Welcome To The Next Level

New roles and new responsibilities invariably demand new sets of behaviour. How successfully can one navigate this shift?

- Scott Eblin

How many of these situations apply to you? In the past year, have you:

-Gotten a promotion or new assignment?

-Had the scope of your job increased?

-Had your performance bar raised?

-Been operating in a constantly changing, competitive environment?

If you are like most of my executive coaching clients and the leadership audiences I speak to, then two, three, or even all four of those situations apply to you. While each of them has unique challenges, all of them have at least two things in common. First, each scenario requires a new and different set of results on the part of the leader. And, of course, whenever different results are expected, different actions are required. You cannot keep doing what you have always done as a leader and expect different results. That leads to the second thing they have in common—they are all next level situations.

When I wrote the 1st edition of The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success, I was primarily focused on supporting leaders who had recently been or expected to be promoted to a first-time executive position in their careers. Based on interviews with dozens of successful senior executive leaders and my own observations, I concluded that there are nine sets of behaviors that executives need to either pick up or let go of to demonstrate the leadership presence required to succeed in next level roles. Those behavior sets break down to three big components of leadership presence: personal, team, and organizational. A summary of the ‘next level’ model of leadership presence is presented in Figure 1.