impact the future viability of the organization. Secondly, senior leaders must be able to understand and manage organizational politics, form alliances, and build collaborative relationships. The ability to work across organizational boundaries, and with outside partners and stakeholders, is an essential prerequisite for leadership success.

Senior leadership is difficult and there are too many examples of failure—extremely damaging to the organizations and to the individuals concerned. A key reason for derailment is that the profound changes needed in mind- and skill-sets, to the step up from unit management to a senior organizational-level role, are underestimated. Filling the skills gap needs proactive sophisticated training and development.

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The Center for Creative Leadership’s Leading for Organizational Impact: The Looking Glass^® Experience program is a 5-day intensive program within a 24-week hybrid learning journey for senior executives, that offers the insights, tools, and support they need to meet the challenge of transformation to senior leadership. The heart of this journey is the Looking Glass^® Experience: a research-driven simulation that serves as a live case study of relational leadership. Along the way, participants experience reflection, peer feedback, 360 assessments, personalized executive coaching, and expert facilitation to help them understand their personal leadership style and decide how to shift their behaviors to enhance their leadership and impact their organization.