THE FIRST CHAPTER: I THOUGHT I WAS READY
I wasn't.
I had watched managers for a decade. Sitting across from them in deals. Built opinions about what good leadership looks like, and most of those opinions were formed from the outside. That is a dangerous place to build confidence.
October 2023 arrived. The role was mine.
The first thing my leadership coach told me was that there would be an abbreviated onboarding. One month to ramp. She said it like that was plenty of time.
I believed her.
THE CALENDAR ATE ME FIRST
Not the work. The calendar.
My leadership coach warned me directly. The biggest thing you’ll learn is how to optimize energy. You will lose control of your calendar. Build blocks. Manage your time. I wrote it down. Then I ignored it for three months while the Monthly Business Reviews, Organizational Leadership Reviews, forecasting cycles, and 2x2s stacked on top of each other like freight cars on a track that was never built to hold that weight.
By June, I had worked through Father’s Day afternoon to prep for Monday's Organizational Leadership Reviews. A blood vessel burst in my eye. Hypertension crept up. My family found a name for the days of the week when I was still the person they wanted to be around. It was Friday and Saturday.
I had confused input for output. Busyness for impact. Exhaustion from effort.
They are not the same thing.
WHAT GOT ME HERE
My leadership coach handed me a book in October. The title annoyed me.
My leadership coach handed me a book in October. The title annoyed me. What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. The message was clear: the skills that made me successful as an Individual Contributor are not the same skills that would ensure my success as a manager. I read it as if she were describing someone else. I finished it, understanding she was describing me.
I came up learning how to outwork a problem. More calls. More prep. More hours. The scoreboard responded. I had a decade of evidence that grinding worked.
That evidence was now working against me.
The transition from executing to enabling is not incremental. It is a different gear entirely. And I could not find that gear while I was still driving in the old one. I tried anyway. I spent a full quarter trying. The grinding continued to yield results, which made it harder to stop.
I stopped anyway.
HOW TO SEE A PERSON CLEARLY
My leadership coach introduced me to the SBI model. Situation. Behavior. Impact.
Three words that sound simple until you try to use them honestly. Until you sit across from someone and describe exactly what you observed, without opinion, without judgment, without softening the edges or adding your interpretation. Just here is what happened. Here is what I saw. Here is what it costs.
The model asks you to close the gap between intent and impact. Those two things are rarely the same. A person can mean well and still create damage. A person can perform brilliantly in one role and struggle in another, not because they changed, but because the role changed around them.
Talent conversations are not done to someone. They are done with someone.
That distinction took me longer to embody than it should have.
THE VISION I DIDN’T HAVE YET
My leadership coach asked me early on what my team’s vision was.
I tried one on. Win today’s customers to secure our future success. It was honest. It wasn’t wrong. But it was still a seller’s answer. It was still about the scoreboard. It sounded like someone who had mastered one game and was now trying to play a different one with the same playbook.
What I was moving toward, without yet having the words, was something different.
I wanted to build people who didn’t need me. I wanted to be the kind of leader who makes the person in front of them bigger than they were before the conversation started. I wanted trust that ran so deep the team moved when I moved, without asking why. Not because I demanded it. Because I earned it.
My leadership coach called it blind trust.
I called it the goal.
WHAT THE YEAR WAS FOR
I came into the role knowing how to sell. I left year one understanding how to build.
Those are related skills. They are not the same skill.
Selling is about reading the room you’re in. Building is about creating the room that other people want to walk into. It requires different attention. Less external. More internal. What is this person’s lever? Where is the gap between who they are now and who they are capable of becoming? What does this team need that it cannot yet name?
Year one doesn’t answer those questions. It teaches you to ask them.
That’s what it’s for.