Leading Followers to Leading Leaders
A CFO at a professional services firm was asked to become a more strategic leader. The firm wanted more of his thinking at the enterprise level.
Part of that work was about him. In board meetings he often stayed quiet, even when the board wanted his view.
The change that created the most value had to do with the person who reported to him.
Why leading experienced leaders is a different job
Future regional presidents and market sector leaders in engineering firms are often drawn from the firm's strongest technical and operational executives.
Their new direct reports are not junior engineers. They are experienced leaders who run offices and manage major clients.
People like that need context and room to lead. They abhor micromanagement.
So the senior executive's job changes. The new job is defining clear areas of responsibility, making sure the direct reports agree on what success looks like, removing roadblocks and holding people accountable. Sitting at the center of every important decision is no longer part of it.
In a regional engineering business the difference is concrete. An office leader brings a staffing problem to the regional president. What comes back is either an answer or a better question, along with the expectation that the office leader will decide.
Only the second builds someone who could one day take the regional president's job.
The habits that created success and now create a ceiling
Strong technical and operational executives are usually good at leading people who look to them for direction. Those leaders diagnose problems quickly and hand out answers. Standards are high. Urgency is constant, and people get held to account.
Those strengths built their careers. Put the same leader in charge of other leaders and the strengths start to cap what the team can do.
Every fast answer takes a problem away from the person who should be solving it. Over time direct reports learn to bring problems up instead of decisions. The executive's calendar fills. Good people either leave or wait.
Here is how it shows up in practice. A business unit head tells a direct report to lead a meeting. The conversation gets uncomfortable. He jumps in and provides the answers.
In my experience many executives overestimate how good they are at developing other leaders. They remember the coaching conversations and forget the times they took the meeting back.
Coaching other leaders without becoming less decisive
Strong executives often worry that coaching will slow them down. They picture themselves asking open questions while a client problem burns.
The skills involved are specific and learnable, and none of them requires giving up judgment. Defining success and expectations clearly. Asking probing questions while the direct report defines the strategy and carries it out. Knowing when to let someone struggle and when to step in. Holding people accountable without making them dependent.
The executive still decides what success looks like and when a situation needs them. What they stop deciding is how every problem gets solved.
The CFO's work with his controller followed a simple pattern: watch one, do one, teach one. Responsibility moved in stages, with more coaching and more ownership at each one.
Meanwhile the CFO worked on his own presence. He started telling the board, "I need some time to think about that," and then following up with a detailed email that gave them the insight they wanted. He also began speaking up on topics where he was conversant but not the company's leading expert. We called it taking more swings at the plate.
Five tests that tell you whether it is working
An executive's opinion of their own coaching is a poor measure. The useful evidence sits with the leaders around them.
Five questions cover it:
Are they making better decisions?
Are they taking greater ownership?
Can they solve difficult problems without waiting for direction?
Are they developing other leaders beneath them?
Are they preparing to lead larger parts of the business?
Each of these can be checked. Pull what got escalated to the executive last quarter and see whether the same kinds of decisions keep arriving. Then look at whether any of the direct reports has a credible successor of their own.
The fourth test matters most for succession. A leader whose direct reports are developing leaders of their own is building two layers of bench at once.
If the answers are mostly no, the executive is managing around the layer beneath them, and the firm will feel it the day that executive leaves.
What this transition does to bench depth in two years
Succession numbers in engineering firms are thin to begin with. In the ACEC and FMI survey of A&E firm owners, 84 percent said management succession planning was important. Just 13 percent had formal plans for key mid-level employees.
Across industries, DDI found only 20 percent of HR leaders say they have people ready to fill their most critical roles. Organizations with strong benches are close to three times more likely to fill leadership roles internally with success.
Leading leaders is where that bench gets built. A leader who develops the layer beneath them produces ready successors as a by-product of doing the job well.
Picture the same regional president two years from now, in two versions.
In the first he is still the answer to every hard question. His direct reports are experienced and no closer to his job than they are today. When he retires, the firm runs a search.
In the second, two of his direct reports have spent those two years running parts of the region with real decision rights. One of them could take the job. His retirement becomes a transition.
The CFO's controller is what the second version looks like. With more coaching and ownership he thrived, and he came to be seen as a potential CFO and as a potential CEO. His boss recognized that he was a leader and started treating him like one.
Want to work on a leader and the layer beneath them at the same time?
Start with one senior leader whose direct reports run real parts of the business.
We look at the leader and run the five tests on the people around them. Where the answers come back no, the work on the executive and the work on their direct reports become one plan.
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