Latest news with #SabinaNawaz
Forbes
6 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
What To Do After Your Promotion, According To Sabina Nawaz
Close up legs of businesswoman hurry up walking she is late time Female business people holding ... More laptop go to office in the modern city foot step on staircase I recently spoke with Sabina Nawaz about her book You're The Boss: Become the Manager You Want To Be. Nawaz is an executive coach and former Forbes contributor who focuses on senior leaders and high-potential employees within organizations. She spent fifteen years at Microsoft, first in software development and then in human resources. As Senior Director of Leadership, Management, Employee Development, and then Succession Planning, Nawaz launched several worldwide programs to help identify and cultivate Microsoft's current and future leaders. Nawaz discussed how leaders can avoid pitfalls and keep moving forward. Being a Boss Comes with New Rules Nawaz said leaders aren't always aware of the new rules that come with their promotion. For example, the leader may share concerns about their team to someone, and then that person shares with someone else. The whispers echo back; the new leader wonders whom they can trust. Another issue that new leaders can struggle with is increased visibility. You as a leader have an increased chance of messing up or making a decision that not everyone likes. Whereas before you operated in the wings, now you're on the stage, in the spotlight. The Cost of Taking on too Much. If you've achieved success, you may want to take on more. You're driven by your enthusiasm to make a meaningful impact, and often expected to deliver immediately. You have a vision; you take on a lot; therefore, your teams take on a lot. This is where things can go awry; take on too much, and you may burn out your teams. Nawaz shares advice to help you navigate the tough times and missteps of leadership; you don't need to do everything at once or take on every opportunity that shows comes across your desk. Be careful and selective as to what you want you and your team to tackle. Taking on too much will overload your team and create churn. Nawaz said it's hard for many leaders, including herself, to reckon with failure. Until they receive a big promotion, many leaders haven't had to grapple with failure. Then, the leader is playing on a bigger stage with higher stakes—some failure is inevitable, because everyone fails. Leaders who experience stress after a failure may grapple with burnout, anger, or even panic attacks. However, you can manage your burnout, relieve pressure on yourself and your teams, and set a smooth course for your leadership. Nawaz shares five actions you can take to find your footing after a big promotion. Five Actions to Become a Calm, Centered Leader 1. First, slow down. As a leader you have to make fast decisions; it can be easy to keep playing out old scripts in your mind without taking the time to think creatively. By slowing down and resisting the urge to take on too much, you can think more creatively and find new, elegant solutions to pressing problems. You also become more attuned to nuances in conversations; you're better equipped to see the whole picture, and therefore make better decisions. 2. Second, ask more questions. The more success you have, the fewer people who are willing to tell you the truth. Pretend you're a journalist. Get used to asking these questions: 'What do you think? Or 'What is one way we can fix this situation?' 3. Third, delegate. Promotions can be tricky; you may still want to micromanage and stay in the details of your teams' operation because that role feels comfortable; yet if you do, you're living in the past. Now is the time to lean into delegation. However, don't bypass all the details and abdicate your leadership. 4. Fourth, be methodical. After a promotion, you probably want to deliver immediately so your managers see your value. However, it's okay to be methodical and keep learning. Consider carefully your next big move; think strategically about how you want to move the company or department. 5. Fifth, always be learning. Successful people are always learning—not always managing. Read and learn every day. Set aside time each week to work on your development, no matter your current leadership level. Getting promoted and leading larger teams can have many hidden traps. You've been successful in the past--but now you're more visible. Delivering the work can be harder, and the stakes are much higher as well. However, your new role needn't leave you floundering. Nawaz shows leaders how to take a grounded approach to playing on a bigger stage by slowing down, asking questions, and methodically planning for success.
