In this area you will find specific guidance for excelling at three managerial career levels: Frontline Manager, Lead of Leads, and Executive. The focus is on common failure modes, handling typical challenges, and contrasting the different expectations for each level.
Executive
You lead the business and shape the long-term vision, mission, and strategy.
Lead of Leads or Middle Managers
You lead other leaders and connect execution to high-level strategic goals - the more layers the more painful this becomes.
Frontline Manager
You lead individual contributors only and focus on execution and managing the work - often you do it too.
Why those specific three?
- There are distinctively different requirements and challenges for leading individual contributors compared to leaders, or driving an entire function, division, or business unit. For example, Delegation turns from nice-to-have to absolute necessity the larger your organization becomes.
- Transitioning effectively to any of these levels for the first time is hard because competition is steep and the managerial duties are different. Getting a job offer for a higher level through interviewing externally is rare as companies want to avoid performance risks. The more common path of internal promotion requires you to excel at your current role first, hence the name of this area.
- The scope of these levels for a given function is similar across mature organizations, but the job titles aren’t. For example, some organizations use Manager or Director job titles for roles that don’t have any formal leadership responsibilities (Product Manager or Creative Director). You will find useful guidance no matter what your actual title is.