Playbook
Moving from Manager to Executive: The (No-Secret) Sauce
A practical guide to developing executive presence and shifting from managing people to leading leaders with strategic impact.
Jill had been advancing her career in various IT manager roles for years. The right way.
Being accessible and supportive to her team. Crediting others fairly. Advocating for others. Keeping things sane, efficient, and not on fire. She didn’t bulldoze or act all bossy-pants. She just quietly made things work.
Her promotion to Executive Director? Not surprising, just a logical next move. Then came the feedback from above:
“Think more commercially.” “Act more strategically.” “Delegate more often.”
Then came this bit of cryptic BS, words every growing leader has heard, yet nobody ever defines with consistency or even clarity:
“You need to be developing executive presence.”
It read like a fortune cookie from an alien planet. Elusive. Mildly ominous. Altogether unactionable.
Jill booked time with me, not in crisis mode, but with the face of someone who joined a meeting five minutes before it was going to end.
The leap from managing people to managing managers is not just a new level. It’s a different dimension. Your calendar’s still full. But understanding how to spend all that time differently? That’s all new.
Welcome to Leadership: Advanced Edition.
In making the move from manager to executive, the expectations of you aren’t about being faster, smarter, busier, or more helpful. It’s about thinking in wider angles. Making fewer decisions but better ones. Asking tougher (and sometimes uncomfortable) questions. Knowing what not to say.
The hallmarks of how to DO "executive presence" is pretty well researched and peer-reviewed including work by Gavin Dagley and Cadeyrn J. Gaskin (2014) and others.
(As a side note, this same research also found that men and women still perceive executive presence more often in male leaders than women, which is reiterated in the recent work of Paustian-Underdahl, et al. (2024). Despite current trends of cancelling DEIB initiatives, unconscious bias is still real, y'all.)
The challenge? No one tells you this shift is coming.
You just gradually begin to realize that your innate approach for leading feels…off. Undersized. Like trying to load a folded mattress into a MINI Cooper.
Become a Leader of Leaders. Here's How.
1. Stop thinking your team’s chapter is the whole book.
Your team matters but now you have to focus, genuinely, on other teams. Their priorities, their headaches, their weird acronyms.
You don’t need to become a super fan of Finance, but you do need to understand how your decisions annoy or support them. Without this awareness, you are unequipped to operate in the interests of the whole business vs. the zoom lens of your function.
2. Stop adopting your team's challenges like your neighbor Arthur does with stray pets.
Arthur’s a kindly soul of a guy. Also, he now lives with 11 cats and a possum named KoKo (not Cocoa. Don’t get into it with Arthur).
Your job isn’t to solve all the problems for the managers who report up through you. It’s to develop them as leaders who can handle their own. Even the messy problems. Especially the messy problems.
Delegate and empower others!
Use good coaching questions like:
"Well what do YOU think needs to happen next?"
"What's your best next step?"
"How will you proceed?"
"What pitfalls might show up, and how can you plan around them?"
3. Get curious in uncomfortable directions.
“Think commercially” is just a buzzy way of saying: understand and focus on the levers of organizational profitability, not just your IT budget.
Why do other departments seem stressed about things you thought were minor?
Why is a slight delay in your project causing someone in Business Development to spiral?
Don’t wait to be told. Go look. Ask. Sit in on their meeting. Learn about their world. Decode their tension.
4. Learn how to explain your team’s work like it’s a movie trailer.
Skip the task list. Say what changed.
Not: “We finished the migration.”
Try: “Support calls dropped 30%, and our Customer Success team has free time for the first time in months.”
Executives don’t need your play-by-play. They need your so what.
Stop reporting department activities and move to reporting department impact. What got better, and by how much?
Photo by Issac Smith.
5. Don’t treat your promotion like it’s the last one you want.
You may have zero desire to be a VP of Blah Blah or Chief Whatever Officer. (Nothing wrong there. Not everyone wants that level of accountability and the political chess that usually comes with it.) But leadership isn’t a scenic viewpoint. It’s a treadmill on which incline and speed change without warning.
If you’ve stopped learning and getting better, regardless whether you want to rise further, you may be coasting or worse, unseen.
Keep asking those weird questions. Stay slightly uncertain, intentionally. That’s where growth is.
