LEADERSHIP NEW ROLE

 New roles are unforgiving in a particular way. The behaviour that earned you the role is rarely the behaviour the role now asks for — and the people around you are already watching how you handle that gap.

Most leaders try to close it by working harder at what they already know. That is the instinct, and it is usually the wrong one. The gap is not a gap in effort. It is a gap in range.

The leaders who do this work early in a new role tend to compound it across the whole tenure. What we give them is a way to see their own range — what they reach for, what they avoid — clearly enough to widen it on purpose. 

“You cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it.”

— paraphrased from Albert Einstein, a touchstone of Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline