Leader shifts: Evolving your skills for greater impact
If you’re a leader who is overwhelmed solving everyone’s problems – congratulations, you might be the bottleneck in your own organization. I recently worked with a director of operations who couldn’t resist the temptation to roll up his sleeves and “get out on the floor” to help his team get work out the door. Heroic? Yes. Effective in the long term? Not at all.
Leading at the wrong level is the phrase used when a manager, or even the leader of a department of business line, is still performing individual contributor work. It’s a common problem that contributes to micro-management, lack of strategic focus and leadership gaps up and down the org chart.
Leadership isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach; it’s a journey of transformation. As you rise through the ranks, the responsibilities at each new level shift. What worked as a first-time supervisor may become a liability as you move to managing managers or leading a function. That’s why understanding the evolution from leading others to leading leaders to functional leadership is essential for sustained impact.
The Leadership Pipeline by Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter and James Noel offers a powerful framework to understand these transitions. It emphasizes that as leaders move up, they must change how they apply their time, what they value and the skills they prioritize. Let’s explore each stage and the key questions leaders can ask to stay focused and effective.
Leading others:
At this level, leaders manage individual contributors. Success depends on shifting from doing it yourself to enabling others to perform. It’s no longer about being the expert, it’s about becoming a coach.
Time application: First-time leaders should spend less time doing and more time observing, coaching and giving feedback.
Values shift: Learn to value the team’s success rather than your own accomplishments. It’s like a parent watching their child load the dishwasher; sure, you could do it faster, but the child needs to learn for themselves.
Skills needed: Delegation, communication, emotional intelligence and performance management.
Questions to ask to stay connected to the team’s needs while fostering accountability and growth:
•How are you prioritizing your work this week?
•What barriers are getting in your way today?
What support do you need from me to succeed?
•What’s your plan to accomplish the task?
Leading leaders:
As leaders begin managing other managers, the complexity increases. They’re now responsible for developing leadership capacity in others and aligning multiple teams toward shared goals.
Time application: Focus shifts from managing tasks to managing systems and people who manage others.
Values shift: Leaders must value trust, alignment and culture over control and direct oversight.
Skills needed: Strategic thinking, coaching other leaders, cross-functional collaboration and succession planning are key skills to develop. It’s also important that a leader of leaders understands the job requirements of leading others; it’s essential that those first-time managers learn to perform their jobs effectively.
Questions encourage first-time managers to think systemically and empower others:
•How are your managers developing their teams?
•Where are we seeing patterns, good or bad, across teams?
•What decisions are you making that others could be empowered to make?
•How are you building leadership capacity in your team?
Functional leadership:
At the functional or business leader level, the scope expands to enterprise-wide impact. This is our director of operations, or it could be a leader of finance, human resources or information technology. Leaders must start to think externally, anticipate market shifts and shape long-term strategy.
Time application: Spend time on vision, strategy and external orientation; less on internal operations, and start planning longer-term.
Values shift: Prioritize enterprise-wide outcomes over departmental wins.
Skills needed: Vision setting, influencing beyond authority, financial acumen and strategic risk-taking.
Leaders at this level become part of the business team and should partner with peers in other functions for the good of the overall business.
Questions to help stay focused on the bigger picture and drive sustainable success:
What’s changing in the market, and how are we responding?
•Are we solving the right problems?
•Where do we need to invest to stay ahead?
•How are we balancing short-term results with long-term health?
Leadership is a shift:
Each leadership level requires a shift in mindset. Leaders who fail to evolve can find themselves overwhelmed, ineffective or stuck in old habits. But those who embrace the shift by asking the right questions, developing new skills (as well as retiring old ones) and valuing the right outcomes, become catalysts for growth and transformation. Sure, roll up your sleeves occasionally to work alongside your team as a show of solidarity, but be sure to spend time leading at the right level to help others rise, too.
This article appears in October SBJ 2025.
Thank you for this thoughtful exploration of leadership as ongoing transformation. I appreciated how the article frames leadership as evolving, not fixed, and emphasizes reflection, growth, and adaptive learning. When leaders see themselves as learners first, they model resilience for their teams. A very practical and heart-oriented read.