The first morning in the role — an extract from The Executive’s Path

The following is an extract from The Executive’s Path, published by Greenfields Press.

The first morning in the role has a quality that nobody warns you about.

Not the announcement, or the handover, or the conversations with the board that preceded it. The first morning when you sit in the chair — the actual chair, in the actual office or the actual seat on the actual call — with the title that is now yours, and the scope that comes with it, and the realisation, arriving with unusual clarity, that the distance between where you are and where you were yesterday is not primarily a matter of seniority. It is a matter of what you are now responsible for.

Most executives describe this realisation as arriving earlier than they expected, and as being more unsettling than they would publicly admit. The role was pursued deliberately, worked towards over years, and arrived at through genuine capability and sustained effort. And yet the experience of being in it, of inhabiting the full weight of it — rather than observing it from the outside or preparing for it from a level below — turns out to be something that preparation could not fully replicate.

---

From the outside, the executive position looks like a vantage point: elevated above the operational detail, equipped with better information than the levels below, and therefore in a position to make decisions with greater clarity and confidence.

What the outside view does not show is the specific texture of the inside experience. The information is better in some respects and worse in others — better in scope, but often worse in honesty, because the higher one sits in an organisation, the more carefully the information presented to one is often managed. The decisions are more consequential, but they are made with less certainty rather than more, because the questions that reach the executive level are precisely the ones that did not have obvious answers at the levels below.

The executive who arrives at the role expecting the clarity and confidence the outside view suggested will spend the first phase of the tenure adjusting to a reality that is more complex, more uncertain, and in some ways more demanding than they anticipated. This adjustment is not a sign of inadequacy. It is the ordinary encounter with what the role actually is.

---