How to Adapt Leadership Development Strategies Across Managerial Levels

The skills of leadership aren’t technical skills such as Scrum, SEO, or SQL. Rather, they are socioemotional skills such as setting vision, building relationships, driving change, and making decisions. These skills evolve with leadership advancement. Experienced talent professionals recognize the importance of leadership development strategies at every managerial level.

Leadership development does not equate solely to executive development. At Hogan, we don’t define leadership by job title but as the ability to build and maintain a high-performing team. Thus, people at every managerial level—from entry-level supervisor to C-suite executive—can benefit from leadership development. As the demands of leadership shift across managerial levels, development objectives should change too.

Sometimes leaders need to develop new skills. Sometimes they need to reduce their use of certain skills. At other times, they need to apply existing skills in new ways. Consider integrity, for example. While integrity is a core skill at all managerial levels, how a leader demonstrates integrity when managing a three-person team looks different from when they are leading an entire business function.

How a leader’s actions appear to others matters. Fostering the development of socioemotional skills in leaders is a long-term process that focuses on reputation. Reputation is related to behavior. With sustained behavioral change, reputation change can occur—a meaningful outcome of leadership development.

What Are the Managerial Levels?

Broadly, managers are employees with authority over organizational resources. They perform a variety of these tasks: organizing, planning, prioritizing, assigning, and directing work across the organization. Managers at any level succeed or fail based on the accomplishments of the people they lead. If they build and maintain high-performing teams, they’re leaders by H ogan’s definition.

Hogan identifies three managerial levels: (1) entry-level supervisors, (2) middle managers, and (3) executives. Entry-level supervisors manage teams and employees and report to middle managers. Middle managers manage other managers, teams, and employees and report to executives. Executives manage business units and report to stakeholder teams.

The objective differences among the three managerial levels are the positions they manage and the positions to whom they report. However, the functional differences among managerial levels can be considerable. The impact of a leader’s actions increases in breadth and scope as they gain organizational responsibility. For instance, a digital marketing manager, a marketing director, and a chief marketing officer all differ in more than just their job descriptions. The socioemotional skills they need to be successful in their day-to-day tasks of leadership differ too.

Distinctions Between Entry-Level Supervisors, Middle Managers, and Executives

To explore the similarities and distinctions in necessary competencies across managerial levels, Hogan conducted a job analysis. Hundreds of subject-matter experts rated key skills for entry-level supervisors, middle managers, and executives. Then, Hogan data scientists used the results to average, rank, and compare how important each skill is for each job level. The results show that some skills are shared among all managerial levels, some skills overlap, and some are unique.

Shared Skills

Managerial levels share many job skills. Integrity, accountability, decision-making, and teamwork are all examples of shared competencies ranked highly by our subject-matter experts.

When skills are shared across job levels, they tend to differ in scope. Take teamwork, for example. Teamwork for entry-level supervisors involves actively participating in day-to-day tasks. Teamwork for an executive is more remote, requiring the executive to rely on the team's expertise to accomplish tasks.

The scope of decision-making changes in a similar way. Quinn, as an entry-level supervisor, will likely make frequent, rapid decisions to help individual contributors accomplish tasks. Their decision-making will involve tactics for executing strategy set by others. When Quinn becomes a middle manager, they will make decisions with more strategic impact, given their increased accountability. Reaching the executive level, Quinn will likely make wide-impact, high-stakes decisions about organizational strategy, which will be executed by others. Overall, decision-making evolves gradually from how to implement executives’ vision to how to inspire others.

Overlapping Skills

Data suggest that middle management is a transitional managerial level. The required skills middle managers share with entry-level supervisors are focused on outcomes. The competencies they share with executives are focused on relationships.

Both entry-level supervisors and middle managers need to work hard and overcome obstacles. These speak to the importance of accomplishing tasks. Those who manage frontline employees or individual contributors, whether singly or in groups, likely require more skills related to the job function. For instance, a manager of a team of bank tellers probably relies on their knowledge of customer service to overcome obstacles more often than the regional banking director.

Both middle managers and executives need skills related to widening their network and sphere of influence. Building relationships, building teams, and inspiring others all concern how a leader behaves with other people. Getting along with others at work matters deeply at every managerial level, of course. At higher organizational ranks, however, cooperation becomes even more integral to performance success.

Unique Skills

Subject-matter experts ranked some skills as key only at certain managerial levels. Generally, competencies progress from operational to strategic across managerial levels.

Entry-level supervisors need the skills of dependability, problem-solving, stress management, and time efficiency. Collectively, these skills focus on accomplishing immediate tasks and fulfilling short-term responsibilities. At the executive level, leaders need the skills of driving change and listening to others. These skills emphasize long-term organizational success rather than individual or team success.

Of course, the unique competencies for a given leadership role will also vary based on the organization and its industry.

This post was originally published on Hogan Assessments