Hi! Wondering what folks thoughts are on the difference between these two job levels. At my org they're somewhat interchangeable. I've been offered a promotion and am negotiating several details, including the title. In your world, is AVP vs Senior Director much different? Does AVP lend more seniority to you? If it makes a difference, industry is mining.
I manage a small team and one of my reports is okay at execution when he’s told exactly what to do. He gets things done, doesn’t need much hand-holding on routine tasks as long as the instructions are clear. But he really struggles with anything that requires creative thinking or problem-solving on his own; he needs a lot of direction and doesn’t come up with ideas himself. And the second I try to give him any feedback on this, even small, constructive stuff, he gets defensive and pushes back instead of just hearing it out.
It’s starting to become a pattern. He doesn’t take learnings well, and it feels like he has some level of ego problem when discussing about his errors/providing feedback, even though the gaps are pretty obvious.
Meanwhile I’ve got a decision to make soon about restructuring. I could either give him more responsibility and bring someone else in under him, or bring in someone new above him to manage him directly. Part of me worries that if I don’t promote him he might see it as a slight and leave. But part of me also worries that promoting someone who can’t think independently or take feedback now is just going to make things worse once he has more authority and less oversight.
Anyone dealt with this before? How do you get someone coachable when they’re closed off to feedback, and how do you weigh “does fine with clear instructions but weak on independent thinking” against losing them if you don’t move them up?
I’ve been appointed to be ‘clinical specialist lead radiographer’ within the NHS.
Give me your best advice, the culture needs to change drastically.
We have issues with punctuality, disrespect, childish behaviour (even down to people off sick because they didn’t get the job and people wearing their own clothes rather than tunics on their ‘offset days/non clinical days’ they mention it’s a ‘them and us feeling’), miss-use of clinical equipment. Some of these behaviours has been going on for at least 10 years.
TIA
(Throwaway account)
See a lot of posts here about why arrogant a*holes keep getting promoted while better liked people are overlooked.
Seen it in real life far too many times. My simple advice to whoever listens: If you really want to progress, focus more on competence and being effective, FOLLOWED by being likeable. Don’t try to be likeable at the expense of being effective.
It’s simple. Leadership rewards people who can get the job done. They’re aware that along the way you may end up pissing off others, they’re OK with it. That’s the silent rule.
Lot of you would disagree, and it may not apply in certain scenarios. But majority of the time this is what happens.
Likeability rewards you in your personal life. But corporate is sadly not the case.
EDIT: Lot of you replying as if I’ve said don’t be likeable. Let me be clear - for someone trying to grow, I’ve said prioritize being competent before prioritizing being liked. I have not said “don’t be liked at all”.
Here is what I mean: majority of leaders who grow and are likeable (as many of you pointed out) - I bet they’re capable / competent too. Not just likeable. Exceptions exist.
Also, I understand this doesn’t apply in every scenario, it’s a generalization of my observation (or as someone called out “anecdata”)
I have got 25 people reporting to me, and despite having clear processes and all, I still find myself chasing updates from people, reminding them, and fixing their errors. How do I shift my leadership style from "doer/assistant" to holding people accountable?
I'd like your thoughts on this thought
Here’s the deal - I like to consider myself a very logical, non-emotional thinker. You know, the perfect Vulcan that uses only reason and doesn’t let messy, emotion clutter the optimal solution. Yeah right! Mark Manson has a recent discussion titled “self-control is a complete illusion”. In that discussion, Mark states that we’re ALL emotionally driven and rationalize our decisions after the fact. I don’t like that. I’d love to say “Mark, that’s BS, I use data to determine my decisions and emotion only comes into play after the fact”. But, THAT is probably BS. It’s far more likely that an emotional thought occurs (maybe without me even realizing it) and I start seeking validation in that thought with data. I bet many of you recognize that if you look enough, you can find the data to validate almost anything.
Let’s dig into a thin example of poor data validation for a sec by looking at an example of categorizing leaders. Say you work under a leader, let's call him Shackleton, that makes you feel part of the tribe, recognizes your work, indicates trust in your decisions, and places high-levels of responsibility in your lap. Now say someone disagrees with Shackleton and voices their opinion to you. What do you do? Chances are, you recite statistics on how well the organization has done under Shackleton. From everything from employee morale surveys, increasing share prices, upward trends in return on equity, better health coverage, you name it - except for maybe those handful of spurious negative years that don’t fit the data, but you can quickly discount those to external factors that Shackleton had no control over.
