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Leadership
Leveling up as a leader: Five transitions to accelerate your career
Progressing to senior leadership means upgrading your mindset and approach with self-belief and courage. Here’s how.
When you’re just starting out in your career, your success can be defined and measured by how well you perform the tasks assigned to you. You’re expected to deliver, to be dependable, and to get the job done. But while performance gets you in the door – and perhaps up the first few rungs – it’s not enough to keep climbing.
Meaningful progression, the kind of leveling up that leads to senior leadership, is not just predicated on strong performance. Advancing in your career calls for a wholesale and intentional upgrade in the way you think, the way you form relationships, and the way you model different behaviors and approaches. It’s about upgrading from capable contributor to credible leader: the kind of leader that earns trust, inspires confidence, brings strategic breadth and perspective – and aligns others around a shared vision.
How do you make an upgrade like this? In my work with thousands of early-career leaders across diverse sectors and industries, I’ve identified five critical inflection points – five critical transitions you must make – to accelerate your personal leadership development, amplify your impact, heighten your visibility, and signal to your organization that you have what it takes to level up in influence and responsibility.
These five transitions look like this.
1 – Thinking beyond the task.
What got you here won’t get you there. In your early career, you are valued for your ability to get things done: to complete tasks on time, manage details, and hit your targets. As you progress, however, the onus shifts from delivering outcomes to shaping direction. Execution alone will not differentiate you. What matters more now is being able to see the bigger picture ahead of your role or function or even organization and taking the initiative to reshape it.
The challenge here is to transition from being a reliable executor to becoming a forward-thinking contributor who can think beyond the immediate task, challenge assumptions, connect tactics to strategy, and anticipate what might happen next. How might you do this? Try integrating these behaviors and habits into your management practice:
- Ask questions about goals that invite deeper exploration of the concomitant risks, opportunities, and tradeoffs. Use the word “why” as well as “what” or “how.”
- Think about how your work connects to the broader business goals of your organization.
- Leverage this to formulate insights in meetings, and not just updates.
- Share ideas that will improve customer impact, team efficiency, and the overall strategy of the business in some way.
Manage upwards by proactively keeping your boss informed, while offering insights and solutions.
2 – Building strategic relationships
Early career progression is typically built on individual effort and performance. You build knowledge and acumen by studying and absorbing, learning as much as you can, and working methodically through your tasks and performance can be a solitary enterprise. But leadership progression is a much more social dynamic. As you transition towards greater responsibility, things like influence, alignment, and building buy-in become just as important as innate skill and effort – sometimes more so.
Leveling up hinges on becoming stakeholder-savvy, and learning how to navigate relationships, power dynamics, and cross-functional collaboration. How do you go about this? Try the following:
- Purposefully solicit buy-in from your peers and senior colleagues for new ideas or approaches.
- Identify and build coalitions that span functions to move a project forward.
- Manage upwards by proactively keeping your boss informed, while offering insights and solutions.
- Become someone who brings different people together and gets things done through collaboration.
The challenge here is internalizing your leadership identity and managing things like imposter syndrome.
3 – Owning your identity as a leader
When you are starting out, there’s often a strong pressure or desire to fit in. You will want to prioritize learning the culture, proving you belong and even staying in your lane. But as you develop and grow as a leader, you are going to want to stand out from the crowd with authenticity, confidence, and clarity. It’s no longer about belonging but believing in yourself, and that means cultivating your leadership presence: the way that other people experience your presence when you walk into a room, when you speak up, or when you lead a project.
The challenge here is internalizing your leadership identity and managing things like imposter syndrome. Transitioning from someone who hopes to be noticed to someone who has presence and intention also hinges on knowing yourself: why you want to lead and what your leadership stands for. It can help to:
- Interrogate yourself for clarity on your values by asking yourself what you want to be known for.
- Be intentional when you speak – in meetings, presentations, or even casual conversations with colleagues.
- Learn to project confidence (not arrogance) in the energy you bring, your tone, and the way you listen to others.
- Ask for and then act on feedback from others about the way they see you and experience your presence.
Find a way to give constructive feedback to a peer or a direct report without diminishing your interpersonal relationship.
4 – Stepping into courageous conversations
Conflict can be difficult to navigate, particularly in your early career. It can feel more comfortable to maintain harmony, seek compromise, or soften your tone to keep the calm, protect relationships, or sidestep difficult feedback. But leadership will require you to step into conflict at times, not to build tension or win battles, but to build accountability, foster trust, and drive progress.
This is a key transition that challenges you to see difficult conversations as leadership opportunities and not interpersonal risks. And to do this, you will need to make the shift from avoiding conflict or uncomfortable situations, to engaging openly with honesty, empathy, and real clarity. From voicing a genuine concern to learning to say no, these are dynamics that will define your character and credibility as a leader.
Try these things:
- Find a way to give constructive feedback to a peer or a direct report without diminishing your interpersonal relationship.
- Disagree with a manager, and back your position respectfully and with irrefutable insights or data points.
- Identify and articulate any tensions within a team that might be holding up progress and suggest solutions.
- Hold your boundaries firmly and communicate your expectations when something is not working well.
Reframe challenges as learning opportunities instead of threats to your competence.
5 – Balancing your energy strategically
At the start of your career, you might find it tempting to yes to everything, to put in long hours, and simply power through stress to prove yourself. But sustainable success and effectiveness as a leader isn’t about endurance. It’s about energy. Leaders who make it to the top and stay there are those who are intentional about managing their energy, learning from setbacks, and maintaining perspective under pressure.
As you level up in this sense, you will want to really focus on building your own, inner foundation: prioritizing the mindset, the self-awareness, and the personal resilience to fuel your long-term leadership growth. Your goal is to be able to bounce back from stumbling blocks, remain grounded despite uncertainty, and continue to learn even when things don’t pan out as you expect. To build your personal sustainability, try to:
- Manage your energy proactively and don’t simply react when you feel burned out.
- Reframe challenges as learning opportunities instead of threats to your competence.
- Practice self-compassion when you make mistakes – and use reflection to fuel growth.
- Stay connected to purpose and values, especially during high-pressure situations.
Building resilience isn’t just a personal benefit – it’s a leadership asset. Remember: people are drawn to leaders who stay steady, curious, and committed when times get tough.
Start leading wherever you are right now
Leadership isn’t something you automatically step into or acquire when you’re given a new job title. Leveling up as a leader calls for a comprehensive and purposeful personal upgrade; one that requires you to practice and develop new approaches and mindsets. And you can start your own upgrade at any point in your developing career – you need neither promotion nor permission. The five transitions I’ve outlined here call instead courage and imagination, self-belief, and willingness to step up and challenge yourself to think and do differently.
As you begin to think beyond the task at hand to forge stronger relationships, manage your presence, step into courageous conversations, and balance your energy, you will reposition yourself from capable contributor to credible leader.
Remember that the path to leadership is rarely a direct line. There will be challenges along the way and the transitions ahead will take stamina and commitment and even bravery. Get them right, however, and you won’t just move forward; you’ll rise.
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