HBR Presents

I'm Yario Wilkins and this is coaching real leaders part of the HBR Presents Network.

I'm a longtime executive coach who works with highly

successful leaders who've hit a bump in the road. My job is to help them get over that

bump by clarifying their goals and figuring out a way to reach them so that hopefully they can

lead with a little more ease. I typically work with clients over the course of several months, but on this show, we have a one-time

coaching meeting focusing on a specific leadership challenge they're facing. Today's guest, who

will call Andrew to maintain his confidentiality, has built his career in the tech world. After business school,

he switched into consulting, but realized he really wanted to be back in tech. He worked at a

startup for some time and now holds a leadership position at a more established tech firm.

I've never had formal training on managing managers. I understand that I'm going to have to be much more of a coach and get the

work done through them, but as someone who's always been very hands-on and was rewarded in my

career for being hands-on and jumping into problems, you know, the analogy of having parachute out

of a plane in a bad situation, that was always what I was rewarded for.

And so now I have to take a step back and say, okay, that cannot be me.

I won't have the time for that.

So Andrew has been a manager before, and he's succeeded because of a certain skill set.

But now he's going up a level and realizes there are

different skills he needs to be a manager of managers. There is a mindset shift that I need to go through

and being really comfortable in this new role that I'm going to be put in. I think there's,

you know, certainly strategies on how to work with senior managers and how to unlock them and make sure they're successful.

But it's resisting all of the old habits.

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