Now let’s go the other way to argue for (and against) a leader we'll call Rickover. Rickover places no trust in others, actively avoids the creation of tribes, berates employees to the point of breakage, and drives perfection through fear of error. If you wanted to voice an unflattering opinion, you could look for data that indicates the lack of morale, resignation rates, and general poor employee relations. You could point out any negative monetary years (a drop in share price, or downturn in return on assets, etc.). Even if positive years exist, those can quickly be written off as staff going above and beyond without Rickover’s influence. However, if you wanted to FOR this leader methods, you would point to an impeccable safety record, unheard of production within deadlines, and basically success in every business metric outside of employee satisfaction.
Here's the issue, both leaders can achieve stuff and make an impact. One of Shackleton's most famous accomplishments was keeping his entire crew alive until rescue after months near the icy southern pole. Essentially none of Shackleton's expeditions were successful in the actual destination. Opposition might point out that he drank heavily and died in debt.
Conversley, Rickover drove to shift the Navy's initial focus from nuclear power plants on destroyers to submarines, oversaw the development of the first commercial pressurized water reactor nuclear power plant, received two Congressional Gold Medals, and retired as a four-star admiral.
Wait what? You mean that the favored, trustworthy, empowering leader Shackleton died without actually achieving stated goals, presumably drowning misery in alcohol and died in debt? Meanwhile, Rickover, the leader everyone loved to hate, with attempts by adversaries to force retirement, contained no mention of debt or problem drinking, and has a list of major accomplishments within the largest military on the planet?
Two leaders with very different approaches, each successful in different metrics. The information from each could potentially be used to argue for a particular style of getting things done. The trick with validating the data is the objectives that are used for success.
What we might consider the traditional emotional decisions in the Shackleton leader could be so easily portrayed as missing the target and being miserable about it. While one whose decisions may appear to be more thought and task driven achieve the target no matter what, seemed to have a much better go. Obviously in these examples, there are a lot of missing pieces, but it’s simply to demonstrate that by careful selection of facts, one can easily shape the narrative they want.
Thinking back to our original issue of emotional vs thought decisions, I actually think the case could be made that both leaders above followed the emotionally driven decision path. The trick is each one followed very different emotions perhaps. The Shackleton leader certainly has goals and tasks in mind, or they wouldn’t repeatedly try so hard to achieve them. At the same time, the Shackleton leader places great emphasis on trust and recognition, in part to get what is needed from subordinates, but also likely because that’s simply how they operate.
Rickover also had goals and tasks to accomplish, and while levels of trust or recognition are not so overt, the emphasis is certainly on placed on individual responsibility. The emotion is still there - it’s essentially driving every decision. But the rewards that individuals seek are not plentiful. Compliance and responsibility isn’t rewarded, it’s expected.
This may short-circuit a bit of the organizational cultural designs we may hear. I mean, I know within organizations we all want trust and recognition (emotion based), and so many organizations also put data-driven decisions at the forefront (thought based). I know these aren’t at odds necessarily, but may require some reconciliation. And this is the trick isn’t it? BOTH techniques can work, and BOTH techniques can fail. The real genius lies in when to select or shift paths. Those decisions must account for culture, other leaders, stakeholders, and the importance of the product, to name a few.
What about you? Do you fancy yourself an emotional leader or a thought leader? What type of leader do you value more? Or do you think a thought leader is even a thing, or as Mark says, are we all emotion driven leaders?
I've noticed that we tend to remember leadership decisions based on their outcomes. If something worked, we remember why it was a good idea. If it failed, we remember what we should have seen coming.
But that's not necessarily what we actually thought at the time.
What evidence did we have? What alternatives did we consider? How confident were we? What assumptions were we making? What did we think was most likely to go wrong?
That's why I included a Decision Log in my new book, Decision Intelligence: Why Evidence Fails and How Leaders Win the Room. The idea is to capture your reasoning before you know the outcome, then come back later and compare what you believed with what actually happened.
