As you advance in your domain, you manage people, execute projects, and deliver results. But if you want bigger results, your approach must fundamentally change. Senior leadership represents a profound transformation in how you create impact.
The game changes. The goals are different. The skills are different. And most importantly, the way you make your mark is completely transformed.
Having witnessed this transformation firsthand, I’ve learned that senior leadership differs fundamentally from middle management. While each step brought greater autonomy and influence, what surprised me most was how the very nature of leadership itself evolved. If you’re aiming for senior leadership, leadership development coaching is key.
Senior Leadership Changes How You Set Goals
As a senior leader, you’re no longer evaluated on individual performance but on collective outcomes. Your success depends on enrolling others in a shared vision and creating conditions where everyone contributes their best thinking. You’re now co-leading the entire organization with other leaders to achieve shared results.
The first major shift: your primary team is no longer your direct reports; it’s your peers, the other senior leaders.
Here’s the challenge: you don’t get to choose them. Unless you’re the CEO, you inherit these relationships. This is your “first team,” as Patrick Lencioni calls it in “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”, and they’re essential to your success. You succeed or fail together.
The truth I’ve learned: every senior leader brings unique gifts. The faster you learn to tap into their strengths while helping them see yours, the more you unlock your leadership team’s collective potential.
The second shift: you win by aligning across the organization. You must build trust with peers, bridge conflicting priorities, and collaborate at scale. The job becomes a complex group project where your “wins” might not always feel like victories to your direct reports.
Senior Leadership Requires Different Skills
The skillset that got you here won’t get you there. Here are the competencies that have served me and many other executives well at the senior level:
1. Habits and Routines When your calendar overflows with competing demands, routines become your best defense against overwhelm. Time management isn’t just tactical, it’s strategic. Effective senior leaders guard their mornings, protect important work from urgent distractions, block thinking time, and batch decisions. They understand that attention is their scarcest resource, and “me time” isn’t luxury, it’s essential.
2. Thinking Differently Senior leaders can’t just execute the current playbook; they must envision the next one. This requires curiosity, forward-thinking, and comfort with ambiguity. You need to zoom out, spot patterns, and question assumptions. It’s not about having the right answer – it’s about asking the right questions and challenging status quo thinking thoughtfully.
3. Multidisciplinary Fluency Even if you’ve never worked in sales, finance, or operations, you must learn to speak their language. Senior leadership means seeing the whole business including understanding balance sheets, customer experience metrics, and supply chain dynamics. You don’t need expertise in every function, but you must speak enough of each language to connect the dots across disciplines.
4. Networking and Influence Your impact no longer comes from positional authority but from relational authority. The strongest senior leaders invest in relationships inside and outside the organization, building networks characterized by depth and diversity rather than momentary utility. These relationships provide critical external perspective, market intelligence, and windows into alternative approaches.
5. Negotiation Rather than saving it for contracts, negotiation is an everyday competency for priorities, resources, timelines, and trade-offs. Effective senior leaders align interests and seek win-win outcomes.
The Invitation to Greater Impact
Senior leadership isn’t a promotion. It’s not linear. Leadership is not limited to your “full-time job.” The path to senior leadership is a transformation in how you create impact and find fulfillment doing it.