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Episode full</itunes:episodeType> <itunes:episode>54/1 September 2026/9 min/The High Performance Leader

Episode 54: The 3 Biggest Leadership Challenges You Will Face as a Senior Manager, and How to Beat Them

Artwork for Episode 54: The 3 Biggest Leadership Challenges You Will Face as a Senior Manager, and How to Beat Them

Also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

In this episode, host Jimmy Burroughes breaks down the three biggest challenges senior managers face as they move into managing managers, and none of them come down to having too much to do. He unpacks altitude switching, task switching and functional switching, the hidden cognitive costs that quietly drain performance without you noticing. Using a Fortune 500 CEO case study and his own military experience, he shows exactly how each challenge shows up day to day, and introduces the PVC framework as the practical way to beat all three.

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Episode highlights:

(0:00) Intro

(1:38) Why burnout is a systemic issue, not a personal failing

(2:41) Challenge 1: altitude switching between strategic and operational thinking

(3:32) The cognitive cost of switching modes dozens of times a day

(4:23) Challenge 2: task switching and the 40% performance hit

(5:09) Case study: focus blocks for an overloaded CEO

(6:09) Challenge 3: functional switching across roles in a single day

(7:47) How to beat all three: strategic subtraction

(8:02) The PVC framework

(8:35) Outro

Follow and Subscribe to Jimmy Burroughes

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmyburroughes/

Website: https://jblhighperformance.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jimmybleadership/

If these challenges sound familiar and you want to explore whether it's worth a conversation, book a scoping call: https://calendly.com/jblhighperformance/scoping_call

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