What Got You Here Won't Get You There: Making the Leap to Enterprise Leadership

There is a particular kind of confidence wobble that nobody warns you about when you step into a senior executive role.

You have been brilliant at your function. You know your area inside out. You have led a team, delivered results, earned a seat at the top table. And then you walk into that room and realise that the conversation has moved well beyond the edges of what you know. Someone is talking about a go-to-market problem, or a technology investment, or a commercial risk that has nothing to do with your expertise. And some quiet but insistent voice asks: do I actually have anything useful to say here?

In the latest episode of The Strategic Leader, Gemma and I are joined by Steve McNicholas, a leadership consultant and author who has spent nearly 30 years in the field, two thirds of that in large corporate environments including banking and insurance, and the rest parachuting into private equity businesses to deliver strategic objectives. He has held multiple C-suite roles, including Chief People Officer, and now works with cohorts of leaders helping them navigate exactly this kind of transition. He is warm, direct, and has the kind of perspective that only comes from having genuinely done it, got it wrong, learned from it, and helped a lot of other people through it since.

The identity shift nobody mentions

Steve's first observation is one that I think is quietly one of the most important things in this episode. Moving from functional expert to enterprise leader is not just a change in scope or responsibility. It is a fundamental identity shift.

As a functional head, your identity is tied up in your expertise. You are the HR person, the finance person, the marketing person. That expertise is your credibility, your confidence, your reason for being in the room. And when you step into an executive role, none of that disappears. But it is no longer sufficient on its own. You are now also responsible for the performance of the whole business, not just your corner of it.

Steve describes what he sees in those early weeks and months. New senior leaders are confident when the conversation lands in their functional territory. The moment it moves elsewhere, the nervousness creeps in. The assumption is that everyone else around the table knows more than they do about all of those other areas. In Steve's experience, the reverse is almost always true. They are simply more used to operating in that broader space.

What I find useful about the way Steve frames this is that he describes it as a security blanket problem. We all naturally gravitate towards the conversations where we feel on solid ground. The work of becoming an enterprise leader is learning to let go of that blanket, to sit with the discomfort of not being the expert in the room, and to find a different kind of value to offer. Which brings us to one of the most practical things Gemma says in the episode: if you genuinely feel you have nothing to contribute on a topic outside your expertise, you always have questions. Asking, probing, challenging, pushing for clarity- these are not consolation prizes. They are strategic contributions in their own right.

Your emotional thermostat

The second big idea Steve introduces, and the one that I think will stay with people longest, is the concept of the emotional thermostat.

As you become more senior, your visibility increases. Your authority is more visible, your presence is more felt. And the temperature you set when you walk into a room, whether you are warming things up or cooling them down, has a far greater impact than it ever did before. Every small signal you send, how you greet people, what you let slide, what you challenge, how you respond under pressure, gets read and amplified throughout the organisation.

Steve talks about what he calls the tolerance tax. What you walk past as a new executive becomes, in the minds of the people around you, what is acceptable in this business. Behaviours or standards you might have let go when you were within your functional team can set an unintended precedent at enterprise level. And the hard truth is that it is very difficult to un-tolerate something once you have walked past it. Which is why awareness of this, early on, matters so much.

Gemma shares a story from her coaching practice that illustrates this beautifully. A leader who was being experienced as cold and aloof by their team. The cause turned out to be nothing more sinister than a habit of walking straight to their desk in the morning without acknowledging anyone. Not intentional, not unkind, just habitual. A tiny shift- a few hellos on the way in, a brief check-in as they moved through the space- changed the temperature of the whole floor. One or two degrees, as Steve puts it. Everyone feels it.

Who you are is how you lead. I have believed that for a long time. The thermostat idea is a really useful practical lens on it: not a call to perform a personality, but a prompt to think consciously about the warmth or chill you are bringing into a room, and whether it is the temperature you actually intend.

Stop confusing activity with accountability

The third shift Steve names is one that I recognise from my own coaching work, and from some fairly embarrassing personal experience earlier in my career.

When you are a functional leader, it is very natural to report on what you have done. The programmes you have delivered. The number of people trained. The projects completed. That is how you demonstrate value at that level, and there is nothing wrong with it. The problem is when you carry that habit into an executive role and show up to the top table with your shopping list of functional activity.

What the enterprise table is looking for is not what you have delivered. It is the strategic impact of what you have delivered. Not "we ran three leadership development programmes this quarter," but "we are beginning to see a shift in how our managers are handling performance conversations, and here is what that means for retention." The difference is moving from the what to the so what and the now what.

Steve has a phrase for the habit of staying in the what: confusing activity with accountability. At enterprise level, you are accountable not just for your function but for the outcomes of the whole business. That is a different thing entirely, and it requires a different language.

The other side of this, which Gemma raises towards the end of the episode, is ownership of collective decisions. When the executive team makes a call that you were not entirely in agreement with, the temptation is to go back to your team and present it as something that "they" decided. Something that happened to you rather than something you were part of. That is not enterprise leadership. At that table, you own the decision along with everyone else, even the difficult ones. Especially the difficult ones.

It is more achievable than it sounds

I want to end on what Steve says as the episode closes, because I think it is worth hearing.

All of these things, the identity shift, the thermostat, the accountability mindset, can sound quite daunting when you lay them out together. Steve is very clear that they are not. He has seen many functional leaders make this transition and become genuinely impactful enterprise leaders. The challenge is not whether it is possible. The challenge is simply being aware of what is coming so that it does not catch you off guard.

If you are at that table, you have earned your place there. The question is just how consciously and fully you are stepping into everything that seat actually involves.

Worth a listen if...

You have recently moved into an executive or senior leadership role and are still finding your feet in the broader conversations. You lead a team of senior leaders and want to understand what that transition feels like from the inside. Or you are a functional expert who is heading towards the top table and wants to go in with your eyes open.

You can find The Strategic Leader wherever you listen to podcasts. And if there is a strategic dilemma you would like Gemma and me to dig into in a future episode, we would love to hear from you.

Fi Craig is the founder of GoodThinking, a Bristol-based team and executive coaching practice working with senior leaders and their teams across the UK and internationally. The Strategic Leader podcast is co-presented with Gemma Bullivant.