Own the problem
Most of your day-to-day job as an organizational leader in a vertical is usually to own the core loop:
- Identify the areas (problems and opportunities) your team should be working on.
- Decide on a destination that solves these problems.
- Explain the direction and align executives, teams, and cross-functional stakeholders.
- Communicate regularly, using data and narrative, on progress in those areas (from step 1).
Typically, I recommend:
Ask your teams for problems and priorities. A core part of the job is to identify problems and mine insights. You can't wait only for top-down or lateral priorities. I've found that this often gets missed by leaders who were previously in more of an orchestration or process management role.
Pick the problems and opportunities that deliver durable leverage. This is your highest value-add. Your job is the "effectiveness" of your team or group, not its "efficiency." You can work on a low-leverage problem very efficiently, but this is not optimal.
Understand the business and technology in depth. If you are in a technical role and are not able to occasionally write product requirements and specs, you may have blind spots in your understanding of the inner workings of the technology and/or your team's culture. This is also important for getting buy-in from certain parts of the organization.
Align with your team and cross-functional stakeholders. It is part of your mandate to say "NO" to executives when they are incorrect or wrong. Your team and your lateral colleagues expect this. Your team will be upset if you blindly follow executives when they have an incorrect picture of ground reality and make suboptimal calls.