Stepping into an executive role is like climbing from 20,000 feet to 40,000 feet – a transformation in perspective, skill, and impact. As a leadership consultant, I’ve coached numerous new executive leaders who once thrived in senior management but now need to reorient their mindset and approach to the next level. Managers execute operations, solve problems, and lead teams. Executives, by contrast, shape strategy, influence culture, and lead leaders. If you’ve recently been promoted – or are preparing for such a promotion – here are three pivotal shifts that will help you successfully elevate your leadership game.

1. Rise Above Your Silo

As a senior manager, your focus is on your domain – your function, your people, your deliverables. As an executive, your view must expand to encompass the entire enterprise. That requires you to:

Collaborate and integrate cross-functionally

Success at the executive level demands intentional connection across departments. You’re no longer optimizing a single function – you’re orchestrating interdependencies. Rather than relying solely on dashboards or status updates, build relationships with peer leaders and align agendas.

Think strategically

What levers move the entire organization forward? Which threats are emerging on the horizon? What new opportunities can you engineer? These questions deserve your strategic focus.

Reorient priorities around the enterprise

Your calendar sets your priorities. Block time for big-picture thinking – market trends, M&A, long-range planning – so you can continually surface and elevate issues that impact the full organization.

2. Cultivate Organizational Capacity and Culture

You no longer lead individual contributors – you now lead through leaders. This requires building a stronger and more cohesive organization through these means:

Recruit, develop, and retain talent

The executive role places you at the center of your organization’s human capital strategy. Ensure you design the right organizational structure. Carefully recruit and hire leaders with the right capabilities and fit for your team. Then coach them to succeed. It’s also important to commit to retention by creating clarity, growth paths, and purpose in every role.

Build trust and cohesion

The executive suite is a fishbowl; every action is observed and scrutinized. To earn trust you must model:

• Character – through integrity and transparency
• Competence – through credible decisions and strategic insight
• Composure – by remaining calm under pressure and exemplifying resilience in crises

Trust ripples outward. When you lead with character, people can trust your intentions. When you lead with competence, they can trust your actions. And when you lead with composure, they can trust your emotions. This trust trifecta spurs confidence that allows your team to bring their best.

Facilitate collaboration and alignment

Your role isn’t to be the smartest person in the room. It’s to ask the best questions. When you ask insightful, connective questions that weave together functional expertise around a coherent narrative, you effectively integrate those inputs to guide execution. Your power lies not in having all the answers, but in orchestrating the right answers to guide your organization toward your strategic objectives.

3. Effectively Work Through Others

The sheer volume of information and decisions increases exponentially at the executive level – you can’t afford to be the bottleneck.

Cast vision to guide execution

Your role becomes setting the course, not controlling every step. A leader’s intent is a powerful tool here: share your mission, vision, values, goals, priorities, and expectations, along with guardrails around acceptable risk and decision-making boundaries. This autonomy-with-alignment approach decentralizes and accelerates execution, unleashing initiative without sacrificing coherence.

Let go and empower your team

You must consciously let go and delegate authority. This begins with clarifying who decides what, where they have full autonomy, and when they need to check with you regarding certain decisions. Bottom line: frame problems, state your expectations, and trust your leaders to deliver.

Coach and develop for scale

Investing time in developing your leaders multiplies your influence and impact. Coach them on:

• How to frame problems clearly
• How to make quality decisions
• How to execute with a sense of ownership

Structured leadership development ensures your influence cascades beyond your direct span – so you can lead at 40,000 feet without losing sight of what happens below.

Bringing It All Together

These three keys – rising above silos, cultivating organizational capacity and culture, and working through others – aren’t one-off tasks. They’re intertwined habits, mindsets, and disciplines essential to your success as an executive. Let’s walk through how they reinforce each other:

1. When you rise above your silo, you build enterprise-wide alignment.
2. Enterprise alignment isn’t complete without cultivating organizational capacity and culture – because alignment only translates into outcomes if you have the talent and culture to deliver.
3. As you learn to work through others, those leaders gain experience and autonomy – amplifying your strategic influence toward enterprise objectives.

A 30-Day Executive Mindset Action Plan

At the end of 30 days, you’ll begin to see new patterns emerging: strategic rhythm, empowered teams, and operational agility that you can continue to build on.

In Closing

Climbing from 20,000 to 40,000 feet transforms not only what you see, but how you lead. At 20,000 feet, senior managers solve problems and run teams. At 40,000 feet, executives shape the future, build culture, and lead through leaders. By rising above your silo, cultivating organizational capacity and culture, and working through others, you unlock the executive mindset – and elevate your impact across the enterprise.

For a deeper dive into developing a leader’s intent and several other principles mentioned in this post, I encourage you to explore my book, The Substance of Leadership: A Practical Framework for Effectively Leading a High‑Performing Team. It offers structure and practical examples to help leaders like you bridge effectively to executive leadership.

If you need a coach to help you climb to 40,000 feet, I can help.

Here’s to your growth – and to leading from new heights!

Sources

Harvard Business Review: Navigating the Jump from Manager to Executive

Stanley McChrystal: Team of Teams – New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World