Hypoxia
I've been thinking about a metaphor that one of my previous reports used to use to describe information as you move "up the chain": He would say that the "amount of oxygen" you have reduces significantly as you move higher up. (As with mountain climbers; as you move up the mountain, the air is thinner and there is less oxygen in each breath. Mountains and org charts have similar shapes, so I guess that's another layer to the metaphor that helps it stick.) It's been a few months now, but I think the point he was making is that you have significantly less information density as a manager of managers (or as a manager of managers of managers), and you must recognize that this is your new environment. I think this realization leads to a few useful, directly actionable insights: You must get used to having fewer details and less information than you are used to, despite still needing to make decisions for your team/organization. This pushes you to delegate mor...