What the executive role actually asks — an extract from The Executive’s Path

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

What the executive role actually asks of the person inside it is worth naming plainly, because the naming is the beginning of meeting the demand honestly rather than managing it defensively.

It asks, first, for a self-knowledge that most earlier roles did not require to the same degree. The executive’s own inner life — their fears, their needs, their relationship with approval and with failure, their honest account of their own motivations — becomes professionally significant in a way that it was not for the specialist or the manager. The anxious executive produces an anxious organisation. The leader who operates from genuine groundedness will produce an organisation that can do the same.

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It asks, second, for a sustained commitment to the people being led that is more than professional management. The executive who regards the organisation’s people primarily as resources — means to the ends of strategy and result — will extract a certain kind of performance from them. The one who regards them as the actual substance of the work will produce something qualitatively different, and will sustain it across a longer horizon and through greater difficulty.

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It asks, third, for the specific courage that belongs to this level: not the generalised courage of resilience, but the particular courage of saying the difficult thing to the person who needs to hear it, of holding a position under social pressure when the position is right, of acting on judgment in conditions where the judgment cannot be fully explained and the outcome cannot be guaranteed. This courage is not innate. It is developed through the repeated experience of having acted on it and found that the acting was survivable and usually right.

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The capabilities that produced the executive’s promotion — the ability to resolve ambiguity within a bounded domain, to deliver results against a defined set of expectations, to build relationships within a context that was largely provided — are not the capabilities that the executive role primarily requires. The role requires the capacity to function well without the external structure that provided the earlier clarity, and to do so continuously, over years, in conditions that are rarely optimal.

The executive who understands this early adjusts their expectations accordingly and begins the work of developing the inner resources that genuine executive effectiveness requires. The one who is still waiting for the role to provide the clarity that earlier roles provided will be waiting for a long time.

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