6. Make your thinking easy to understand, especially by people who aren’t you.
Executive presence isn’t about sounding important. It’s about quickly making things make sense.
When you talk, do people feel smarter and more informed or just tired? The best leaders make others think, “Ah, now I get it.” Even when the topic is murky and pesky.
Learn to speak in bullets. The brevity and relevance critical to effective PowerPoint slides applies to verbal communication with executives.
Smart People Get Stuck Between “Manager” and “Executive”
Are YOU stuck? And if so, are any of these a teensy bit true?
You’re still too close to the details, because they’re comfy.
You haven’t connected the dots between your work and the broader strategy. Not for your team, and not for the senior executives.
You assume good work speaks for itself. It doesn’t. It whispers in spreadsheets.
You keep developing your team while mistakenly operating as if your own growth happens via osmosis or the passage of time.
If that sounds unfair? Tough toenails. Go and journal on it if you must.
Executive Leadership Sniff Test
Firstly, no sniffing others in the workplace. You’ve come this far. Don’t start now.
(A.K.A. Questions You Might Overlook If Left to Your Usual Playbook)
Can you name three goals your peers care about that aren’t yours?
Are you building managers who get better at leading others or are you coordinating a group of task checkers?
If you left for a month, would your team thrive or text you nine times a day?
When was the last time you asked for real feedback on your leadership?
Can you easily and clearly articulate how your team’s work impacts revenue, margin, or cost?
Could you explain your company’s value proposition in less than 20 seconds?
Can you easily explain your boss’s goals and how your strategy will get them there?
Are you having more conversations about the future than the current status?
Have you coached someone through a decision you didn’t agree with, on purpose?
Do you have a peer or team member who feels safe such that they share with you, negative perceptions about you, that you might not want to hear?
Do you know how your function is perceived by others? (Not what you hope. What’s real.)
Can you clearly describe how your role adds value beyond your team?
Are you regularly connecting with peers in other departments just to learn about their goals and challenges?
Do you notice who talks in meetings and who doesn’t? And why that might matter?
Are you helping your managers build their own internal networks?
Do you do reflection as an activity on its own or just triage from one fire to the next?
Photo by Jaikishan Patel
What Jill Did (and You Can Too)
Jill didn’t reinvent herself into a self-crowned, LinkedIn thought leader, nor did she subscribe to HBR.
She started paying attention to patterns and asking future-focused questions. She stopped trying to be (even more) helpful and started being…strategic. She got a leadership coach, not to be fixed, but to get clearer, faster. She started asking for invitations to other functions’ meetings for the stated reason to “learn and align our team’s work.” She actively practiced communicating value and vision succinctly, building mental muscle memory so she could do so spontaneously.
She also made it her agenda to work through many of the Sniff Test items above. (Again, no sniffing.)
Also...
Leverage your senior HR business partners and Leadership Development Resources
I'm gonna get preachy here but stay with me.
Assuming you work someplace where the HR team ISN'T relegated to hiding in a dark closet, only coming out to witness someone getting canned...
Your HR executives have insight and advice, formed by extensive first-hand knowledge of the business of "people-ing" in your organization. They can help guide you to be better, decide better, and do better.
Training for making this big leadership transition? Help getting introduced to a good mentor internally? A skilled leadership coach to support you? Or maybe there's a professional development budget you can use for additional support outside the organization.
HR executives are, first and foremost, business people. (Any reluctance to acknowledge this does not make it less true.) While you are an expert in finance, supply chain, operations, whatever, your HR executives have graduate degrees and years of experience in a discipline as unique and tricky as your own. (Don't try to be your own HR executive. You aren't qualified.)
Wrap Up
“Executive Presence” may sound BS-y, but it’s quite concrete when you approach it as a checklist of specific behaviors, all of which can be learned and practiced by anyone who aspires to higher levels of leadership.
About Joel Dietz
Joel is a corporate leadership development and coaching practitioner in the energy industry. He partners with professionals and executives on career transitions, leadership growth, and retirement readiness—helping clients build meaningful next chapters with clarity and purpose.
Focus areas: career transitions, executive and leadership development, retirement coaching, culture and organizational development
Formats: individual coaching, group coaching
Work with Joel
Ready to apply this playbook to your context?
Or tell us your goal and we will recommend the best first step.