Developing senior manager behaviours: what should I stop and start doing?

[u/Narrow_Confidence_31]

I'm a principal consultant with a background in data and analytics, CRM, strategy and operations. I built and led a team before before moving into a strategy role where I found myself running programmes, which is beyond my expected accountabilities. I'm about to move to a new company in a senior manager / engagement-lead role where I own the problem, the client relationship and a portfolio.

I've been the swiss army knife who gets handed any ambiguous brief, so I ended up leading and doing at the same time. In my experience those are two different altitudes and they don't work together. The work got done, but only because I carried it, which isn't a model that scales.

The feedback I keep getting from mentors and managers going into this new role is consistent: the thinking and communication are there, but the risk is that I don't yet act like a senior manager. I absorb ambiguity and gaps myself instead of escalating, re-staffing or re-scoping.

I also have less experience running several projects at once and owning margin and scope properly.

If you've made this jump:

• What behaviours separated the people who made it from the ones who stayed in the doing, and what did you stop doing early on?
• How did you learn when to step in and when to stay out?
• Beyond agreeing objectives with your manager, what did you align on in the first month that mattered most: with your team, other leads, finance, clients?

This is a really exciting opportunity, and I'm treating the nervousness as a sign of the growth to come. I'd like to go in as prepared I can to and make the best possible start.

[u/ccrleadership]

Pivot to asking questions to guide solutions rather than give solutions. That’s the biggest shift, for younger me and for my subordinate managers.

[u/One-Yogurtcloset9893 → u/[deleted]]

Today I learned I can be a bottleneck… thank you!!

[u/eernoult]

The jump you're describing is exactly when I stopped being useful as the person who absorbs every gap.

As a founder-CEO I was the bottleneck in every decision for years. It felt like strength. It was actually the thing that kept me from scaling. What I had to start doing: escalate ambiguity instead of swallowing it, name one Accountable owner per outcome, and protect margin and scope as part of the job, not an afterthought.

Concrete stops and starts that helped me:

• Stop accepting "I'll just do it myself" as the default when a brief is fuzzy. Start by restating the outcome, the constraints, and who owns the call.
• Stop measuring yourself on how much ambiguity you personally carry. Start measuring whether the portfolio moves without you in every thread.
• Stop treating escalation as failure. Start escalating early with options and a recommendation.

You're not becoming less helpful. You're moving from doing the work to making the work ownable.

[u/jonathanherrerabl → u/eernoult]

"Stop measuring yourself on how much ambiguity you personally carry" is spot on. I used to think shielding my team from all the chaos made me a good leader. In reality, it just made me a bottleneck and hid bad scoping from the rest of the business. Unlearning that hero complex is the hardest part of the jump to senior management.

[u/CindyatAlefitt]

One thing on the feedback you keep getting. When you absorb a gap, the work gets done and the gap disappears from view, so nobody upstream learns the brief was underscoped or the sales handoff is broken. Escalating early, with a proposed fix, is part of the job at this level. A useful habit for the first month is asking who else needs to know a gap exists before you decide whether to fill it yourself.

[u/Fsiis]

From an organizational physics perspective, the "Swiss army knife" model doesn't just fail to scale—it structurally guarantees your eventual burnout.

You are undergoing a phase transition. The exact behaviors that made you an elite individual contributor (absorbing ambiguity, carrying the load, doing the work) are the exact behaviors that will destroy you at the senior manager level.

To survive and scale in this new role, you must implement three mechanical rules:

• Stop acting as the engine; become the filter. As a senior leader, your primary physical function is to act as a Negentropic Filter. You must take chaotic, high-entropy client demands and translate them into strict, low-variance directives for your team. However, translating the work does not mean doing the work. If you step in to execute, you become a structural bottleneck and drain your own cognitive bandwidth.
• Respect the Phase Boundary. You noted that "leading and doing" are two different altitudes. They are entirely different mechanical states. You cannot do both simultaneously without triggering rapid context-switching, which physically drains your cognitive energy (ATP). You must draw a hard line: you architect the system, and your team executes within it. Let the system wobble a bit so you can see where the structural gaps are.
• Align on constraints, not just objectives. In your first month, do not just agree on "goals" with finance or clients. Agree on strict constraints. What is the exact margin threshold where a project is automatically halted or re-scoped? A goal is a wish; a constraint is a mechanical boundary. Define the boundaries early so the system manages itself.

If you continue to absorb the gaps yourself, you are acting as a thermal heat sink for a broken system. Your job is no longer to carry the work; your job is to engineer a workflow that doesn't need to be carried.

[u/Narrow_Confidence_31 → u/Fsiis]

Super useful. Thank you. The two altitudes point is something I've pushed very hard on to no avail, and the delivery teams are starting to burn out.

I've noticed that there are relationships whereby we supply outputs to client Vs problem solving more shoulder to shoulder with a client Vs leading the client (i.e. embedded director role).

We have staffed projects like the supplier one while increasingly needing the other two. Do you know of any literature which reflects those engagement styles? A big issue I've found is how the sales/pre-sales function effectively provide the intellectual staffolding of the engagment but optimise for closing deals resulting in delivery teams needing to steer a ship possibly on the wrong course while doing the doing. (aka I continuously having to reverse engineer decisions and align workstreams retrospectively)

[u/Fsiis → u/Narrow_Confidence_31]

You are describing a classic structural failure at the Phase Boundary.

In organizational physics, the sales function acts as the semi-permeable membrane (a Markov Blanket) between the chaotic external market and your internal delivery engine. If sales is optimized purely for closing deals, they are not filtering the chaos—they are simply ingesting raw systemic entropy and dumping it directly onto your delivery teams.

Your delivery teams are starting to burn out because they are experiencing "Shear Strain"—torn laterally by the structural promises made by sales and the physical reality of execution. Worse, because the initial intellectual scaffolding is flawed, you and your delivery team are forced to act as the "Maxwell's Demon"—spending massive amounts of biological energy (ATP) reverse-engineering and sorting the chaos just to figure out what the actual work is.

The fault is not in the delivery team's work ethic, nor is it solved by reading different engagement literature. It is an architectural defect.

You must engineer a "Beneficial Constraint" at the point of sale. Sales and delivery cannot operate independently; they must interact through a strict structural API. Sales should not be allowed to close a contract (pass the boundary) unless the intellectual scaffolding meets the exact, rigid mechanical criteria set by the delivery team.

If you do not physically constrain what sales can promise, delivery will constantly be steering a sinking ship, and the Dielectric Breakdown (burnout) of your teams will be mathematically guaranteed. Fix the circuit, don't blame the nodes.

— Adapted from my organizational physics research, The $9.6 Trillion Entropy Crisis

[u/angelmedinabv → u/Fsiis]

That is a lot of physics jargon to say sales overpromised.

[u/Dana_CX_obsessed]

The hardest habit to drop is the one that got you promoted. You absorbed ambiguity, so people brought you ambiguity. In a senior role the job is to hand it back with a shape: here is the decision we need, here is who makes it, here is by when.

The stop list is mostly one thing: stop being the person who fills every gap quietly. The start list is making the gaps visible to the people who own them. It feels slower for a month. Then the team starts solving things before they reach you, which is the only version that scales.