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Rising Star
Just want to say Wah-tf?
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Chief
Dear recruiter who said you’d get back to me ASAP:
Any word on Swift in Portland?
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It is very challenging to be in a senior leadership role if you are not aligned with your peers and other senior leaders. There is not a lot of room for diverse thinking at the top. They will just dump you if you are constantly challenging the norm.
Reality check? Senior leadership isn’t just about big ideas and vision, it’s often about managing the messy middle. You’ll spend more time navigating office politics, calming egos, and handling sideways conflicts than pitching creative concepts.
Agreed with D1. I'll add - I think that success i senior roles depends less on being the smartest in the room and more on your patience, emotional intelligence, and ability to influence quietly behind the scenes. Most don’t realize how much “soft skills” hustle it takes until they’re actually there.
Learn how to manage up. The most successful upper-tier execs spend little time with their reports and most energy coddling their superiors.
It sucks. But that’s how they roll.
Truth. That. This is 80% of my time managing senior executives to budge on anything. "we want better engagement, better work you need to fix it" when it's actually the other way around. As sad as it sounds I realized this quickly and put a middle manager in place to take over my teams day to day problems and I have completely detached. None of the stuff they want can happen unless I am fighting above for it.
Crippling anxiety does not go away. You just have to manage it better. And help manage everyone else’s. Congrats! You are now a therapist.
The money makes life easier.
I’m in awe of the people on my team who are so brave and talented.
I can tell who is actually good at their job and who is good at managing up.
Spreadsheets and fighting for staff are so painful.
I wish I could influence and change more things to help the team than I am able to at present.
If you don’t ask for a salary raise, I can’t get you one.