Geek Wire
05-07-2025
- Business
- Geek Wire
Managing in the age of AI, with former Microsoft leader, executive coach, and author Sabina Nawaz
Executive coach and author Sabina Nawaz explores the hidden forces that derail managers — and how to lead with intention — in her book, You're the Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need). (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Executive coach and former Microsoft leader Sabina Nawaz joins the podcast to talk about her new book, You're the Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need) — and why she believes pressure, not power, is what truly corrupts leaders. Management is undergoing a dramatic transformation as AI agents handle more routine work and companies including Microsoft and Amazon reduce their leadership layers, leaving fewer managers responsible for larger teams. We discuss this thinning layer of middle management, how AI tools are changing the landscape, and why some workers no longer aspire to lead. Nawaz shares tools and tips from the book, including Micro Habits, the power of 'blank space,' and how managers can stop micromanaging and start serving as the 'container, not the content.' She also reflects on her time advising Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer — including a memorable moment involving Ballmer, a name badge, and an umlaut — and explains why getting promoted from individual contributor into the management ranks might be the riskiest moment in a person's career. Listen below, and continue reading for key takeaways. AI and the 'Great Unbossing': Nawaz challenges the common refrain from managers dealing with layoffs who say they're 'doing more with less.' She says many leaders haven't yet made the mental shift to treat AI and automation as real resources — instead falling back on a scarcity mindset and personally taking on even more work. 'Is it really doing more with less?' she says. 'Because what you're truly doing is you're trading human head count for compute power.' Managing in flatter organizations: Nawaz warns that traditional management approaches won't survive the current industry transformation. With companies like Amazon and Microsoft cutting management layers while expecting the remaining managers to oversee larger teams, she says the heroic 'sole provider' mentality is unsustainable. 'If you manage the old way, you're going to get insurmountable levels of pressure, and it's just not going to scale. It's going to fall apart,' she says. From hierarchy to collaboration: With fewer management layers, Nawaz says it's especially important to move past the traditional command-and-control approach. Rather than managers hoarding decision-making authority based on their titles, she advocates for distributing ownership across teams. 'The fulcrum of power and ownership needs to shift from positional to people,' she says. 'It needs to shift from people who have the title of manager to all the people who are responsible for the work.' Pressure, not power, corrupts: Nawaz's central thesis challenges conventional wisdom about leadership failures. 'It is not power that corrupts, but pressure,' she says. 'Pressure is the silent corrupter. It affects everyone. It's everywhere and constant, and it doesn't just stress us out. It changes how we act.' Her research shows that the same person can be both 'the best boss ever' and 'the boss from hell' — depending on how they handle pressure. Managing that pressure: So how do leaders avoid letting pressure corrupt their actions? Rather than dramatic overhauls, Nawaz suggests tiny, sustainable changes. Examples include taking three deep breaths before delivering difficult feedback — a simple act that, as she notes in the book, helps regulate emotion and creates space to respond with intention rather than reaction. She also recommends building what she calls the 'shut-up muscle' — holding back and letting others speak first, instead of always being the first voice in the room. In a similar vein, another tip is taking time for 'blank space': two hours of completely unplugged time each week to let solutions emerge naturally. Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Podcast audio editing by Curt Milton. You're the Boss, by Sabina Nawaz, is published by Simon & Schuster. It's also available as an audiobook, read by the author.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
At Microsoft she was in charge of professional development for 90,000 employees. She found this trait prevents women from getting promoted
Good morning! Bill fighting revenge porn passed by Congress, UPS to cut 20,000 jobs, and Fortune's Nina Ajemian talks with former Microsoft exec Sabina Nawaz about how managers can overcome the pressures of leadership. - Management 101. Managers in the workplace adopt a few identities, according to Sabina Nawaz, the ex-Microsoft exec and executive coach behind the new book You're the Boss. There's the flash, a leader who gets things done at warp speed in the name of efficiency; the straight-A student, a perfectionist with high standards; and the whack-a-mole, a boss who is always putting out fires. But one identity is more likely to hold women back in the workplace: the caretaker. Caretaking can, of course, be healthy—but being too caring can often manifest in managers constantly picking up the slack for their employees and 'rescuing' their team. This behavior hurts employees' growth and often makes managers feel like they are being taken advantage of. Men and women are equally likely to be caretaker-style managers. But that quality can manifest—and be perceived—in different ways. For men, this may look like being a superhero, jumping in when they notice their team is busy. Women, on the other hand, often take their team's feelings into consideration, not wanting anyone to feel badly if they push too hard, Nawaz shares. 'In many ways, that's great,' Nawaz says. 'It's that richness of emotional intelligence and that awareness of my impact on other people, which helps with all the other traps that we talk about.' These qualities often become clear during a person's first promotion to manager. and McKinsey have termed that promotion the 'broken rung' on the career ladder, when women often fall behind men in the workplace. But Nawaz has found that that time can be risky even for the women who do get promoted. The characteristics that led to their promotion can hurt them as managers. Often, for women, that's being detail-oriented—an asset for an individual contributor, but an often unfairly misinterpreted signal to leadership that a manager is not a 'strategic' thinker. Through her coaching, Nawaz has heard from women who get that feedback when they are first promoted to manager. 