What do senior leaders do?
This is based on working with a range of senior staff, and getting on the edge of seniority myself, in a large corporate organisation.
This list aims to be comprehensive. So if a senior leader or manager is doing all these things well, by this definition, they're doing a good job.
There are 8 things:
Decide what matters most. One definition of wisdom is getting the things that matter approximately right. To get those things right, the leader needs to make clear what staff should care about - what their work is in service of.
This gives everyone clarity on what the overall objective is - their "guiding star" which enables them to work with more autonomy day to day, and bring more energy and creativity to that objective. It also enables measurement of the goals, so progress can be evaluated and unpacked for future learning.
Create excellent vibes. Ensure staff feel as brilliant as possible about coming to work every morning. Nurture very strong relationships with a bunch of people, and learn what engages their hearts and minds. Take wellbeing of staff seriously. Ensure staff feel they can share learnings from failure to the benefit of the collective. Ensure right and fair incentives are in place.
Tell stories. Of the future you want to build. Of how everyone's going to get there (if you know). Of what matters the most and why it is so. Of the history and myths of the organisation, the directorate or the team, and what it means to be part of it. Of sung and unsung heroes in the organisation. Of the challenges you collectively face. Of success. Of celebrating and learning from failure. Of what it's like to work in the organisation - and what you want it to be like.
Another way of saying (1), (2) and (3) is "shape the culture".
Select talent. Get help selecting specialist talent you don’t have the background to recognise yourself.
Move blocks around, where each block is a team, lump of money or another form of resource. You want your blocks to be geared towards the things you care about, in groupings which make sense, and cover all necessary tasks (e.g.: finance, HR, operations, product development, sales, etc).
Moving blocks is the most abstract item of this list. For example, risk management can be seen as one case of making sure the right blocks are in roughly the right places, and being deployed in the right ways. To go back to our definition of wisdom, we want to get this stuff approximately right in the areas which matter - perfection is too much to ask for.
You can have blocks for anything. You might even have a block for finding the best configuration of blocks - often called transformation or strategy teams.
Build and manage interfaces between blocks. Interfaces are the connections between organisations, teams and people. Sometimes they are technology based, but generally they are very human relationships.
Ideally most blocks are able to build and manage their own interfaces. You can introduce new connections, and can create new blocks to build and manage connections (e.g.: comms teams, client facing teams).
Maintain healthy feedback loops (e.g.: mechanisms to propose changes to the system).
Be the last line of escalation. Because things are never so clean that this doesn't happen.