Congratulations. Genuinely.
You got the title. The bigger patch. The seat at the table you’ve been circling for years. Someone shook your hand and said “we’re thrilled to have you,” and you went home and poured a wine and let yourself feel it for about eleven minutes before the panic arrived.
Because here’s what nobody puts in the offer letter: the thing that got you this job is not the thing that will keep you in it.
I’ve coached hundreds of executives through this exact transition. Newly promoted. Externally hired. Stepping up two levels because someone left in a hurry. And I can tell you with absolute confidence that the biggest risk in your first six months is not that you’ll be found out.
It’s that you’ll be too busy proving you weren’t a mistake to actually do the job.
Let’s fix that.
First: your brain is not your friend right now.
Let’s start with what’s happening between your ears, because everything else follows from this.
A new executive role is a threat state. Not metaphorically. Neurologically.
Novelty, ambiguity, status uncertainty, unfamiliar faces, unclear rules, and a very public scoreboard. Your brain reads that cocktail as danger and floods the system accordingly. Cortisol up. The prefrontal cortex — the bit responsible for perspective, nuance, patience and long-range thinking — quietly goes offline. Your amygdala takes the wheel.
And what does a threatened brain do? It narrows. It speeds up. It craves certainty and closure. It reaches for action because action feels like control.
So you will feel an urgent, physical, almost righteous need to do something.
Restructure something. Announce something. Fix something. Fire someone. Launch a strategy in week four so everyone can see you’re worth the money.
That feeling is not strategy. That’s your nervous system.
Learn to tell the difference, and you’re already ahead of most of the people who’ve sat in that chair before you.
I wrote a whole book about this — Leadership Attitude — because after two decades of watching people step into big jobs, I became convinced the differentiator isn’t capability. Everyone at that level is capable. It’s attitude. How you show up when you’re uncertain, exposed, and out of your depth.
Which is precisely the condition you’re in right now. So let’s go through it.
Stop performing competence.
New executives fall into one of two traps, and they’re mirror images.
Trap one: The Bulldozer. Comes in hot. Has Views. Compares everything to their last company, loudly. Restructures before they understand what the structure was doing. Confuses activity with authority.
Trap two: The Ghost. So terrified of getting it wrong that they consult everyone, decide nothing, and by month five have earned a reputation as lovely, thoughtful, and completely inert.
Both are driven by the same thing: fear.
The bulldozer manages fear by performing certainty. The Ghost manages fear by avoiding exposure. Neither one is actually leading.
Here’s the reframe I give every executive I coach: in your first ninety days, you are not being assessed on your answers. You’re being assessed on your judgement.
People are watching how you listen. What you ask. Whom you talk to. What you do when someone gives you bad news. Whether you can sit in “I don’t know yet” without flinching.
That’s it. That’s the test. And you cannot pass it by talking more.
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Listen like it’s the actual job. Because it is.
Everyone does a listening tour. Almost nobody does it properly.
A bad listening tour is a roadshow. You book thirty meetings, you turn up, you talk about your leadership philosophy for twenty minutes, you ask “so, any concerns?”, nobody says anything real, and you leave feeling like you’ve connected.
You haven’t. You’ve broadcast.
A good listening tour is an investigation. Same question set to everyone, so you can hear the patterns. Silence held long enough that people fill it. Follow-ups that go one layer deeper than is comfortable.
Try these:
- What’s working here that I should absolutely not touch?
- What’s the thing everyone knows but nobody says out loud?
- If you were in my chair, what would you do in the first six months?
- What did my predecessor get wrong? What did they get right?
- What’s the one decision that’s been stuck, and why?
- What do you need from me that you’re not getting from anyone?
And then — this is the bit — write down what you hear and do not respond to it yet.
Do not solve it in the room. Do not promise. Do not say “leave it with me” seventeen times in a week and then drown. Say: “That’s really useful. I’m collecting. I’ll come back to you with what I’m seeing in a few weeks.” Then actually do that.
Nothing builds trust faster than a leader who listens, goes away, and comes back with evidence they were listening.
Everyone is now lying to you (politely).
This one stings, so I’ll say it plainly.
The day you got that title, the quality of information reaching you dropped. Not because your people are dishonest. Because power distorts.
