The wheel of leadership

How to support your leaders in a transition into a higher level? What are the best steps to coach, mentor, and prepare your leaders? What are simple strategies to make the transition effective, efficient, and easy?

Promotion into a new leadership role often follows a standard list of what the candidate needs to do. It ignores what is really necessary for the new leader. Too often management looks in the rearview mirror to understand what the company needs for the road ahead. Although there are lessons to be learned from studying the past, it is clear that the real test of a candidate’s future performance is the degree to which he or she is prepared to lead the company tomorrow, not yesterday. New leaders are being trained primarily on the “how to” and less on the “who” – this is often doomed to fail.

Don’t forget human aspects

When I worked for a big corporation, I had to prepare my successor for my role. HR handed me a script listing what my successor needed to do. How the successor would be integrated, aligned, and connected to my team was not part of the plan. As a result, my team could not get along with their new leader. If promotion to a new leadership role is not thought through and human aspects are not considered, it results in dissatisfied employees who do not perform well and, in the worst case, even quit. In addition, a new leader who is not sufficiently prepared will in many cases only stay for a few years at most. This in turn leads to high recruitment costs.

Who to promote your leaders?

Organizations do not focus enough on the best way to promote existing leaders into new roles. Often these leaders fail in their new positions and need to be replaced. I help coaching my clients into their transition in their new leadership role with a very simple model: the wheel of leadership. The wheel of leadership helps you to identify what is most important to you about your role, where your level of experience is now, and how big the gap is that you need to close to be as effective as you need to be. 

Do you want to learn more about the wheel of leadership? Call me or email me and we can figure out which complimentary strategy session is best for your needs.


The wheel of leadership