I had no idea what I was doing
Building Like a Leader has been one of the most humbling experiences of my life.
I know leadership. My PhD is in organizational psychology with a focus on leadership. I've spent years researching it, teaching it, coaching it. I walked into this with genuine expertise and a lot of confidence.
And then I had to learn how to be a marketer. And a salesperson. And a content creator. And approximately fifteen other things I had no idea how to do.
Case in point: I recently spent 8 HOURS trying to set up a Meta ad. I thought I had it figured it out and ran the ad for a week. When I debriefed the (not good) ad results with my lovely friend who is a marketing manager she said to me, “how did you even run this? You don't have a Facebook account.” I messed this up SO BADLY, y'all. 😭
Turns out knowing a lot about leadership does not automatically make you good at running a business. Who knew!! (Everyone. Everyone knew.)
I see this same thing play out for women in leadership constantly.
You get good, like really good, at your current role. You know your stuff, you manage your team well, you deliver. And then you step into the next level and the rules change completely. The skills that made you excellent here are not the same ones required to succeed there. You're essentially starting from scratch in a whole new domain, except nobody acknowledges that's what's happening. They just hand you a bigger job and a performance review that says "needs to be more strategic."
Cool. Thank you.
But like, how, though?
That feedback is so common and so completely useless. What does it even mean on a Tuesday afternoon in back to back meetings?
Strategic thinking is a skill. Things like seeing the real problem underneath the one everyone's reacting to. Thinking through the downstream consequences of a decision before you make it. Sitting with complexity long enough to actually understand it instead of immediately trying to resolve it.
The research on senior leadership effectiveness points to these kinds of cognitive skills as the real differentiators at the top. And the bad news? They are almost completely absent from the leadership development most of us are getting.
We're trained on communication, confidence, executive presence, all (mostly) useful, but it's the equivalent of someone handing me a course on Instagram aesthetics when what I actually needed was to learn how to think like a marketer. Adjacent, but…I speak from experience when I say: definitely not the same! And that's why I ended up hiring my own business coach who is an expert in marketing and is helping me grow those skills (shout out to the amazing, Suzanne Acteson!!)
I've been working with my own client lately who is brilliant and capable and wanted to really hone her leadership thinking skills. As part of our coaching we've been developing her vision for her team, and one of the things she's committed to is blocking time every week just to think. Not to action anything. Not to prep for a meeting. Just to sit with the bigger questions about where she's going and what she's building.
When we started she said, I think I know where my team is going but I've never really spent the time to write it down and think about it. After a few weeks of thinking time and really focusing on her vision, she had mapped out a clear vision for her team, a plan to get them involved, and even hosting her own vision development session with her team!
And guess what?! Not only does she feel more confident but her team started coming to her unprompted to tell her what a great leader she is.
That's what deliberate thinking time actually looks like in practice. And the benefits of the time and the skills you build in it are undeniable.
Let's go, girls.
xoxo Kels
This Week's Thing
Pick a decision you made in the last month , something real, not trivial. Then spend 15-20 minutes reverse-engineering it with these questions:
What information did I use to make this decision? What information did I ignore or not look for?
What did I assume was true without checking?
What was I trying to achieve? And was that actually the right goal?
What did I think would happen as a result? What actually happened?
If I could make this decision again, what would I do differently?
Here's why this matters: we can't change how we think until we understand how we currently think. Most of us are making decisions on autopilot: pattern-matching to what's worked before, moving fast, trusting our gut. Sometimes that works great. But the higher you go, the more complex and unfamiliar the terrain, and the more those mental shortcuts can work against you. Great leaders improve their thinking by getting curious about their own thinking first.