As the senior-most person in an organization, you’ll be watched more closely than you’ve ever been watched in your life. Your presence causes people to focus all of their attention on you. They seek out your approval and try to avoid your criticism. Shifting your mindset away from “one of the team” to “the person in charge,” especially if you came up through the team and grew the team yourself, is a challenge for many at this level.
You’re no longer one of the team. Your first team is comprised of your peers at the leadership/executive level, and your reporting structure has now become your second team. If you shift your mindset successfully, you will probably start to detach socially a little bit from the overall organization. When there’s a happy hour, you go for a drink and then leave the team to socialize. Closing down the bar with your whole organization will tend to have bad consequences for everyone, so I strongly advise that you avoid doing that with any regularity. Socializing heavily with your team outside of working hours is a thing of the past.
You need to detach for a few reasons. First, if you don’t detach, you’re likely to be accused of playing favorites. In fact, you probably will play favorites if you maintain very strong social ties with people who report up to you on the team. This hurts, but it is true. Maybe you don’t care, but personally I found that having my team believe I was playing favorites made the overall team unhappy and made my job a lot harder.
Second, you need to detach because you need to learn how to lead effectively, and leading effectively requires people to take your words seriously. The downside of leading at this level is that with a throwaway comment, you can cause people to change their whole focus. This is bad, unless you’re aware of that and actually make use of it appropriately. If you try to maintain a “buddy” image, your reports are going to have a hard time distinguishing between their buddy thinking out loud and their boss asking them to focus on something.
Detaching also means being thoughtful about where you spend your time. As the senior leader, you’ll often suck all of the oxygen out of a room. Your mere presence will change the tone and structure of meetings you attend. If you aren’t careful, you’ll end up pontificating and change the direction of a project because you had a great brainstorm in a one-off meeting you decided to drop into. It sucks! I know! It’s frustrating that you can no longer be one of the team whose ideas are there to be evaluated and potentially rejected — but you are no longer that person.
If you’ve ever worked with anyone who overlapped with Steve Jobs at Apple, chances are you’ve heard that person talk about “Steve” and the impact he had on some project he or she was working on. Apple employees used the specter of Steve to argue for and against decisions, as a moral compass for what the organization should be doing. The culture you build and reinforce will have some of this effect on your company. They may not refer to you by name, but as you choose which behaviors to model in front of the team, they will learn those behaviors and copy them. If you yell, they learn that yelling is OK. If you openly make mistakes and apologize, they learn that it’s OK to make mistakes. If you always ask the same set of questions about a project, people start to ask those questions themselves. If you value certain roles and responsibilities openly above other roles, ambitious people will seek out those valued positions. Use this power for good.
There are other reasons you need to detach. You’re going to be part of hard decisions that will impact the whole business, and these decisions may cause you a great deal of stress. It won’t be appropriate to discuss these decisions with other people at the company. It’s deeply tempting to rant to those people you consider friends in your reporting team about the challenges of your position, but this is a bad idea. As their leader, you can easily undermine their confidence by sharing worries that they can’t do anything to mitigate. Transparency that may have been harmless or even possibly helpful at lower levels of management can become incredibly damaging to the stability of your team at this level.
You may not be “one of the team,” but that doesn’t mean you should stop caring about the team as individuals. In fact, I encourage you to care more about people as individuals, at least in a small way. Taking the time to get to know as many people as you can as humans — asking them about their families or hobbies or interests — is a good way to help them feel that they’re part of a group that cares about them.
As you grow more detached from the team, it can be easy to start to dehumanize people and treat them like cogs. People can tell when that’s happening, when their leaders stop caring about the individuals in the organization. They’re less likely to feel committed to giving their all, to taking risks and pushing through hard circumstances, if they feel that no one really cares about them personally. Nurturing that kind of connection, even at a superficial-seeming level, helps to reinforce that you do care about them and not just their current projects or work output; that you know they’re people outside of work. It grounds you without attaching you too strongly to individuals. You’ll have to make hard calls as an executive, but your team deserves a leader who’s able to be kind even while making those hard calls.
You’re a role model. What kind of leaders do you want to develop? What kind of legacy do you want to leave?