Top Pitfalls of Newly Promoted Executives

Here are 10 mistakes newly promoted executives make:

1. Failure to realize you need to shift gears.
   You need to step back and reconfigure your world while you are accelerating to 180 miles an hour.
2. Trying to keep your former peers as friends.
   You need to structure a series of individual and team conversations to build new ways of going forward and lead.
3. Being too impressed with your success.
   You need to stay grounded and focused. You are in a new game. You need to win anew in new and broader ways. You need to help your people win anew.
4. Moving too slowly. Too much deliberation to achieve consensus.
   You need to create a sense of forward movement, develop early wins and build confidence and credibility.
5. Moving too rapidly. Ignoring the areas where you need to build coalitions and support.
   You need to identify where you can move swiftly and what requires further deliberation and cultivation of support, agreement and coalitions of willingness.
6. Not listening.
   You need to engage, listen, and observe attentively to identify opportunities to create movement. You need to let your people know and feel that they can succeed and that their success is your success.
7. Not delegating.
   You need to learn all over again how to let go, to delegate and to empower others. . You want to build trust and the great dividends of trust.
8. Jumping in to fix problems.
   You need to differentiate the important from the urgent. Prioritize. Reframe problems in the context of your objectives and strategy.
9. Relying solely or too much on what worked well for you in the past.
   You need to consciously and deliberately determine what practices you take forward and what you need to leave behind.
10. Poor judgment on priorities and allocation of time and energy.
    You need to work on the short-term with the long-term in mind. And build the long term with practical focus on the here and now.

© Aviv Shahar