In 2021, I stepped into a Director role.
I wish I could tell you there was a clear moment when I felt ready. Perhaps a quiet morning when I looked out of a window, took a thoughtful sip of coffee and said, “Yes. I am now prepared to lead at the next level.”
There was no such morning.
There were, however, many cups of coffee. Most of them went cold during meetings.
The move from Senior Manager to Director looked straightforward on paper. I had led teams, handled complex programs, managed difficult situations and spent years learning how to get work done in large organisations. The new role was a natural next step.
At least that was how it appeared from the outside.
Inside my head, the transition was less orderly.
The work still looked familiar. There were plans to review, decisions to make, people to support and deadlines that appeared to move closer whenever I looked away. But slowly, I began to notice that the questions coming to me had changed.
Earlier, someone might have asked, “How do we solve this?”
Now the question was closer to, “What should the organisation do?”
That small change carried a surprising amount of weight.
The answer could affect several teams. It could influence funding, headcount, delivery commitments and the credibility of leaders who had already made promises elsewhere. It could create momentum in one part of the organisation while quietly creating a problem in another.
Sometimes the person asking wanted a decision immediately. Sometimes I had only half the context and ten minutes before the next meeting.
This is one of the less glamorous truths about senior leadership. People often expect your clearest thinking when your calendar has given you the least time to think.
I remember one conversation during that period.
“We need a decision,” someone said.
“I understand,” I replied. “What exactly are we deciding?”
There was a pause.
“Well, we need to decide whether we move forward.”
“With which part?”
Another pause.
“All of it.”
This was not an unusual conversation.
Many organisational problems arrive dressed as simple choices. Move forward or stop. Approve or reject. Hire or wait. Centralise or distribute. The longer you stay with the problem, the more you realise that the choice is carrying several other choices inside it.
Who owns the outcome?
What work will stop if this begins?
Does the team have the capacity?
Have we made a commitment to a customer?
Is the risk real or merely uncomfortable?
Are we solving the problem, or are we trying to end the discussion?
These questions began running in the background of almost every conversation I had.
It felt like my mind had developed a second shift. One part listened to what people were saying. Another part scanned for what the situation might mean.
I was thinking about the work, the people, the business, the timing, the money and the promises already made. I was also watching the room. Who was leaning in? Who had gone quiet? Who was agreeing because they believed in the plan, and who was agreeing because the meeting was already ten minutes over?
That was when I began to understand that becoming a Director was less about reaching a new level of certainty and more about learning to carry uncertainty without passing all of it on to everyone else.
You cannot walk into every meeting and say, “I have no idea either, but let us remain positive.”
People need a direction.
At the same time, pretending to know more than you do is a quick way to make expensive mistakes.
The challenge is to create enough clarity for people to move while staying honest about what is still unknown.
I learned many things during that period, but five stayed with me. They did not arrive as a neat framework. Life was not considerate enough to teach them one at a time. They overlapped, contradicted one another and usually appeared when I was already dealing with something else.
Looking back, they shaped the way I learned to see, execute, build, trust and maintain standards.
You are always learning, especially when people think you already know
When you become more senior, people assume you know things.
To be fair, you should know some things. Experience must count for something.
The trouble begins when you start believing you are supposed to know everything.
A larger role expands your view of the organisation, but it also exposes how much of the organisation you do not fully understand. You begin hearing conversations about financial commitments, portfolio choices, sales priorities, customer risk, staffing models and executive expectations. Your own area of expertise is still important, but it is now one part of a much larger picture.
This can be uncomfortable.
You have built a reputation by being capable. You know how to enter a difficult situation and make sense of it. Then you find yourself in rooms where the vocabulary, history and incentives are different.
Someone refers to a financial assumption everyone else appears to understand.
You nod thoughtfully.
Later, you write it down and look it up.
This is leadership too.
The learning becomes less formal as you move up. Nobody hands you a course called “How this organisation really makes decisions.” You learn by paying attention to what happens around the official process.
You notice that a priority described as critical does not receive funding.
