We frequently hear about the value of authenticity in leaders. New leaders are advised to “just be yourself,” “don’t ever change,” and “be who you are.” In a culture where so many of our interactions are on social media, where influencers are filtering, looksmaxxing and presenting heavily-curated experiences, and where nearly everybody has asked “is this AI, or real?” it’s understandable that we’re concerned about being real and authentic.
But what we are often not told by mentors, peers and other leaders is that to be a great leader, you will need to change in significant ways. Who you are becomes different. And those needed changes are urgent too. They need to happen immediately—not over the next year or two. If you are a new VP or a new CEO you’re not the new VP or CEO in transition, you are the new VP or CEO now.
Of course, in any new position there will always be learning, ongoing new experiences, trial and error, and even failures over time. But the things you can control now, you can also change.
Stop doing your old job tasks.
Too often I have seen leaders cling to the tasks and contexts of their old job while the new tasks of the CEO are left waiting. Understanding the tasks you need to stop doing is a crucial decision for new leaders.
The tasks you used to do in your old position, the places or areas of the business where you spent the most time, and the team that you were once a member of will typically change.
Ask yourself: “Do I need to still spend my time in that old task? Or do I need to let someone else do that work while I focus on new tasks?”
If you are doing a task associated with your old job, who is the person who should be doing it now?
If you were once a really good VP of finance and you are now the CEO, somebody else has to start being the VP. And the question for you is “If I’m not VPing, where am I useful?”
A significant part of leadership is having spent the time to understand what the new role is, discovering why you want the role (hopefully not for title, ego, accolades or money), and acknowledging that you have the traits and skills to take the corporation to a higher and better place. The skills you have developed over the course of your career, you can deploy to make the organization better.
If you are not in leadership for those reasons—deploying your exceptional talent to help make the organization better—you are in leadership for the wrong reasons.
Fortunately if you end up in a leadership position it is not simply because you have stepped up for the role after self-assessment. It is also because others have already seen that you are a leader.
Stop using your old voice and find your [new] voice.
Surprisingly you will need a very different voice in your new role. You will not use the same words or the same approach and you will not even talk about the same topics. Just as your tasks are new, your business focus and thus your communication will be different.
Yes, you will still sound like you—but it will be a new you because you are in a different role. Clients, peers, staff, support and the leadership team, all will see you differently, have new expectations and recognize that you will be carrying a new role forward to the best of your ability. That new role shapes your voice.
In the past your natural style may have been to speak more tentatively and less crisply. But your task as a leader is to be able to communicate duties, difficulties and decisions in brief, compelling ways so that the rest of the organization understands and takes action.
Your voice is separate from the decision-making process which necessarily includes other voices and other leaders, peers and staff. But your voice is yours alone and people look to you to hear that clarity, vision, and decisiveness.
Stop having all the answers.
It is challenging as a new leader to accept that you do not have the answers. A part of this is, perhaps, overconfidence. Today I can accept that I did not know certain things 20 years ago as a new CEO. It is harder when you are young and eager.
But another part of that desire to have all the answers is the idea that you ought to have those answers. You feel that if you are the CEO you should have the answers—and the right answers too.
But the reality is that the most powerful point in my career has been when I have discovered that a good answer to a problem . . . is that I do not have the answer.
It is even more humbling today to recognize that knowledge has expanded and time moves more swiftly than ever before. In a sense, we know even fewer of the answers today than we did 20 years ago because there are more variables and complexity than ever before.
No one person, however talented a leader, is able to have all the answers, and acknowledging this reality early on in your role will not diminish, but will add to your credibility.
There is nothing worse than your peers, employees and fellow leaders coming slowly to the conclusion that you do not know—and that you do not know that you do not know. They wonder if you are hiding your cluelessness, or are unaware of it entirely. But either way, it becomes plain that the captain of the ship is floundering.
Be willing to say “I do not know but we will find out.”
The writer and theologian Henri Nouwen once wrote, “The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.”
In leadership, we are entering unexplored terrain—not only the contexts of business, changing markets and new problems, but also the unexplored terrain of our selves as leaders. A part of the challenge of life is discovering, confronting and changing the self. And in the process of that discovery, we travel through terrain through which we hope to lead others.
To grow our businesses, we must grow our selves. To do that we must enter the unexplored terrain of change and growth first, and then help guide the business and its people through the same events.
