This article was originally published at The Harvard Business Review by Adam Bryant.
When Penny Herscher stepped into her first chief executive role, at the tech firm Simplex Solutions, she felt sure she was prepared. After all, she had held marketing, business development, and general manager positions at her previous company, Synopsys, and she was comfortable taking on difficult challenges. Even so, her confidence quickly evaporated.
“I had no clue how to be a CEO,” she says. “I kept finding myself in situations where I didn’t feel I had the experience and the toolset to know what to do, and I kept waiting for permission to make decisions.” Then one of the company’s directors took her aside. “You’re looking to the board for permission,” he told her. “We’ll give you advice, but you have to make your own decisions.” With that nudge, she found her footing and went on to lead her company to a successful IPO.
As Herscher’s story illustrates, succeeding as a top leader has little to do with your title and everything to do with your mindset. As a journalist, I conducted in-depth interviews with more than 500 CEOs and other executives for “Corner Office,” a feature I created at the New York Times, and over the past six years, I’ve interviewed hundreds more for my leadership series on LinkedIn.
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I’ve also coached hundreds of high potentials: people whose organizations are betting on them to eventually take the reins. From all those conversations clear lessons have emerged about what it takes to make a successful transition to a senior leadership position. I wrote the book The Leap to Leader, from which this article is adapted, to share what I’ve learned.
In this article, I’ll explore the mental shifts needed to become a leader and to handle the challenges you’ll encounter in your new role. The process involves identifying and communicating your core values and learning how to approach tough decisions. It requires setting the bar for your team’s performance and learning to compartmentalize so that you can find the right pace for yourself. And it requires expanding your self-awareness and paying attention to the stories you tell yourself about your experiences—your successes and failures, your bad times and good ones—when you contemplate the arc of your career and life.
Being a leader means playing for the team’s success rather than your own and navigating the many balancing acts that make the job so challenging. The following guidelines can help ensure that you’re ready.
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