A head of operations is promoted to director. She now has four managers reporting to her, each with their own team. Six months in, she is working longer hours than ever. Problems still land on her desk, her managers bring decisions to her that they could make themselves, and their teams have started coming straight to her too. She is busy, valued and, without realising it, holding the whole function back.
The move from managing a team to leading other leaders is one of the biggest shifts in a career, and one of the least prepared for. The habits that made someone an excellent manager are often the ones that get in the way at the next level. This guide explains what changes, the five shifts that matter most, and how to stay close to the work without undermining the leaders beneath you.
What changes when you lead leaders
| Leading a team | Leading leaders | |
|---|---|---|
| Your job | Getting work done through people | Building leaders who get work done through people |
| Where problems go | To you | To the right leader, who solves them |
| Your value | Your expertise and judgement on the work | Your judgement on direction, priorities and people |
| How you know things | You see the work directly | Through your leaders, your systems and selective contact |
| Success | Your team delivers | Your leaders deliver, and grow, without you in the middle |
The common thread is distance. You are now one step further from the work, and that is deliberate. If you close that gap by doing your managers’ jobs, two problems follow: your managers never grow, and nobody is doing yours.
Five shifts that matter most
1. From doing the work to designing how it gets done
Your time goes on structure, priorities, standards and the capability of your leaders. When you find yourself fixing a specific problem, ask what it tells you about the system that let it happen.
2. From giving answers to asking better questions
When a manager brings you a problem, your instinct will be to solve it. Try asking what they think first, what options they see and what they would recommend. You will often find they already have a good answer, and they will learn to bring it next time without the meeting.
3. From controlling detail to setting standards
You can’t check everything, and you shouldn’t try. Be clear about what good looks like, what you need to know about and what you don’t, then hold people to that.
4. From being visible in the work to being visible in the organisation
Much of your impact now comes from outside your function: peers, executives, other departments and partners. If your diary is full of your team’s operational meetings, there is no room for the relationships your function needs you to build.
5. From a set of individuals to a leadership team
Your direct reports are a team in their own right, and their first loyalty needs to be to that team, not only to their own areas. A leadership team that solves problems together needs far less from you than four managers who each bring theirs to you separately.
Staying close without bypassing your managers
Leading leaders doesn’t mean losing touch. You still need to know what is really happening. The trick is to stay informed in ways that strengthen your managers rather than undermining them:
- Skip-level conversations work well when your managers know about them, understand why you hold them, and hear what you learn.
- When someone comes to you directly, listen, then ask whether they have raised it with their manager. Usually the right answer is to send them back, with your support.
- Ask for information you need, not information you’re curious about. Every report you request costs someone time.
- Go and see the work occasionally, with your managers rather than around them.
Developing the leaders who report to you
Developing your managers is now one of the most important parts of your job. Most of it happens through everyday work rather than formal training:
- Give them decisions you used to make, and let them make them, including a few you would have made differently.
- Bring them into conversations above their level, so they see how decisions are made.
- Give feedback on how they lead, as well as what they deliver.
- Ask each of them what they want to be doing in two years, and help them get there.
The ability to show that you build leaders is also one of the things senior interview panels test most closely. Director-Level Interview Questions sets out how they assess it.
Building your leadership team
Your direct reports only become a leadership team if you deliberately build one. Left alone, most groups of managers behave like a collection of department heads, each focused on their own area and competing quietly for resources and attention.
A leadership team works when its members agree on a few things together. These questions are worth answering explicitly, ideally in a session away from day-to-day business:
| Question | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| What is this team for, beyond each of us running our own area? | Gives members a shared purpose that sits above their individual departments |
| Which decisions do we make together, and which belong to individuals? | Stops everything coming to the team, and stops important cross-cutting choices being made in isolation |
| How do we disagree? | Healthy conflict in the room prevents unhealthy conflict outside it |
| What do we say outside the room once a decision is made? | A team that reopens decisions in corridors loses credibility quickly |
| How will we hold each other to account? | Moves accountability from you alone to the whole team |
Change what your leadership meetings are for, too. If they are mostly round-table updates, move updates into a short written note and use the meeting time for decisions, problems that cross boundaries, and the future of the function.
