617: How to Start a Big Leadership Role, with Carol Kauffman

Carol Kauffman: Real-Time Leadership

Carol Kauffman is an international leader in the field of coaching and has more than 40,000 hours of practice. Her clients are C-level leaders and their teams or elite athletes and creatives. She was shortlisted by Thinkers 50 as one of the top eight coaches around the globe for her thought leadership, entrepreneurial spirit, and contribution to coaching best practices. She is a founding member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches and ranked the number one leadership coach in the world. She founded the Institute of Coaching with a $2 million gift from the Harnisch Foundation.

Carol is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, a visiting professor at Henley Business School, and a senior leadership adviser at Egon Zehnder. At Harvard she launched the annual Coaching in Leadership and Healthcare Conference, one of the school's most highly attended events. Her professional development program, Leader as Coach, won Harvard’s inaugural Program Award for Culture of Excellence in Mentoring and has been rolled out throughout the United States. She was also the founding editor-in-chief of Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research, and Practice. Carol is co-author with David Noble of Real-Time Leadership: Find Your Winning Moves When the Stakes are High*.

In this conversation, Carol and I explore the mindsets and tactics that are helpful when taking on a new, big leadership role. We discuss how vision, resolution, scope, and altitude play a key role in your success early on. Plus, we invite listeners to consider the importance of peer relationships and recognizing how others see you as your role begins.

Key Points

Having the right altitude often means looking much more broadly at the organization and moving past a subconscious bias towards your old role or department.

The “subject matter expert trap” is a common one. Your awareness will help you avoid it — or recognize it faster.

Good peer relationships are one of the strongest predicators of success in a new role. Make time to build these critical connections.

Learning to accept recognition is a key competency for an executive leader. Treat it as you would receiving any kind of gift.

Have an enterprise mindset and remember that people perceive you as representing the organization vs. just yourself. Thinking like the entity can help you show up in the way you intend.

Resources Mentioned

Real-Time Leadership: Find Your Winning Moves When the Stakes are High* by Carol Kauffman and David Noble

Interview Notes

Download my interview notes in PDF format (free membership required).

Related Episodes

How to Manage Former Peers, with Tom Henschel (episode 257)

How to Nail a Job Transition, with Sukhinder Singh Cassidy (episode 555)

How to Genuinely Show Up for Others, with Marshall Goldsmith (episode 590)

Discover More

Activate your free membership for full access to the entire library of interviews since 2011, searchable by topic. To accelerate your learning, uncover more inside Coaching for Leaders Plus.