Your Move Into Senior Management Will Make You Confront Your Biggest Fears

10/14/2021

Sally Grisedale

You fear confrontation could lead you to express your true feelings, and getting fired.

You fear that if you spend time leading a team your technical skills will become out of date, which will make you less marketable in the future.

You fear you might become a cog in the wheel whose role is dull and lacks meaning.

Leadership is a full-contact sport. It’s all about confronting people in various situations. Confrontation and conflict are unavoidable and are rarely resolved on their own.

Conflict will find you whether you look for it or not. If you deal with it by putting your head in the sand and hoping it will pass you, it will surely escalate.

So how do you become a manager if you’ve avoided confrontation your entire life?

One of the things I teach my clients is how to identify and manage limiting behaviors like avoiding confrontation. With this understanding, you can choose to become a successful manager and leader by stepping into your self-assurance and self-authority at the same time.

Once you release these fears, you are free to make decisions informed by grounded optimism and sustainable abundance.

Career transition brings up all kinds of fears. As children, fear helps us survive the real and imagined threats to our physical and emotional well being. By the time we’re adults, they’ve become invisible inhabitants of our minds, but at this stage we no longer need them.

When life puts you on the fast track, it’s a sign you’re ready to release old fears and make space in your life to solve bigger problems, for which you will be rewarded handsomely.
As Elon Musk says, “You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of the problems you solve.”

Are you ready to release your biggest fears as you step into your next level of leadership?

Photo by Febri Sym on Unsplash

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What Is the Leading by Design Newsletter? Great question.

Leading by Design is a blog for creative leaders working in tech. It’s not a “Why You Should Use AI in Design Thinking” or “How to Hire and Retain Product Design Teams with Impact” type of blog. There are enough of those.

I write about the challenges you can’t safely discuss as creative leaders working in tech. The stories come directly from my experience leading teams at Apple, Meta, Yahoo!, and some start-ups and from the executive design leaders I coach today.

I have written about the stressful magpie boss, hateful cross-functional peers, creative burnout, the shame of job loss and survivor guilt, and the fear of becoming irrelevant in the marketplace.

I publish once a week and offer strategies to reframe your challenge so you can return to being the creative leader your team loves you to be.

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