What counts as a good week changes when you lead leaders

Promotions to executive level are often described in terms of scale. A bigger team, a bigger budget, a bigger remit. It makes the role sound like more of the same.

It is not.

Melody Wilding writes about this in an HBR article on the move from manager to executive. She describes the shifts from expert to coach, from execution to achieving impact through others, and from personal oversight to systems that can work at scale. She also makes an important point about satisfaction. At the previous level, it often came from ending the day with something concrete to show for your work. At senior level, much of the work is harder to point to.

That is the part I recognise most often in coaching. Leaders understand that the job has changed, but they continue judging themselves by the standards of the previous one.

The measure you bring with you

Most people arrive in senior roles with a well-established idea of what a good week looks like. Things delivered. Problems solved. Detail understood. Questions answered.

That idea was built over fifteen or twenty years of being measured, rewarded and promoted for exactly those things. It made sense. They were good at getting things done, solving problems and knowing the detail.

The role changes, but their idea of a good week often does not.

The week fills with conversations and decisions. Two teams become clearer about their priorities. A difficult issue gets resolved before it turns into a larger problem. Someone leaves a conversation more able to handle something for themselves.

Yet I regularly hear leaders describe weeks like these as though they have achieved very little.

The new role does require new skills. But one of the harder shifts is changing what you use as evidence that you are doing a good job. The old evidence was immediate and personal.

The new evidence is often indirect, shared with other people and slower to become visible.

The organisation often reinforces the old measure

This is not only an individual habit. Organisations reinforce it.

Status reports ask what was delivered. Recognition often goes to the visible rescue, when a senior leader steps in and gets a difficult project back on track. Preventing the problem in the first place is harder to see.

A full calendar can still be mistaken for commitment. A leader who creates clarity, strengthens other people and avoids unnecessary involvement can look less busy than one who keeps stepping in.

So leaders are told to achieve through others while continuing to receive praise for personal intervention. They may understand the new role perfectly and still find themselves pulled back towards the work that produces the clearest and quickest evidence of usefulness.

The pull back into the detail

When a leader finishes the week feeling that they have done very little, the easiest way to recover that sense of contribution is to find something tangible.

Review the work line by line. Join the meeting. Rewrite the document. Take over the difficult problem.

Going into the detail is not automatically poor leadership. Senior leaders need to know when to get close to an issue. The stakes may be high, the risk may be poorly understood or the standard may not be good enough.

The important distinction is why you are there and what happens to ownership when you enter.

You may go into the detail because the work genuinely needs your judgement. Or you may go there because completing someone else's work feels more useful than sitting with uncertainty while they find their own way through it.

The people underneath you can usually tell the difference.

A different way to review the week

Activity is a poor measure of senior leadership. A busy diary shows where your time went, but not what changed because of it.

Personal contribution still matters. There will always be moments when your knowledge, judgement or direct intervention make the difference. But it is no longer the only measure, or even the main one.

More useful questions include:

• What became clearer this week?

• Which decisions were made at the right level?

• Where did I help someone think more clearly rather than give them the answer?

• Where did I step in, and was there a good reason?

• What is less dependent on me than it was three months ago?

These questions do not offer the same satisfaction as clearing a task list. Some weeks the answers may also reveal that very little moved forward. That is useful information too.

The evidence of senior leadership is often less immediate and less personal. It appears in stronger decisions, more capable people and work that continues without the senior leader having to remain at the centre of it.

The difficult part is not only doing the new job. It is recognising when you are doing it well.

Source: Melody Wilding, Navigating the Jump from Manager to Executive, Harvard Business Review, June 2025.