How To Convince Others That You Are Qualified and Ready To Lead (You Know You Are!)
You have functional expertise. You are a great mentor. You've led impactful new initiatives. Yet, you aren't able to land leadership level roles. Try these 3 ways to pitch your qualifications better.
Client: I am trying to land a leadership role either at my current company or externally. I have the experience and technical know-how. I am great at mentoring and coaching others. I get in the door to pitch myself for director and head of type roles. But it doesn’t go anywhere after a few conversations. What am I doing wrong?
Tactic #1: From “Do-er” to “Lead-er”
The best way to position yourself as a leader is to showcase your leadership experience without getting lost in the execution details. Get out of the player-coach mentality and imagine yourself as the leader 100% of the time.
Perhaps 30% of your job today is “leading” and 70% is “doing”, and you’ve spent the last 8 years mostly in “doing”. You will be more confident talking about the “doing”, but it’s not what hiring managers are interested in. They are hiring 100% leaders. They don’t have time to separate out your “doing” from your “leading. Do it from them. Focus exclusively on how you lead.
Here’s what it sounds like to talk about your leadership capabilities rather than how you get things done:
Doer: I launched a new product feature that led to 5% growth in top line revenue. I worked with the team to overcome xyz challenges, create sales materials, and prep for launch.
Leader: I brought together 3 siloed product teams across the organization, got buy-in on vision and strategy, and helped the team launch in just 6 months, realizing a 5% increase in top line revenue for the company.
Doer: I worked with my team and cross-functional teams to bring to start a new paid marketing channel for the business, and it is now the second fastest-growing channel.
Leader: I created and pitched the strategy for a new paid marketing channel to our CMO, scrapped together a team of volunteers to pitch in on top of the day job, and guided the taskforce through multiple pivots. It is now the second fastest growing channel for the business.
You probably have many years of examples of problem-solving with your team, getting into the numbers and research findings, and facilitating discussions with partner teams. It may feel uncomfortable at first not to highlight those but instead talk about the “lesser” amount of time you spent leading. However, indexing on the “leading” part of your experience opens up the conversation to topics you are less comfortable with but critical to leadership hiring. Remember, leaders “do” through their teams.
Yue’s Coaching Corner
I sat down with Andrew Capland, PLG advisor and former head of growth, to discuss why great ICs get stuck, why “politics” isn’t a dirty word, and the identity shift required to step into real leadership. Check it out on the Delivering Value podcast (Apple, Spotify)
Check out my lightning talk on “Using GenAI to Nail Questions from Executives With Confidence” on May 14 with 220+ registered so far! Register here.
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Tactic #2: Describe How You Enable Others To Do Their Best Work, Not How You Work Best
If I am hiring for a leader, I want to hear how you enable others to do their best work, not how you do your best work. A significant part of a leader’s job is creating the best environment for others to get things done — process, culture, goal-setting, skillset development. Pivot your story from “how you execute given constraints” to “how you set constraints for others to do their best work”.
To do this well, imagine your day-to-day in the leadership role you are trying to land.
How will you motivate and empower the team? How do you decide what to prioritize yourself versus delegate?
How will you structure the team? What friction are you trying to remove? What friction are you intentionally introducing?
What processes do you like to run for your teams, partner teams, and executive leadership? How do you improve the collaboration of your team with other teams?
What skillsets would you look for on the team, and how would you bring them in? How do you fire/promote?
At the leadership level, it is a given that you can execute well. Showcase your ability to set motivating and impactful goals, create an empowered team culture, and manage communication up, down, and sideways. Help them understand how you’ll operate as the leader of the team.
Tactic #3: Talk about the Business Impact.
Regardless of your functional expertise, framing priorities in terms of business outcomes is an essential skill at the leadership level. You are likely used to speaking about your accomplishments from a functional lens. As a leader, an increasingly important aspect of your job is to work across the company with different functions. Start speaking about your work from the company lens or the perspective of other critical functions (e.g. finance, sales, investors).
Functional lens: I led a refactor of the entire codebase across 10+ engineering teams over 6 months.
Company lens: I led a cross-company initiative that accelerated $3M in pending contracts with key strategic accounts. I brought together 10 siloed engineering teams across different parts of the product. We refactored key components of the code base, which enabled us to ship customer features 40% faster and move up the roadmap for revenue-gating work.
Functional lens: I spearheaded the new GenAI initiatives for our company and developed the 5-year strategy with our team.
Company lens: I worked with our CPO, CEO, and the Board to align on how GenAI will transform our business in the next 5 years. I then brought together various product teams exploring GenAI ideas together to form a cohesive GenAI strategy that will allow us to keep up with the fast-paced technology updates and build a competitive moat.
When you speak from a company level, you showcase your ability to bring people together at the leadership level across functions. Remember, I know you can work with sales and marketing to revamp materials. I want to hear how you can also get the VP of Sales and Head of Marketing on board with your next product investment.
That’s all folks! See you next week at 3:14 pm.
Yue
More On Communicating Like A Leader
Great post! If the goal is to “persuade” and not convince, do you believe the same tactics would apply? Or would there be subtle differences in tactics?
The biggest challenge for some ICs is to convince they can lead even if they never officially had the title before. Some unfortunately had done most of the work either way but never got the title, this makes it harder to convince another company they qualify as leaders. Does your advice change in this circumstance?