The goal isn't to beat yourself up over decisions that didn't work. It's to separate a bad decision from a bad outcome, and learn from both.
I turned the template into a free PDF that can be used for personal or professional decisions:
https://www.thenicholasjohnson.com/downloads/decision-intelligence-decision-log.pdf
I'd love to hear from other leaders: Do you have a way of looking back at important decisions you've made? What have you actually learned from doing it?
Our company is going through a tough time, and the current leadership can't handle it, and ngl... the situation is pretty shitty. Decisions are constantly being delayed, departments are shifting blame, and there's no clear direction to calm the team.
If you were in our shoes, somehow... how would you handle a board that gets bogged down during a crisis and drags the entire business down? Thanks in advance for any advice!
Last August I was promoted from the highest level CNC operator to a shift lead position, I am one of 4 in our department on our shift. This site is growing rapidly, I was hired when we had less than 500 employees, we have a little over 2k and in 5-7 years they are planning on 5k. There is a lot of opportunity coming, my employer prefers to promote from within as much as possible and in the next 3 years or so I have a chance to seize that opportunity again.
We have a new supervisor, formerly a machine operator and then shift lead as well, and one of his goals set by his boss’s boss was to identify and begin grooming the next supervisor for our shift and department. To my surprise he picked me, apparently immediately on the spot. It is of course no guarantee but in my one year as a shift lead I have had to be involved in a sexual harassment situation, a conflict between two other shift leads that damn near became a fist fight and another very sensitive situation. I apparently made a name for myself for my handling of these situations much higher than I had realized as it was decided I was the perfect fit.
The problem is I have no background in leadership and I can already see what my biggest challenge will be…disconnecting from the floor. I have no degree, help between truancy and discipline issues I barely graduated high school. I never thought I’d be in a position to climb any ladder, I have always been a machine operator. They want me in the same department on the same shift.
I am a people person, I made friends with everyone. How do I begin to separate myself from the folks that were my coworkers a year ago? I know that I can do the supervisor job, I can have the hard talks, write people up or potentially terminate them. I’m fully capable at doing what needs to be done. I’m concerned that it will eat me up inside, I’m also worried that former coworkers may take issue with someone they used to work next to eventually being the one to handle raises and disciplinary issues and whatnot, especially when I legitimately made friends with so many of them. Our new supervisor climbed the same ladder but he is the opposite of me, he was respected and liked, but he made friends with nobody.
My current position is between operator and supervisor, leaders on the shop floor, we basically run things day to day. But when it’s a hard decision or sometimes a stupid one, we have the excuse that we don’t actually make those decisions, we just carry them out. It gives us a level of separation that allows us to work together with the operators. Training them, coaching them, motivating them, working on their machine, convincing them that yes this is dumb but it’s what we are doing so let’s stop whining and get to it because this is the way it is.
Our previous supervisor already told me that I approach issues from the operators standpoint, which he said was overall very good because being their advocate and voice in the office is part of my job. But that equally important is carrying out the directives from management. Not that I don’t, but apparently I advocate too hard for the people in my lines sometimes.
I understand what is needed of me as a supervisor, I understand where I need to be and how I need to make decisions, the level of separation needed. What I’m having a hard time with is how do I start making changes now to be prepared in 3 or so years to confidently step into a supervisor role, what mindset is needed to fill that role, what things should I start doing now to distance myself somewhat from my former coworkers to begin to set that boundary now?
Any guidance is appreciated.
been chewing on this for a while and i think it's one of the least discussed traps in leadership. the higher you climb, the worse your information gets, and it happens so gradually you don't notice.
when you're junior, people tell you the truth constantly, they vent, they flag what's broken, because there's no risk in it. then you get promoted and the raw truth starts getting filtered. people tell you the version that won't cost them. by the time you're a few levels up, you're often the last to hear a project is in trouble, because every layer sands off a little bad news until what reaches you has been polished into fine.
here's the unsettling part: your access to reality gets worse at the exact moment your power to change things gets bigger. authority goes up, signal quality goes down and they cross in the middle.
