Let's face it – senior managers need to have a flexible, adaptive, and accommodating aura around them! How can you build on yourself? Read on to find out!

Are you a senior manager that's been handed a giant goal, a BHAG goal, we call it, Big Hairy Audacious Goal? And you've got that on your shoulder and then over here, you've got your team that you care about, you want to motivate, and inspire, and keep them going.

Wow, what a tall order. That's all on you.

Today, we are going to give you three pro tips on how best to navigate this position and make sure that you have job satisfaction, create achievement for your goals, and keep that great team you have assembled.

Tip number one: shift your perspective from portrait to landscape.

What does that mean?

Well, it means that you have been a high potential. You've been a star performer and that got you promoted. And now, instead of looking at your life as a portrait and being focused on tasks and achievements for you, you need to widen your lens and look at your team through the lens.

Widen your perspective and move from tactics and tasks and achievement into strategy. Ask yourself: How can I help this team move together and work together to achieve goals?

By simply shifting your mindset and stretching your lens, your perspective, you'll begin to access ideas, and develop problem-solving capabilities that have always been in there – and now you get to work it through your team.

Tip number two: listen.

Do you know that as you move up the ladder, you go from 45% of your day listening to over 80% when you become a CEO? So somewhere in-between there, but certainly over 50% of your day is going to be listening.

Many senior managers will say, “Well, gosh, all I did all day was listen. Now that the day is done, I can get my work done.”

But guess what? That is your work. It's your work to listen to your team. What's in their way? What's the obstacle in project completion? Is there a problem with a customer? Are they having a conflict with one of their team members or someone else in the organisation?

By you listening and giving them that time and getting curious and accessing their solutions for those problems, you as a senior manager are again, stretching and opening to what is your job and it's to listen.

Listen with your ears, listen with your intellect, with your experience, and also, your curiosity to find out what else is in there. Many times our team knows the answer, but they just need the time to pause. Get Present, start posing questions and suddenly the answers will come forward.

So be willing to listen more.

Tip number three: ABD, always be developing.

You used to be focused on ABC, always be closing, but you've got your sales team to do that now. And for you as a leader, you need to be out in front developing yourself and bringing your team along.

Well, how do you do that?

A couple of ways. First of all, we always got a good read to inspire us. Amy Edmondson's The Fearless Organisation: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth, Patrick Lencioni’s "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" is a great place to start! So make sure that you've got some books that are enriching your life as a manager.

And then listen to some TED Talks, share them with your team.

And lastly, always have a coach. Every successful manager had a professional influencer to follow. You would never be able to move from Senior Manager to Vice President without that extra pair of ears.

Everyone needs a thought partner that can help bust your biases, change your behaviour, keep you accountable, and mostly, motivate you by challenging you.