I was chatting with someone a few week ago who told me they thought they were ready for promotion. I cheered them on and asked what skills they needed to demonstrate to put themselves in a position where they were the obvious candidate for that role.

They replied that they were really good at their current job. I agreed and pointed out that, if they got the promotion, they wouldn’t be doing their current job anymore.

This is something often overlooked as managers seek promotion: your focus expands as you progress to new roles.

The Shifting Focus

As an individual contributor, you focus on doing your own job well. You practice the skills that allow you to execute quickly and accurately, and deliver individual results.

In the MANAGER role, your focus shifts from individual execution, to setting up a team for success. Hiring and developing people. Helping them understand standards and evaluate their performance. Putting in place a system that takes work into and moves it through the department with minimal effort; and delivers accurate and on-time results. As a manager, your time spent executing the work is reduced and you work through others (people and process management).

As a DIRECTOR, you focus on how your department interacts with other departments. You hand off managing processes and standards to the managers that work for you. You build relationships with other departmental leaders. This allows you to understand how your department impacts them; based on this, you set direction for your team. You spend more time on cross-functional work.

If you then move to VICE PRESIDENT, your focus shifts again. You become less focused on cross-functional tactics and more focused on organizational strategy. In many companies, a vice president is a steward of the business. You look at the bigger picture, how your department’s work can contribute to organizational goals, not just departmental goals. Depending on the size and structure of your organization, you may look at how your department can enable the organization to compete against outside forces, such as competitors or environmental changes. You set targets for and measure your team’s ability to move the needle on organizational goals.

From there, in roles such as president and CEO, your focus increasingly shifts to aligning your executive team, how your organization is perceived in the outside community, futures that could impact your organization, what’s happening around you and how to leverage that to your organization’s success.

Doing the Next Job’s Work

Has anyone ever told you that, in order to get promoted, you have to be doing the work of next job while in your current job?

That means that you have to start to shift your focus. For example, as an individual contributor, you have to stop thinking about doing your work even better, to coming up with new ways that the department can work more effectively together. This demonstrates that you may be ready to let go of what made you a successful individual contributor and take on the new skills associated with the manager role.

Becoming the Cork in the Bottle

It isn’t easy to let go of what made you successful in the previous role. I’ve seen many star performers fail as managers fail because they continue to do the work of the previous role.

Or because they hold the person in that previous role to the impossible standard of “doing it exactly the way that I would have done it.” Even if they don’t recognize it consciously, “How I Did It” becomes their standard for “right” – a standard no one else can ever achieve. These impossible standards often creates bottlenecks that slow down the work.

These managers become the cork in the champagne bottle: their teams stop thinking for themselves, stop growing, stop trying. They may like their manager. They may admire them and aspire one day to achieve their manager’s impossible standards or to know as much as their manager seems to know. But they are stuck.

Until someone pops that cork!

Then new talent, new ways of doing things, bubbles up.

Any time an experienced manager leaves, this possibility exists. The team may wonder how they will ever get along without their resident SME, but then they find they are traveling faster, with less effort. They innovate. They shed old practices that used to be critical and are no longer relevant.

When I am feeling good about my team, my work, I sometimes ask myself, “Am I at risk of being the cork in the bottle here?”

Are you?