Seven starting points for the jump to the next leadership level, with insights from research and from my coaching practice.
The move from colleague to leader was the first major turning point in your career. The next step, out of operational leadership and into a bigger, more strategic role, is a second turning point, one that is often underestimated because this time you already bring leadership experience.
Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter and James Noel describe six such transitions on the way from the first leadership role to the top of an organization in their Leadership Pipeline model. The central finding from their more than thirty years of consulting work: leaders rarely fail at a new level because they lack technical skill. They fail because they keep doing exactly what made them successful at the previous level, instead of truly stepping into the new one.
The Global Leadership Forecast 2025 from DDI also shows how much this transition weighs on leaders. 71 percent report noticeably higher stress since stepping into their current role, up from 63 percent in 2022. 40 percent of those with higher stress have seriously considered giving up their leadership role to protect their wellbeing.
The seven starting points below will guide you through exactly this transition. Each one combines a short piece of context with concrete steps and a reflection question for you.
Why it matters: Only 19 percent of leaders show strong delegation skills, according to DDI. Anyone who does not let go of operational tasks stays trapped in the old role and has no capacity for the new one.
Reflection question: Which task is hardest for me to hand over, and what does that say about how I have understood my role so far?
Why it matters: Strategic thinking is one of the central skill gaps in the move into higher leadership levels. It rarely develops on the side, it needs deliberately protected space.
Reflection question: How much of my week currently really goes into strategic rather than operational topics?
Why it matters: Influence beyond your own department is one of the skills that counts most at higher levels, and one of the skills leaders bring with them least often.
Reflection question: Who outside my own department have I actually spent time with in the last month?
Why it matters: The biggest shift in a promotion is the focus of your communication. Leading at the operational level meant communicating about execution. At the next level, direction and context are what count.
Reflection question: Do I start my most important contributions with the outcome, or with the path to get there?
Why it matters: Confidence with the financial metrics of the new level is one of the most commonly missing skills when moving into higher leadership roles.
Reflection question: Which three metrics matter most at the next level, and how confident do I feel with them?
Why it matters: As responsibility grows, feedback becomes rarer and more indirect. Leadership research describes this as one of the most emotionally demanding sides of moving up.
Reflection question: Who tells me the honest truth since I have been in this new role?
Why it matters: The shift in your own identity as a leader is considered one of the most common pitfalls in promotions to higher levels, precisely because it is rarely addressed openly.
Reflection question: What do I measure my success against at this new level, and does that differ from before?
American leadership researcher Michael Watkins describes what he calls the breakeven point in his widely translated work on leadership transitions. That is the moment when an organization gets as much value from a new leader as it has invested in bringing them up to speed. This applies to internal promotions just as much as to a first move into a leadership role.
The following four patterns show up in leadership research as well as in my own coaching practice, again and again with experienced leaders on the way to a bigger role.
According to the Leadership Pipeline model, leaders often fail because they keep doing what made them successful at the previous level, instead of truly stepping into the demands of the new one.
Only 19 percent of leaders show strong delegation skills, according to DDI. Concern about control keeps many from letting go in time.
71 percent report noticeably higher stress in the new role, according to DDI. Many accept it for a long time before they change anything about it.
Out of concern for how they come across, many freshly promoted leaders do not talk openly about uncertainty, which means they miss out on valuable support.
This guide gives you structure for the transition into the next leadership level. Even so, some questions are easier to work through in conversation than alone on paper, especially when it comes to your own leadership identity.
In a no-obligation introductory call, we look together at your current situation and work out whether coaching is the right next step for you.
Since 2020, I have supported leaders in one-on-one and group coaching on their way to more clarity and confidence in the new role.
Book an intro callI have been Managing Director of BGM³ GmbH since 2017, and since 2020 I have also worked as a coach for leaders, in one-on-one and group coaching. As an NLP Practitioner, NLP Master and NLP HypnoCoach, I combine psychologically grounded methods with practical experience from running my own company. As a coach, mentor and Managing Director of the CoA Leadership Academy, I have supported numerous leaders through one-on-one and group coaching as well as mentoring, many of them in exactly the phase this guide describes, the transition into a bigger leadership role.