You notice that one customer commitment can rearrange an entire roadmap.
You notice that an idea with broad support can still stall because nobody has the authority to make the final decision.
You notice that two leaders may use the same words while meaning very different things.
You also start learning people at a deeper level.
Earlier in my career, I paid attention to what someone said and whether the argument made sense. Over time, I began listening for the concern underneath the argument.
A person might say, “We are not ready.”
That could mean the work genuinely needs more time. It could mean the team is exhausted. It could mean they disagree with the direction but do not feel safe saying so. It could also mean they are trying to avoid a difficult commitment.
The sentence alone does not tell you enough.
I remember asking someone during a planning conversation, “What is worrying you most about this?”
“The timeline,” they said.
“Only the timeline?”
There was a pause.
“No. I do not think the team believes this will stay a priority.”
That was the real conversation.
The team had seen several initiatives arrive with energy and disappear when leadership attention moved elsewhere. Their concern was reasonable. They were being asked to invest in another plan without knowing whether the organisation would remain committed long enough for the work to matter.
No dashboard would have shown me that.
This was when I began to see organisational listening as a leadership skill. You listen to the words, but you also listen to the history behind them.
It does not mean treating every hesitation as profound wisdom. Sometimes people are simply resisting change. Sometimes the timeline really is the timeline. Sometimes a meeting is quiet because everyone is tired and wants lunch.
The work lies in telling the difference.
I became slower to label behaviour too quickly. What looks like a lack of ownership may be confusion. What looks like negativity may be experience. What looks like agreement may be fatigue.
There is a risk here as well. Once you start looking for hidden meaning, you can become the person who believes every raised eyebrow is an organisational signal.
It may just be an eyebrow.
The goal is to stay curious without becoming theatrical about it.
The larger lesson for me was that seniority does not reduce the need to learn. It changes what you need to learn.
You are learning how the organisation behaves under pressure. You are learning which commitments are flexible and which are not. You are learning when to push, when to wait and when waiting is simply a polite form of avoidance.
You are also learning yourself.
You begin to see the situations that make you impatient. The people whose approval matters to you more than it should. The problems you tend to over-own because solving them makes you feel useful.
That last one took me some time.
Being useful had been part of my identity as a leader. I liked helping teams move. I liked bringing order to uncertainty. When the role became larger, I had to learn that constantly stepping in could make the organisation more dependent on me.
It felt helpful in the moment.
It was not always helpful in the long run.
Strategy has to survive the journey
I have always enjoyed strategy.
There is a certain satisfaction in taking a complicated problem, finding the pattern and creating a direction people can understand. You step back from the daily noise and ask where the organisation needs to go.
Then Monday arrives.
The strategy meets existing roadmaps, limited capacity, old processes and several people who remember the last strategy.
This is where the real work begins.
I learned that a strategy can be sensible, well presented and widely appreciated, yet still go nowhere.
People may applaud the presentation. They may describe it as thoughtful. Someone may even say, “This is exactly what we needed.”
Then everybody returns to work and continues doing what they were doing before.
It took me a while to understand why.
Sometimes the strategy had not been translated into choices. We had explained the direction without making clear what would change. Teams were still carrying the old priorities alongside the new ones. Nothing had been removed. No ownership had shifted. The operating model remained the same.
We had added strategy to the organisation without making space for it.
On one occasion, someone asked me, “Are you saying this is now the priority?”
“Yes.”
“So what is no longer the priority?”
That was the better question.
Organisations are often comfortable declaring new priorities. They are less comfortable naming what will receive less attention.
This is where leaders have to be honest. If everything remains important, the new strategy is mostly a new slide deck.
Execution forces that honesty.
It requires someone to decide who owns the work, how progress will be measured, where the team will get capacity and what happens when the new direction conflicts with an older commitment.
The answers are rarely elegant.
You may have to delay work people care about. You may need to move strong people from one area to another. You may discover that the organisation lacks a capability everyone assumed it had.
You may also have to tell a senior leader that the timeline is not credible.