and a lot of leaders misread quiet as agreement. you float an idea, nobody pushes back, you leave thinking there's alignment. but silence isn't agreement, it's a reading on how safe people feel telling you no. taken as endorsement, it lets you walk confidently in a direction half the room already knows is wrong. what makes it worse is that it feels good, all that smooth agreement feels like you've gotten better at the job, when sometimes you've just gotten more insulated.
so i've started to think real senior leadership is partly fighting your own blindness: going around the filter, talking to people a couple levels down without their managers there, treating a lack of bad news as a warning sign and rewarding the person who tells you the uncomfortable thing, because flinch once and you teach everyone to stop.
do you feel your information getting more filtered as you've moved up? what actually works to hear the stuff people are incentivized not to tell you?
Can you please recommend your favorite leadership book outside of Maxwell and Kotter?
Am I the only one who is completely over LinkedIn?
The constant platitudes. The same regurgitated messages: “KPIs… Keep People Informed!” The same AI-slop graphics. And the exact same cadence, tone, and voice in every post, clearly generated by AI:
“Leadership isn’t just about XYZ. It’s about blah, blah, blah…”
It’s the same recycled content over and over and over again. At this point, LinkedIn feels less like a professional networking platform and more like thousands of people using the same AI prompt to talk to each other and put on their little performances. It’s exhausting.
What’s even more annoying is when I see coworkers who can’t be bothered to respond to an email, yet they’re painting the web with their incessant LinkedIn activity.
If it weren’t for recruiters headhunting on there, I’d be OUT.
Had a business owner bring something up a couple of days ago that sparked an interesting conversation. Seems like a few members of their team are using AI for every piece of communication. Internal and external emails, strategic presentations, long slack messages, etc. The AI-isms abound.
It's becoming a running joke. Not the end of the world, a timesaver on one hand, but it sounded like you still end up doing a back-and-forth because the AI flattens the idea, and obviously it's difficult to parse out for sure what's their idea and what's AI...
One thing for ordinary entry level workers, but one of the team members is someone he felt had potential to be a manager, and we all agreed the ability to critically think and articulate an argument or an idea is integral to leadership. Are young workers robbing themselves of the ability to think for themselves? And how do you push a team to save time with practical uses of AI, while also ensuring they maintain their growth as a professional?
I know we're probably all sick of the conversations surrounding AI. But wanted to gather people's thoughts regarding its use for communication/strategy building. Are there evolving policies around this? Any success stories?
Hi all,
could you please suggest me a Women in Leadership Programs whihc are free of cost or include low fees? I am really interested to join. Please provide some details which you know. Thank you
There are bosses who give a one-sentence reply to a proposal or problem and leave it at that. Do you think that's intentional like they know it'll land without more context? Or is it just bad communication?
Curious how different leaders figure out where that line is. If you lead a team, how do you know when you've said enough? And if you don't, what's the tell that separates a leader being concise from one who's just not communicating?
anyone currently in a Director role ?
I’m a director at a mid-sized company that recently entered an aggressive growth phase due to PE acquisition.
The simplest way I can describe our current situation is: we are building the infrastructure required to scale while simultaneously scaling.
I believe in the plans and am bought into the vision. In 12-18 months, I see an organization with significantly more structure and resources than we have today.
But the right now of it all has me questioning if I’m capable of leading through this.
The dizzying theme has been: I get direction on a scaling initiative. I spend a week or two creating the plan, documenting, looping in key players etc. Then, like clockwork, I get new information that changes things (“we’ve decided to move up this timeline, we’ve decided you need a new role for X, we’ve decided X is no longer a priority and Y is”), and suddenly I’m rebuilding pieces while still trying to keep everything else moving. In most cases, the new direction genuinely makes sense. But the implementation cost of changing direction is significant.
I have no middle management and a super lean team. When these pivots happen, I’m the person who has to revise, reallocate, re communicate, reprioritize for everyone. No one on my team has scaled a business 5x. No one has more than 10 years of professional experience. For most of us, that entire professional experience has been at this one company. It’s not like I have these strong SMEs or middle managers to take minimal direction and run.
And now I feel like I’m falling into immature leader behavior traps I don’t like.
