Bigger role.
Same Tuesday.
For senior leaders whose role got bigger while the way it is set up stayed the same.
Promoted, hired in, or running a business that outgrew the role.
Dependable got you promoted.
Sustainable keeps you in the game.
You are three meetings in by 10am. You were the most senior person in all three. In two of them you were the least necessary.
By lunch there are forty new messages. Half are FYIs. The other half are decisions being routed to you because you are the shortest path to an answer.
The plan for the next two quarters sits untouched. It has sat untouched for three weeks.
By evening you are home but not present. Not because the day was hard. Because almost none of it was the job you are accountable for.
And none of that work disappears. It gets done later. On a Sunday night at speed, or a quarter on, when it has stopped being strategic and become critical.
Picture a Tuesday.
Tomorrow looks the same.
Now picture a different Tuesday.
You are in two meetings. You are needed in both.
The decisions that used to arrive on your desk are being made a level down, and they are holding, because someone was named to hold them.
What reaches you now is the part nobody else can do. The calls with no precedent. The trade-offs that cross functions. The judgement they gave you the role for.
By lunch you have done the thinking the next two quarters depend on. Not because you found more time. Because the load moved.
By evening you are home. Actually home. The phone is still on the table. Your head is not in the building.
You stop being the thing the business waits for.
Which is the only reason it can grow, and the only reason you can.
You already know how to fix this
Delegate. Restructure. Protect the thinking time. You have probably done all three, and watched it slide back within a month.
You moved the task. You did not move the authority. And some of it is you. Being the fastest answer is how you got the job. Letting someone else decide is harder than it sounds. I know. It was true of me.
Knowing what to change is not the hard part.
Changing how you operate every day, and keeping it changed, is.
Two things, worked on together
How your team is set up around you. And how you operate inside it.
Work on yourself without changing the team, and the team keeps bringing it back. Change the team without changing how you work, and you keep pulling it back. It holds when both move.
With someone outside the business to think it through with, and to check it held in the week it was hardest to hold.
Two ways to work together:
The Work.
The Leadership Reset™
For the leader who has taken on more. Thirteen weeks, inside your real week. By the end you are out of the detail and your team decides without you.
How it works →
The Ongoing Strategic Partnership
For the leader already running at that level. A thinking partner for the biggest calls, before they are made. No fixed term. Two leaders at any one time.
How it works →
Andrew Henry.
Most people who work in this space have studied it.
I ran it.
20+ years inside the environments I now work on. Senior leadership across global product and merchandising businesses.
Responsible for revenue portfolios in excess of €500 million.
I know what your Tuesday looks like.
Not because I've advised on it from the outside. I lived it, with P&L accountability and commercial consequence.
The work I do now is built on that. Not on frameworks developed in a consulting room.
Read the full story →
At the end of the year you will take stock of the last twelve months.
Not just the numbers. The role.
Whether it looked like the one you were promoted into, or the one you were doing two years ago.
Private. No obligation. If the fit is there, we’ll know in the first conversation.