That conversation usually goes something like this:
“Can we complete this in three months?”
“We can complete something in three months.”
“Will it solve the problem?”
“Not the whole problem.”
“How long will that take?”
“Longer than three months.”
This is the point where everyone suddenly becomes fascinated by phased delivery.
There is nothing wrong with phases. Most significant change needs them. The danger is pretending that the first phase is the complete outcome because the full answer is inconvenient.
Strategy requires a clear destination, but execution requires honesty about the road.
During my transition, I became much more interested in the last mile. I had seen good plans lose energy after the main decisions were made. The leadership attention moved elsewhere. The team continued, but questions began to accumulate.
Is this still important?
Who makes the next decision?
Are we allowed to change the original plan?
Who owns the work after launch?
The initiative had not failed. It had simply begun to fade.
The last mile is rarely exciting. It involves follow-ups, corrections, repeated communication and making sure the work becomes part of the organisation. It may take months after the launch before the new behaviour feels normal.
This is where persistence matters.
There were plans I worked on that took twelve, eighteen or twenty-four months to show their real value. During that time, the work moved through cycles of excitement, doubt, progress and fatigue.
A leader has to keep the organisation connected to the purpose without repeating the same speech until people begin avoiding eye contact.
That requires more than communication. It requires proof.
People begin to believe when they can see the direction working. A decision becomes faster. A customer problem reduces. A team gains clarity. A leader who once depended on escalation begins handling the issue independently.
Small evidence carries more weight than a large presentation.
I came to think of execution as the process through which strategy earns credibility.
Until the organisation experiences the benefit, the strategy remains a promise.
Good people should not have to rescue the system every week
For many years, I believed strongly in the power of good people.
I still do.
Give thoughtful, capable people a meaningful problem and enough room, and they will often surprise you.
The problem is that organisations can become far too comfortable with being rescued by their best people.
You know these individuals.
They know who to call.
They remember the decision nobody documented.
They can explain one team to another.
They notice the deadline before the project plan does.
When something falls apart, everyone says, “Speak to them. They will sort it out.”
This sounds like praise. It is often a warning.
I began to notice how much invisible labour good people were doing to keep work moving. They were compensating for unclear ownership, poor information flow and processes that had grown around the organisation like old wiring.
The lights still worked, so nobody wanted to open the wall.
Then one of those dependable people went on leave.
Suddenly, the system revealed itself.
“Who approves this?”
“I thought you did.”
“No, I send it to them.”
“They are away.”
“For how long?”
“Two weeks.”
There are few things more educational than a key person taking a proper holiday.
It shows you whether you have built a system or a dependency.
As my role grew, I started paying more attention to repeated friction. A single problem might be an exception. The same problem appearing across several teams usually meant the environment was helping to create it.
Why was context being lost?
Why did decisions keep reopening?
Why were teams meeting late in the process?
Why did work arrive as urgent even though everyone had known about it for months?
Why were highly capable people spending so much time chasing basic information?
These questions led me into the less glamorous parts of leadership: operating rhythms, decision rights, governance, reviews, handoffs and escalation paths.
I found this work deeply interesting.
I realise that sentence may cost me a few readers.
But systems shape daily behaviour. A poorly designed system can make good people look careless. A clear system can give people the confidence to use their judgement.
The aim was never to create process for the pleasure of having process. Large organisations are already capable of producing enough templates to concern the environment.
The aim was to remove avoidable confusion.
A useful system should help people understand what is expected, where the decision sits and how to move forward when something changes. It should protect quality without forcing every piece of work through the same level of review.
This is harder than it sounds.
When organisations experience a failure, the natural response is to add a step.
Something went wrong? Add an approval.
A risk was missed? Add a review.
Someone lacked context? Add a document.
Soon the process is technically safer and practically unusable.
Then capable people create side channels to get the work done, which defeats the purpose of the process, and somebody eventually proposes another process to control the side channels.
This is how calendars are born.
System building requires restraint. You need enough structure to create consistency and enough freedom for people to think.
You also need to revisit the system.