People manage upward. They round the numbers toward optimism. They lead with the good and bury the bad in slide 14. They read your face and adjust mid-sentence. They tell you what they think you want to hear because you now control their bonus, their promotion, their project, their Tuesday.
This is not a character flaw in your team. It’s a structural feature of hierarchy, and if you don’t actively counteract it you will make confident decisions on filtered data. Which is how good executives fail slowly.
So build your truth infrastructure early:
Find your truth-tellers. Every organisation has two or three people who will tell you the unvarnished version. They’re often not the most senior. Find them. Protect them. Never punish them, not once, not even with a flicker of irritation. One bad reaction and the tap turns off permanently.
Go where the work happens. Skip levels. Site visits. Sit in the contact centre. Ride along. Not as theatre — as data collection. The truth lives three levels down, and it’s usually pretty easy to find if you shut up long enough.
Reward the messenger visibly. When someone brings you a problem early, thank them in front of others. You’re not thanking them for the problem. You’re pricing the behaviour.
Watch your own face. You now have an executive face. Your neutral resting expression will be read as displeasure. Your two-second pause will be read as disagreement. Your rushed “sure, fine” will be read as a veto. You’ve inherited a megaphone you didn’t ask for and can’t put down.
Your strengths are about to betray you.
Here’s the cruellest part of the executive transition, and the one almost nobody prepares people for.
The capabilities that made you brilliant at your last level are now the very things that will hold you back.
You were promoted because you were the best operator. The one who could fix it, ship it, save it. You were fast, decisive, hands-on, exceptional in the detail. That’s your identity. That’s what people praised you for. That’s what your brain has wired thousands of dopamine hits to.
And now the job is to not do that.
The job is deciding, not doing. Setting direction, not driving delivery. Building the people who build the thing. Your value is no longer in the work — it’s in the quality of your decisions, the calibre of your team, and the clarity of the direction you set.
Which means the transition is genuinely a grief process. You’re giving up the thing you were best at, in exchange for a set of skills you’re currently mediocre at. Of course it feels awful. That’s not weakness. That’s an accurate reading of the situation.
The practical test: every time you’re about to jump into something, ask yourself — am I doing this because I’m the only one who can, or because I’m the fastest and it feels good?
If it’s the second one, you’re stealing development from someone else and calling it leadership.
This is the hardest ninety days of most executive careers — and almost nobody gets support through it. Our executive coaching is built for exactly this transition. Book a Strategy Session →
Your calendar is your strategy. Everything else is a poster.
You can write the most beautiful strategy document in the history of corporate PowerPoint. Nobody will believe it.
They’ll believe your diary.
Your organisation reads where you spend your time, what you ask about first, what you follow up on, and what you let slide. That’s the real strategy. The deck is a rumour; your calendar is the evidence.
So audit it, ruthlessly, at week six and every quarter after:
- What percentage of my week is genuinely strategic versus reactive?
- Which meetings am I in out of habit, ego, or FOMO?
- What did I say was my top priority, and how many hours did it actually get?
- Where’s my thinking time? (If the answer is “the shower,” we need to talk.)
Book the thinking time like it’s a board meeting. Defend it like one too. An executive with no white space is not a strategist — they’re a very expensive processing unit.
Make one real decision early
There’s a strange paradox in executive transitions. Move too fast, and you’re the Bulldozer. Move too slow, and you’re the Ghost.
The resolution: listen broadly, then make one clear, visible, slightly uncomfortable decision by around day sixty.
Not a restructure. Not a five-year vision. One real call on something that’s been stuck — a resource fight nobody’s settled, a project that should have been killed eighteen months ago, a behaviour that everyone’s tolerated and shouldn’t have.
Why? Because legitimacy doesn’t come from your CV. It comes from watching you decide something hard and stand behind it.
Explain your reasoning out loud. Not to justify yourself — to teach people how you think. Do that a few times and your organisation starts making good decisions without you in the room. That’s the actual goal.
Your peers are your real team now.
Almost every new executive over-invests down and under-invests sideways.
You’ll pour energy into your direct reports because that’s familiar and it’s where you feel competent. Meanwhile your peer relationships — the CFO, the COO, the head of the thing you don’t understand — get whatever’s left over, which is nothing.
Then six months in, something needs cross-functional support, and you discover you have no capital in the account.