Signs you’re still doing your old job
The pull back towards your previous role is strong, especially under pressure. These are some of the most reliable signs that it is happening:
- Your managers’ team members regularly come to you directly.
- You know more about the detail of a project than the manager responsible for it.
- Your diary is mostly operational meetings within your own function.
- Decisions wait for you when you are on leave.
- You feel most useful when solving a specific problem, and uneasy when you are thinking about the longer term.
- Your managers present their work to you rather than to their peers or to senior leaders.
Two or three of these are common in the first six months. If most of them are still true after a year, the role you were promoted into is probably not being done by anyone.
Where your time should go
There is no perfect split, and every role is different. But a rough comparison often helps leaders see how much their time needs to move. Treat the figures below as a guide to direction, not a target.
| Where time goes | Typical when leading a team | Healthier when leading leaders |
|---|---|---|
| Doing or directly managing the work | Most of the week | A small share |
| Developing and supporting your managers | Some | A large share |
| Direction, priorities and decisions across the function | Little | A large share |
| Peers, senior leaders and external relationships | Some | A significant share |
| Thinking time | Rarely protected | Protected in the diary |
A useful exercise is to colour-code your diary for two typical weeks and compare it with the right-hand column. The gap is usually obvious, and it tells you what to change first.
Holding your leaders to account
Stepping back from the detail doesn’t mean stepping back from standards. Leaders of leaders still need to know when things are going off track, and to act when they do. The difference is that you hold your managers to account for outcomes and for how they lead, rather than checking each piece of their work.
- Agree a small number of measures for each area that you review regularly, and stick to them.
- Ask about their people as well as their results. How is their team doing? Who are they developing? Where is the risk?
- When something goes wrong, ask what they will do about it before offering your own answer.
- Address a pattern early. If one manager repeatedly misses commitments, raise it in the second month, not the sixth.
Accountability that is clear and consistent is one of the kindest things you can offer the leaders who report to you. They know where they stand, and they have room to lead in their own way within that.
Much of this depends on delegating well. Why Capable Senior Leaders Struggle with Delegation, and How to Fix It looks at how to hand over decisions, not just tasks, so that it sticks.
Common mistakes
- Being the best manager on your own team. If you are still the person with the answers, nobody else needs to develop them.
- Rewarding people for escalating. If bringing problems to you is quicker than solving them, that is what people will do.
- Managing your managers’ teams directly. It feels efficient and quietly removes your managers’ authority.
- Holding only one-to-ones. Without regular time together as a leadership team, your managers never learn to work across their boundaries.
- Measuring yourself by how busy you are. A full diary at this level is often a sign that you’re doing work that belongs to someone else.
Review your leadership team
Use this to think through each leader who reports to you. The first row shows an example.
| Leader | Main strength | Next development step | What I’ll stop doing for them |
|---|---|---|---|
| Head of customer service | Calm, trusted by the team | Leading change across other functions | Chairing the monthly service review |
The last column is the one most leaders find hardest, and the one that makes the biggest difference.
Not sure where your strengths and gaps sit as a leader? The free Leadership Readiness Assessment takes about ten minutes.
Making the move to leading leaders?
I work one-to-one, online, with senior leaders stepping into bigger roles. Wherever you’re based, sessions are scheduled around your time zone.
The Lead With Clarity Programme is a 12-week coaching programme for leaders who want to lead with more clarity, confidence and impact. It combines one-to-one sessions with guided implementation weeks, so the changes happen in your actual role between sessions.
If you’re finding the step up harder than expected, book a discovery call and we’ll look at where your time and attention need to go.