First, I’m becoming more defensive with my leaders. When they identify another opportunity or ask “what if we did X?”, instead of being open, my brain immediately goes to “with what people and what time?” I don’t want to come across as stubborn or whiny, or be perceived as incapable of figuring it out. And then I get concerned that I truly, am, unable to figure it out.
Second, I’m worried my team can see me becoming frazzled. I’m normally super calm, cool and collected, able to protect our deliverables, and reinforce simple prioritization frameworks the team operates well under. Right now, I’m changing direction and priorities frequently, realizing after the fact that I could have handled something differently, and generally not feeling as in control. The imposter syndrome now is real.
I know leading through change is uncomfortable. I expected a level of chaos. But none of that really prepared me for the actual lived experience. I know the next 12 months will be uncomfortable. I just want to get better at leading through this without feeling like I’m totally unqualified and stressed. Any advice is much appreciated.
Hi everyone! First time posting and I wanted to share something that could be valuable to someone, and I think of this:
Through my years (leadership in technology) I have learned that for some of us in a leadership position, its easy to fall in the trap of what my coleages and I called "being the buffer" for the team, let me explain:
Some of us feel responsible for the wellbeing of our team (something I consider part of being a good leader), but that feel could lead to shield them from stress, hold back messy information, and sometimes do the work ourselves. At first glance, for me at least, felt like care.
Has someone felt the same?
In my case, I had to learn the hard way that protecting or shielding my team from the client, other leaders or the general context/situation, its was like I was treating them as a child, not as adults. I was strechting my self trying to channel the pressure I had, and in the long run was a mistake for me and for them.
My main take aways are:
Leadership is a delicate balance between support and empowerment. Buffering felt like support but it was the opposite of empowerment.
Does anything of this resonate with someone? If so, how do you catch yourself when you're buffering instead of leading?
About 7 months ago I was notified that my role as a VP would no longer be needed. I transitioned on good terms, and had a good severance package that ran out at the end of July. So I've had about 6 months to look for work, and about 3 months of actually not having a job. I'm 56 years old and have a good background: 6 years at AWS as a senior leader, 3 years as a VP at a public company, 15 years as an engineer, etc. I've made a good career leveraging technology to create business value, and the last 9 years were as a senior leader/executive. My career goal was eventually to find my way into a CTO-type role.
What I'm finding is that breaking into C-level roles feels out of reach. I don't have the network at the C level, or maybe even the VP level, of people who know me well enough to think of me if a role opens up. I also don't seem to have the network to reach out to for those roles, most of which aren't posted anyway. At least that's how it feels from where I'm sitting.
For the roles that are posted, it's been pretty discouraging. It seems like a lot of them are stale, and I've wondered whether some are posted for compliance reasons. I don't think I've gotten a positive response from a single application in 6 months. It feels like many of the roles I'm looking for are filled through networks before they're ever broadly advertised. I'm also finding it difficult to move into more hands-on roles because I haven't been doing that work day-to-day for about 9 years.
I've also worked hard to build relationships with executive recruiters. I've had good conversations with about 25 of them from the major firms as well as local boutique shops. That has resulted in exactly zero calls over the last 6 months.
I have a pretty good network at the peer level and below. People have good things to say about me and genuinely want to help. But those folks generally aren't in positions where they know about VP or C-level openings. I have had a few good leads and interviews, but they all came through friends or acquaintances I reached out to. None were really at the right level or the right fit.
I'm fortunate that I am okay financially to keep looking for a while, so I don't want to give up on my career goals yet. I feel like I've got a lot of good experience and still have the drive to do meaningful work. I'm also increasingly intrigued by management consulting, advisory, or fractional leadership. It seems like it could be a good fit for my background, but I honestly have no idea how people break into that world.
For those of you who have made executive-level transitions, what finally worked? What advice would you give for someone in my position? And for anyone who built a consulting, advisory, or fractional practice after a corporate career, how did you land your first clients?
I think I may not have the personality to do this job. I want my two teams to grow and succeed. I went to bat for Team 1 and went above and beyond to make sure they have the right tools to do their job.
Team 2 is made of very senior and experienced employees. I try to leave them alone.
But, my supervisor dressed me down recently saying I am too timid, I don’t like confrontation and that my teams do not respect me. I think he is right. Please help.