How managers become leaders

Start with the function, not your team

Managers are asked about their team. Leaders are asked about the function — where it is weak, what it should stop doing, what it will look like in eighteen months. Having an answer before anybody asks is the cheapest, most visible signal there is, and it costs a few hours of thought rather than a programme.

Do the three things new leaders find hardest, early

• Remove someone who is not right, properly and humanely. Almost every first-time leader defers this and almost every one of them says afterwards they should not have.
• Hire somebody better than you at something that matters. It is the fastest way to stop being the ceiling of your own function.
• Kill a project publicly, with reasons. Priorities become real at the moment something visible is stopped.

Change what you bring to the room

Managers bring status: what happened, what is late, what is fixed. Leaders bring choices: here are the two options, here is the one I recommend, here is what it costs and what I need from you. The difference is not seniority of language — it is whether the room has to do the thinking after you finish speaking.

The step is granted by other people and made by you. The gap between those two moments is usually a year, and it is entirely visible in your calendar.

Get out of your function

Most of what will constrain you at the next level lives elsewhere — in finance's model, in the commercial team's incentives, in a technology roadmap written before you arrived. Leaders who move up have usually spent a year building relationships in those places for no immediate reason, which is exactly why it works.

The honest caveat

Doing all of this does not guarantee promotion where you are. Some structures have no room above you, and no amount of readiness creates a seat. It does, however, make you the obvious candidate at the moment a seat appears — somewhere.