A model that works for ten people may become painful for fifty. A governance practice created during a high-risk period may no longer be necessary two years later. A review intended to improve quality can become a queue if the organisation never improves capability at the source.
The system is not sacred.
It exists to serve the work and the people doing it.
One of the questions I began asking was, “What are we making people do repeatedly that the organisation should solve once?”
That question often led to better conversations.
It moved the discussion away from individual frustration and towards the conditions creating the frustration.
It also reminded me that operational work is not separate from leadership. When you design a better way for decisions to be made, information to move or quality to be maintained, you are shaping how people experience the organisation.
That is leadership at scale.
The team’s success has to become enough
There is a version of leadership in which the leader appears completely free of ego.
They care only about the mission. They require no recognition. They stand quietly at the back while others receive the applause.
I have met very few such people.
Most leaders want their work to be seen. I certainly did.
There is nothing shameful about that. Recognition tells us that the effort mattered. It helps careers, creates opportunity and gives people confidence that their judgement is trusted.
The difficulty begins when recognition becomes the emotional fuel for the work.
At a senior level, some of your most important contributions are hard to point to.
You may help shape a plan that someone else presents.
You may spend months coaching a leader who later appears naturally confident.
You may prevent a serious problem, which means nothing visible happens.
You may build the conditions for a team to succeed long after your direct involvement has reduced.
It can feel thankless.
There were moments when I watched a plan come together and thought, “I hope somebody remembers how difficult this was.”
Usually, nobody did.
People remember the result. They rarely remember the seventeen conversations required to make the result possible.
This took some adjustment.
I had to ask myself what I really wanted from the work. Did I want the organisation to recognise that I had shaped the plan? Of course. Did I need to remain visibly attached to the plan for it to feel worthwhile? That answer needed to become no.
The greatest satisfaction began to come from watching the team carry something without me.
A leader made a difficult decision independently.
A team defended the strategy in a room I was not in.
Someone I had coached began coaching others.
The work continued even when my attention moved elsewhere.
These moments were quieter than public recognition, but they meant more.
They showed that the organisation had grown.
This does not mean disappearing or allowing your contribution to be erased. Leaders should communicate their impact clearly. Organisations should recognise the people who create the conditions for success.
The personal lesson was different. I could not allow the absence of immediate recognition to make me bitter about good work.
Senior leadership involves delayed rewards.
Sometimes the reward is simply seeing that the plan held.
That can take a long time.
Keeping belief alive during that period is difficult, particularly when not everyone supports the direction.
Some people will believe early. Some need evidence. Some may never agree fully but will still help the work move. Others will wait until the outcome becomes obvious and then explain that they supported it from the beginning.
This is also normal.
You do not need universal belief to begin. You need enough belief to create movement.
The leader’s job is to keep making the purpose understandable, listen to the objections and adjust the approach when the evidence demands it. There is a fine line between conviction and attachment.
Conviction says, “The purpose still matters. Let us find the right way forward.”
Attachment says, “This was my idea, and therefore reality must cooperate.”
Reality is rarely that cooperative.
I had to remain willing to change the plan without casually abandoning the intent. That required judgement, patience and the occasional swallowing of pride.
None of these comes with a pleasant taste.
Operational excellence is how the culture behaves on an ordinary Tuesday
Operational excellence can sound like a phrase designed for a presentation.
For me, it became much more practical.
It was the quality of decisions people made when senior leaders were not in the room. It was how quickly a risk surfaced. It was whether a commitment meant something. It was how people behaved when they disagreed.
The test was not the annual planning workshop.
The test was an ordinary Tuesday when the work was late, the customer was unhappy and two teams believed the other one was responsible.
That is when culture becomes visible.
I cared deeply about decision quality. I wanted people to understand the problem, use the available evidence and make ownership clear. I also wanted the organisation to move.
These goals can sometimes compete.
Ask for too much information and the decision stalls.
Move too quickly and important context is lost.
Senior leaders have to help the organisation find the right level of certainty for the decision in front of it.
Buying lunch does not require a steering committee.