Fix it now. Coffee with every peer in the first eight weeks, with one question: what do you need from my function that you’re not getting? Then deliver something small for them within a month. Small, real, unrequested.
That’s how you build the alliances that make you effective when it actually matters.
Regulate yourself, because the room copies you.
If you take one thing from this entire piece, make it this.
Your nervous system sets the temperature of every room you walk into.
Humans are exquisitely calibrated to read the emotional state of the most powerful person present. It’s ancient wiring, and it’s fast — faster than conscious thought. Your team is scanning your face, your voice, your pace, your breathing, whether they know it or not. And they’re catching it.
Walk in tense and rushed and your team will make anxious, short-term, defensive decisions. Walk in steady and present, and they will think more clearly. Not because you said anything inspirational. Because their brains had enough safety to access the good bits.
This is why regulation is not a wellness nice-to-have. It is a core executive capability with a direct line to organisational performance.
So: sleep. Move your body. Breathe before the hard meeting — a slow exhale, longer than the inhale, is the fastest way to reach your own prefrontal cortex. Learn your tells. Mine is talking faster and getting terse in emails. Know yours, and build a two-second gap between the trigger and the response.
Regulate yourself first. Everything else downstream gets easier.
This sits at the centre of the Leadership Brain Framework™ — the methodology we use with every executive we work with — and it’s first for a reason. You cannot lead from a hijacked nervous system. You can only react from one, faster and louder, and call it decisiveness.
And the bit nobody warns you about: it’s lonely as hell.
The higher you go, the fewer people you can be honest with.
You can’t vent to your team — you’d be dumping. You can’t fully unload on your peers — you’re competing for resources. You can’t take it all home to your family, and you shouldn’t. Your old work friendships get weird because the power dynamic changed and nobody’s talking about it.
So you keep it in. And you sit there at 11 pm with a churning stomach thinking everyone else has this figured out.
They don’t. I’ve been in the room with a lot of them. They don’t.
Get a coach. Get a peer group outside your organisation. Get one person you can say the unspeakable thing to. This is not indulgence — it’s operational maintenance for the asset your entire organisation depends on.
Don’t become the role.
Last thing.
There is enormous pressure, in the first year of a senior role, to become a slightly stiffer, more corporate, less interesting version of yourself. To flatten out. To sand off the edges. To adopt the voice.
Don’t.
The reason you got the job is that you brought something specific — your judgement, your humour, your directness, your care, your way of seeing things. The second you trade that for a generic executive persona, you become fungible. And you become exhausted, because performing someone else’s personality for fifty hours a week is one of the fastest routes to burnout I know.
Be the same human in the boardroom, on the floor, and at the school pickup. Your integrity is the only leadership asset that compounds.
The short version, for the skimmers
- Your urgency is anxiety wearing a suit. Slow down.
- Listen properly, then come back with what you heard.
- Build your truth infrastructure before you need it.
- Your best skill is now your biggest risk. Let it go.
- Your calendar is the strategy. Everything else is decoration.
- Make one hard call by day sixty.
- Your peers matter more than you think.
- Regulate yourself. The room copies you.
- Get a coach. Do not white-knuckle this.
- Stay you.
You didn’t get here by accident. Someone looked at the evidence and made a call.
Now stop trying to justify their decision and start doing the job.
You’ve got this.
Sonia x
Want to go deeper?
📕 Read the book. Leadership Attitude is my book on why great leadership is a mindset before it’s a skill set — and how to build it deliberately, especially when you’re under pressure and out of your depth. If this article landed, that’s the long version. Find out more →
🎯 Book a Strategy Session. If you’re stepping into a new executive role — or you’ve just moved someone into one — the first ninety days decide the next three years. We work with executives and organisations to make that transition land. No pitch, no deck. Just a conversation about what’s actually going on. Book a Strategy Session →
🧠 Bring us into your organisation. Executive coaching, leadership programs, and keynotes built on the Leadership Brain Framework™ — used by Qantas, ANZ, Amazon, Coles, Telstra and government agencies across Australia. Start the conversation →
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Sonia McDonald is the CEO and Founder of LeadershipHQ, a three-time published author, and one of Australia’s most sought-after voices on human leadership. She has spent two decades coaching executives through exactly this transition — and has the scar tissue to prove it.