'I realize, 'Oh, you're plenty strategic. There's nothing wrong with your strategic thinking,'' she says. 'It's some of that caretaking…and how you're doing that that get[s] in the way.' Nawaz, who was Microsoft's senior director of HR, wrote this book after reflecting on how she changed after her boss left the company—and left Nawaz in charge of professional development for Microsoft's 90,000 employees. Plus, with increased responsibility came increased visibility, as she was now working more directly with Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and former CEO Steve Ballmer. She wasn't the boss she wanted or needed to be, she discovered. 'Without realizing it, I slid from being a caring and supportive boss to one who was snippy and belligerent,' Nawaz writes. She lost connection with her team. Feeling the pressure that came with a bigger job, she became a micromanager. In You're the Boss, Nawaz describes a low point: when she made team members come in early to individually test the 50 pens gifted in swag bags after an attendee received a defective one. A colleague staged an intervention, and told her she wasn't aware how her actions were coming across to her team. 'We love to put these binary judgments [on people]: good boss, bad boss. Good person, bad person. No! All of that is inside us,' says Nawaz. 'For me, it was about coming clean, showing people that all of us succumb to this, and being as open and vulnerable as I could be. Was it easy? No. But if I am, then other people hopefully are as well, and then they can get to what's really at play.' Nina The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune's daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today's edition was curated by Nina Ajemian. Subscribe here. This story was originally featured on Sign in to access your portfolio
Forbes
05-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Leadership's Tough Side: Why Being The Boss Isn't Always Easy
. Life is full of absurdities. Would we entrust an airplane to someone who's had no flight training? Of course not. Would we ask a guy off the street to perform surgery on someone we love? Not a chance. But in the daily workplace we're not as circumspect. We hand people the job of manager and ask them to figure it out. Then they, and we, are perplexed when good intentions and hard work don't produce the results we wanted. Sound familiar? It does to elite executive coach Sabina Nawaz. She advises C-level executives and teams at Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, nonprofits, and academic institutions around the world. During her 14-year tenure at Microsoft, she advanced from managing software development teams to leading the company's executive development and succession planning efforts for more than 11,000 managers and nearly a thousand executives—advising Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer directly. Many of the golden nuggets of what she's learning and teaching are found in her book You're the Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need). For example, some managers become superstars while others crash and burn. What seem to be the make-a-difference factors? 'One of the key differentiators is the capacity to stop and remove the blinders to recognize that the higher you go, the less you know,' Nawaz says. 'Not because you're wired for ignorance, not because you don't want to know. But because the higher we go, the less people are inclined to give us the honest feedback we need.' Nawaz says a common impediment to leadership excellence is the myth that business is not personal. 'We're dealing with human beings, not automatons,' she says. 'Human beings come bundled with all the stuff above the neck—intellect, curiosity, analysis, data, logic—and all that stuff below the neck that resides in your heart, in your guts, feelings, emotions, reactions. interpretations, assumptions, and fears. All of that is personal. A good boss must understand that.' Sabina Nawaz Nawaz says the riskiest time in a person's life is when they get promoted. She offers advice on how to thrive instead of dive. 'When we get promoted, our perch in the organizational hierarchy has changed,' she says. 'The things we considered as our strengths and what propelled us upward may now come across very differently and be regarded less charitably by those around us. Let's say you've paid a lot of attention to detail. It's a great trait. But if you continue with that attention to detail as a manager you'll be perceived as micromanaging. Your people will regard you as a control freak. If you've been very strategic in your previous position and carry that tendency into your new job as manager, you may be regarded as manipulative. So, in a different situation our strengths might be perceived as problematic. A helpful exercise is to write down some of your superpowers. Then do your best to honestly look at those from the perspective of someone three levels down. From a different vantage point, those 'superpowers' may come across in ways you don't intend.' In today's workplace, burnout is becoming increasingly more common. Nevertheless, some people seem to regard busyness as a badge of honor. What's the key to avoiding that trap? . Nawaz says one way is to create what she calls a time portfolio. 'We may say that time is our most valuable asset, but do we really treat it that way? Most of us have financial portfolios to help us decide how to save, invest, and spend our money. Time is no different. We can strategically budget and allocate our time by creating buckets for meetings or reviewing reports or for conferences or for physical exercise or for anything that's truly important to us. Then you can get into the details.' She provides an example. 'If we're spending 30% of our time on email and communications, we may decide to reduce that to 20%. But as with New Year's resolutions, that's not likely to happen. So, we can go for a micro step from 30% to 28% by turning off notifications so we're not distracted every time a new message comes in. The key is intentionality.' For managers who want to tap the ingenuity of their team members, Nawaz recommends use of what she calls the 'Shut-up' exercise. 'If you come into a meeting and say, 'this is just a brainstorm meeting, but I thought we'd be more efficient if I brought this first draft of a plan,' you're only going to get lipstick on the pig. You'll get marginal comments at best. Everyone's going to say that's great. If you're the first one to pipe up with ideas, no one else is going to argue with your ideas. So for the manager a key part of the shut-up exercise is to be the third or fourth or fifth one to speak, not the first or second.' Nawaz offers a masterclass for leaders who are navigating the pressures of authority and the pitfalls of power.