Changing the operating model probably deserves more thought.
Not every decision needs the same process.
Behavioural quality mattered just as much.
How do we challenge one another?
Can a person raise bad news without being treated as the bad news?
Can a leader admit that an earlier decision needs to change?
Can we be direct without making the conversation personal?
I have always believed that clarity and kindness can exist together. In fact, unclear feedback is often less kind because it allows the problem to continue.
There are moments when a leader has to say:
“This is not working.”
“The commitment has been missed.”
“We have discussed this several times, and the behaviour has not changed.”
“I understand the pressure. The standard still applies.”
The tone matters.
Directness should not become a performance. The goal is not to sound powerful. The goal is to make the situation clear enough for action.
I have seen leaders use ten gentle minutes to avoid saying one necessary sentence. I have also seen leaders use “I am just being direct” as permission to behave badly.
Neither is useful.
Operational excellence requires people to make sound decisions with minimal unnecessary friction. That last word matters.
Some friction protects the organisation. A serious risk deserves scrutiny. A major investment deserves debate. Quality work deserves review.
Other friction exists because ownership is unclear or trust is low.
You can feel the difference.
Useful friction improves the decision.
Useless friction makes everyone attend another meeting.
Part of my role was to keep the standard high without allowing the operating model to become heavy. This required constant adjustment.
Where were we over-processing the work?
Where were we relying too much on informal knowledge?
Where had kindness become avoidance?
Where had urgency become chaos?
Where had one missed commitment become a pattern?
These questions were not always comfortable, but they helped create a culture in which people knew what mattered.
I also learned that leaders teach standards through what they allow.
You can talk about accountability all year. If the same commitments are missed without a conversation, the organisation learns the real rule.
You can talk about respect. If a high performer is allowed to damage the team, people notice.
You can say that risks should be raised early. If the person who raises one is punished for creating discomfort, the next risk will stay hidden longer.
People watch what happens after the values are stated.
That is where culture lives.
What I would tell the person I was in 2021
If I could sit across from myself in 2021, I do not think I would offer a grand speech.
He would probably be between meetings.
I would ask him to sit down for five minutes, which he would find mildly irritating.
Then I would tell him that the role will feel heavier because he is beginning to see more.
The weight is not always a sign that something is wrong. Sometimes it means you understand the consequences more clearly.
I would tell him to keep learning, particularly in the rooms where he feels he should already know.
I would tell him that strategy deserves respect only when he is willing to stay with the execution. The final twenty per cent will take far more energy than expected and receive far less attention.
I would tell him to look carefully at the systems around good people. Their ability to rescue the work can hide problems that leadership needs to solve.
I would tell him that recognition will sometimes arrive late, arrive elsewhere or not arrive at all. He should still communicate his contribution, but he should not let that decide whether the work was worth doing.
I would also tell him that high standards do not require a hard personality. He can be calm, clear and firm. He does not need to turn every disagreement into a contest.
Most importantly, I would tell him that he does not need to appear certain all the time.
People can handle a leader saying, “Here is what we know, here is what we do not know, and here is the decision we are making for now.”
That is often more reassuring than borrowed confidence.
The transition from Senior Manager to Director did not happen on the day the title changed. It happened slowly, through the decisions I learned to carry and the habits I had to leave behind.
I became more aware of the field around the work.
I stayed closer to execution for longer.
I began designing systems instead of repeatedly solving the same problem.
I learned to take greater joy in success that belonged to other people.
I became clearer about the standards I wanted the organisation to experience, rather than merely hear about.
I am still learning all of this.
Anyone who claims to have completed leadership should probably be kept away from people.
The work keeps changing because the organisation changes, the people change and the context changes. A system that worked yesterday may need to be reconsidered tomorrow. A lesson learned in one role may need to be learned again at a larger scale.
Perhaps that is what I understand most clearly now.
Leadership does not become lighter as you grow. You become better at understanding what deserves to be carried, what can be shared and what should never have depended on you in the first place.
That distinction took time.
It was worth learning.
