How Managers Become Leaders

After reading " How Managers Become Leaders", I think it is a good article worthy to recommend. The author introduces us seven kinds of seismic shifts of perspective and responsibility one should learn if he/she shifts from a lower position into a higher position. The author tells about Harald's real personal story, sharing what kind of difficulty Harald had met during his transitional period and how Harald as a leader should do to those problems.

When executives shift from leading a function to leading an enterprise, they might be challenged by the new ways of working and thinking, and to some extend, feel disoriented and less confident in their own ability. In order to make this trasition successfully, executives must navigate a series of changes in their leadership focus and skills, which defined by the author as seven seismic shifts.

First Shift-Specialist to Generalist. When shifting to whole sets of function, Harald as the leader of an enterprise should not focus only in his confortable function zone, instead, he should learn to work on cross-functional project. Just as the author mentions " leaders must be able to speak the language of all functions and translate for them when necessary", an effective executive should think about the benefits of business as a whole.

Second Shift-Analyst to Integrator. As an enterprise leader, one of the important responsibilities is collect ing functional teams' idea and proposal to solve the organizational problems. Besides, a leader should also learn to make business decisions instead of just analyzing a problem or situation.

Third Shift-Tactician to Strategist. To be a strategist, one should let go so many details, free his mind and focus on higher level matters. There are three skills an executive should learn for a strategic mind-set: level shifting (flexibly move among different level of analysis); pattern recogonition( to discern the significant thing from other trifles); mental...