The pay increase and perks of a job promotion carry a price. If you don’t want to pay it, you may need to rethink your career aspirations. As I look back at the teams I’ve led and leaders I’ve coached, I discovered a gap with how people navigate career advancement. When someone gets a promotion, they usually want it for the prestige of the title, the increase in pay, and/or the recognition for their hard work. The focus is often on what the promotion will do for them. How their lifestyle will improve with the extra money. How they will potentially receive elevated treatment from others in the organization. When I coach aspiring leaders, they seem to look at only one side of the promotion coin – the shiny one. The other side of the leadership promotion coin is rather dull. This side is sometimes ignored or dismissed until it’s too late. What, you ask, is on the less shiny side of the leadership coin? The invisible bullet points on the job description. Top 10 Invisible Bullet Points on any Leadership Job Description You will need to learn new ways of doing. You will need to manage relationships differently. You will need to coach and develop others. You will need to have hard conversations. You will need to make tough decisions. You will need to live your values as you lead. You will need to model the organization’s values. You will need to be okay with not being liked sometimes. You will need to increase your capacity. You will need to strengthen your resiliency. If you choose to advance in leadership, your first step is to look in the mirror. Be ready to refine and evolve how you show-up, how you think, communicate, and engage. A promotion, in many ways, should be a reset for you.

In recent years, especially post-COVID, the word transformation has become a buzzword across various industries. Personal trainers use this word to describe the physical metamorphosis they’ll help you achieve, and organizations use it to outline how they'll leverage technology, particularly in the age of AI. Beyond physical and technological change, transformation takes on new significance in the realm of leadership—specifically, transformational leadership. We often see the term in leadership contexts, but what does it truly mean? The concept of transformational leadership has been around for quite some time, originally coined by sociologist James V. Downton in 1973. Over the years, the defining qualities of a transformational leader have evolved to become, at their core, leaders who focus on the essential needs of their followers. Today, it’s more relevant than ever. My own journey toward becoming a transformational leader was unplanned, and something I only fully recognized in hindsight. It evolved in ways I never anticipated. Around 2003, I was working for a global company as the director of corporate communications. That year, we conducted our first large-scale employee engagement survey. As we analyzed the results, some findings were predictable. Typical areas like pay and benefits ranked in the bottom quartile, representing the lowest-rated aspects of employee satisfaction. However, there was one surprising item in the Bottom 5 for employee satisfaction: a question about whether employees felt good about the company’s contributions to the community. This result was unsettling to our executive team because, truthfully, it uncovered something we had not anticipated. At the time, giving back to the community on a company level was not a priority. Somehow, I was tasked with finding a solution, and at first, I didn’t know where to start.