Creating Leadership Impact: Beyond Your Departments Walls
Showcasing Your Full Leadership Potential Through Cross-Functional Initiatives and Impactful Projects
Stepping up to a leadership role typically requires taking on a broader perspective of the business. Not only does your remit grow, but so does your breadth of impact.
The best leaders are seen as leaders across the business, leading right across its various functions.
However, doing this when your leadership role is still primarily functional, with responsibility for one department, can be challenging to start. It often means taking on additional or new projects outside your direct area of responsibility.
These projects expose you to different elements of the business and its challenges, broadening your network and perspective. They also help build your profile as a passionate, proactive leader recognised by everyone in the company.
Stepping out of your area of expertise demonstrates confidence and an appetite to lead beyond your comfort zone. It's about seizing the opportunity to lead something bigger than your role and having a direct impact on the entire business. It also gives you a chance to showcase your abilities beyond what people expect and know you're good at.
For those aspiring to move to the next level of leadership, having interviewed hundreds of candidates for leadership roles, I also believe that having experience in projects outside their usual responsibilities is often what most helps people demonstrate their ability and aptitude.
All companies have projects and opportunities that span departments and functional expertise. They may take the form of formal projects or specific portfolio roles dedicated to cross-functional themes, such as championing underrepresented groups, participating in committees, or serving as a spokesperson for the company on social media. Many larger organisations have established ‘sponsorship’ roles like these for their senior team and layers below.
In companies where such opportunities aren’t evident, you must actively seek them out or create them. This might involve identifying a small project to broaden your insight and demonstrate your commitment to making a difference across the business. For example, organising a cross-functional meeting to tackle a longstanding business problem or partnering with People experts to explore ways to increase engagement and reduce turnover. Of course, you may need to garner support and put your influencing skills into play.
Projects like these offer an added opportunity: taking the lead on work that you know will make a significant difference to the business and its people.
Take Camille, for instance, highly successful in her Director role and on the pathway to CFO. While her functional role spans the entire business, it is relatively narrow in scope. Although people across the business are familiar with her name and her team, very few know her, what she stands for, and her leadership capability. In a business with a roughly 70:30 men-to-women ratio and where she is the only female on the leadership team, she is passionate about helping women develop. Camille has created and is now leading a small working group to rethink how women can be supported on their journey into and through the business. My client Dan, a first-time dad who has shifted to work part-time in a small company staffed by twenty-somethings, also has fantastic insights that he is keen to share and inspire.
The challenge for many leaders is that their plate is already full. Adding extra responsibility by choice doesn’t frankly sound like a great idea.
But today, the best leaders operate across the business as much as leading their own area of responsibility. They understand that cross-business impact is part of their leadership role, not an addition to it.
And that doing so requires a re-sequencing of priorities, resource and energy.
So if you’re ready to make an even broader impact and show your leadership range, the prompts below will get you started.
Be a champion: In this editorial piece, Jimmy Brown assimilates the qualities of a leader to that of a champion, operating more broadly across a business to have a deeper more significant impact.
A champion is someone who commits themselves and their organization, to winning in the global market place through agility, creativity, and honesty. They are not afraid to make bold moves that not only benefit their organizations, but also serve the greater good. In other words, they are not just focused on motivating top performance now, but also to helping their organization evolve to meet future needs. Moreover, they are not just looking at the organization, but the broader world.
Think about your current leadership priorities. What are you championing right now?
Reflect: Taking on extra curricular projects can give you the opportunity to lead something that you are really passionate about.
Think about your business.
What would you love your business to do more of?
From your unique perspective, what one business wide problem would benefit from being solved?
What do you know in your heart would make a big difference to the success of your business this year?
Focus: Taking on an extra project needn’t be a life long commitment. Instead try viewing it as an experiment or short term focus that you can test out.
What would be the first step to getting buy in or taking on a more cemented portfolio/champion role?
Whose support would you need?
What would the next, first step forward look like?
Learn: Most leaders have limited time to spare. And taking on an extra project inevitably brings concerns over how you’ll fit it in and the impact that it will have on our existing remit. Set your self some parameters up front about how much time you will invest, and what that investment would look like.
How many hours per month could you allocate right now to a cross business project?
What proportion of your time would you like to allocate to it?
What would need to be in place to make that happen?
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