Congratulations, You’re a Vice-President

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You finally made it. That big executive title you had long strived for and now it happened. You’ve been promoted to Vice-President, or to a similar role at the executive level.

You stand a little taller. You update your LinkedIn profile and email signature with your new title for all the world to see. You even go back and look at your own profile a few times and smile as you relish your accomplishment.

Likely, you’ll have new business cards adorned with your impressive title and you eagerly await the first opportunity to hand one to a business contact.

Maybe you even find a few excuses to drop news of your promotion with family and friends, tactfully letting them know that you made it.

New title. Heightened respect from others. What else changes?

Almost everything.

As the novelty of the promotion wears off, you’ll begin to realize that life as a senior executive is different from that of a mid-level manager in many ways. Here’s how:

Your performance and what you accomplish at an individual level begins to matter less and how your team performs as influenced by your leadership matters much more.

You’ll be measured much less by how hard you work, the effort you put in and the intentions of your actions and much more by the measurable results produced by your team. It’s not that your effort and commitment aren’t important, and a senior executive exhibiting these may get the benefit of the doubt when it comes to assessing short-term performance, but in the end, executive leadership is about accomplishing the mission and producing results.

The habit of basking in the radiance of your own accomplishments, either outwardly or inwardly, and accepting credit and compliments for your own work product disappears. Credit for your work, results and performance should always be deflected to your team.

Keeping members of your team committed, focused and productive becomes your responsibility, as will be the difficult decisions to move team members along and out of the organization if you determine they are not a fit for their roles, for the company’s mission or if their output falls short of the results they are expected to produce. Putting the blame for your team’s sub-par performance on one of your direct reports only works once. After that, you’re to blame for not solving the performance issue or making a personnel change.

Should a member of your team choose to leave the organization, or should you choose to move them on, the responsibility to fill the gap they leave, both by finding ways to do so in the immediate-term and by filling the open position in the medium-term, rests on you.

The words you choose and how you deliver them to others within the organization matter much more. During my years as a manufacturing CEO, I was once told to multiply the meaning of the words I delivered to a company employee by five. In other words, if I criticized a team member, the impact that criticism would have on that person would be 5X what I intended. Same if I complimented them. As a vice-president, perhaps the factor is 3X. Choose your words carefully.

As written in this space previously, leaders get the behaviors they exhibit, expect and tolerate. With your new title, the “exhibit” part of this mantra weighs even more heavily. The entire company will closely watch your behavior and many will model and emulate it. After all, you made it to vice-president. People will take note of how you act, often when you don’t even know they are doing so. Exhibit the proper behaviors and you’ll get the same behaviors from others.

Expect your feelings to get hurt. The adage “it’s lonely at the top” exists for a reason. The higher you go in the organization, the more sensitive you must be to the emotions and feelings of others and the less sensitive others will be of yours. Be prepared for this reality and thicken your skin a little – it takes some getting used to.

As the company’s financial performance goes, often so goes your compensation. Mid-level managers accustomed to receiving raises and bonuses based on their individual efforts and results can be surprised to learn that once at the executive level, these will now be more heavily based on enterprise-wide financial results. This means compensation will be determined not only by your team’s results but those of other teams within the company. You’ll be relying on the performance of fellow executives to help drive your compensation and vice versa.

If you’re a worrier, and we all are to some extent, what you worry about will change. In the past, you might wake up at 3 a.m. worrying about what those at higher levels in the organization thought of you, your work, your commitment and so on. Add to these worries new ones about how your individual team members are performing, whether they’re getting what they need from you to be their best, and whether your team is achieving the results the rest of the company expects.

How you deal with worry must also adjust. To an even greater extent than before, stop worrying and get on with strategy, tactics and action to address what you’re worried about.

With the prestige that comes with your new title, you’ll also be viewed by the outside world as part of the face of the company. Your actions inside and outside of the organization not only reflect on you, they reflect on the entire organization. Your personal reputation and that of your employer start to become one in the same. Always remember that whatever you do, for better or for worse, will impact the entire company’s reputation.

Finally, and most important, those who think senior executive leadership is about getting others to serve them have it backwards. Senior executive leadership is all about serving others, the company’s mission, its customers, suppliers, stakeholders, owners, your fellow executives and your team members. As one of my favorite lines goes, anyone who wants to be first must be the very last.

You’re a Vice-President! Congratulations. Now the work begins.