Master Your Next Move Read online

  In summary, this book is about how leaders can survive and thrive when dealing with the classic types of transitions that virtually everyone faces on their journey to the top. The chapters that follow build on my work in The First 90 Days but delve much more deeply into the specific transition challenges you are facing now and will continue to face in the future. You will be given clear road maps—advice and tools—to excel in your next move . . . and in every move after that.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Promotion Challenge

  Bert Vandervliet had been working steadily toward this promotion for years. But just four months into his new job, as a business unit leader at BSC Chemicals, the euphoria was beginning to wear off: the realities of what it would take to lead the company’s plastic resins manufacturing unit were becoming evident—and Bert was wondering if he was fully prepared for the challenges of handling a global business with more than three thousand employees worldwide.

  Bert had spent his entire fifteen-year career at BSC, a maker of specialty chemicals, plastics, and pharmaceuticals headquartered in Belgium. He had joined BSC’s performance plastics unit soon after completing his master’s degree. Even in his first job, as an assistant product manager, he had won early recognition for his leadership abilities. Bert’s strong performance continued, and eventually he was assigned to help set up the performance plastics unit’s new Asian business center in Singapore. He quickly built up the sales side of that venture and was promoted to sales manager. In addition to the sales responsibility, he was also charged with managing the subcontracting of BSC’s plastics production, so Bert ended up gaining some good exposure to the manufacturing side of the business.

  When he returned to Belgium three years later, he was promoted to European marketing and sales director, overseeing a group of eighty professionals in technical marketing, sales, and customer service. He also became a member of that unit’s top management team, which allowed him to experience decision making at the business-unit level and to familiarize himself with what was going on in other functions. In due course, he was transferred to BSC’s polyethylene division as a vice president of marketing and sales, responsible for a cluster of products, related services, and a staff of nearly two hundred.

  Now recognized as one of the future leaders of the company with twelve years of experience, Bert was asked to join BSC’s corporate human resources organization. He was responsible for internal sourcing and external recruitment of executives, a role he held for almost three years. This gave him a deeper understanding of HR, a broader view of the company’s operations, a chance to build an organization-wide network, and greater visibility with BSC’s senior executives.

  All of Bert’s hard work culminated in his appointment as the business unit leader for plastic resins, a sister unit of performance plastics in BSC’s plastic materials division. The resins business manufactured the raw material for fabricating plastic components. It was relatively small but one of BSC’s best-performing units. Quite intentionally, the senior team at BSC had assigned Bert to a successful business with a strong team that could help him learn what it meant to head up a thriving unit and, over time, push his leadership skills to the next level. The setup was perfect, completely in his favor—yet Bert was astonished at how much he was struggling to climb the learning curve.

  He fretted about the high expectations placed on him; after all, when you inherit a successful business, there’s often no place to go but down. The resins business was highly profitable but mature—which presented Bert with a very different set of challenges than he had experienced in the high-growth performance plastics business. He worried that any significant misstep could seriously limit his future prospects at BSC.

  Bert also quickly recognized the difference between leading a particular functional group, as he had in the past, versus overseeing multiple functional areas within a complete business. Most of the people Bert was leading now knew much more about operations, say, or R&D, than he did. Yet they were expecting him to make the right trade-offs between the supply and demand sides of the business (operations versus marketing and sales) and between focusing on current results and investing in the future (finance versus R&D). Because of the cross-functional nature of his new role, Bert felt much less rooted in any one area of expertise, and thus much less confident in his ability to discern the strengths and weaknesses of his team.

  Bert was also now leading many more employees than he ever had. In his other management roles at BSC, he had been able to initiate a reasonable degree of personal contact, albeit sometimes sporadic, with most of his employees—something that was simply impossible in this new role, with more than three thousand people scattered in facilities around the globe. The implications of this became clear to him as he worked with his team to craft the annual strategy. When the time came to communicate it to the organization, he realized that he couldn’t go out and simply sell the vision and strategy by himself; he had to work more through his direct reports and find other channels for spreading the word. And after touring most of the unit’s facilities, Bert likewise worried that he’d never really be able to keep in touch with what was happening on the front lines.

  As a member of various management teams during his tenure at BSC, Bert had gained some appreciation for how difficult it was for business heads to prioritize all the issues thrown at them in any given day, week, or month. Still, Bert was surprised by the scope and complexity of the problems at this level. He wasn’t sure how to allocate his time and immediately felt overloaded. He knew he needed to delegate more, but he wasn’t clear yet about which tasks and assignments he could safely leave to others.

  Never mind that Bert had also recently become aware of some potentially dangerous patterns in how he was managing his new team in the plastic resins unit. A month earlier, his vice president of HR, an experienced and insightful executive, offered the new leader some blunt but friendly feedback: “You seem to be over-managing your VP of sales and marketing. You need to give Kurt a little space.” The HR executive also suggested that Bert be a bit more careful about how and when he raised new ideas in meetings with the senior team. “I know you’re just trying to get the group to be more open and flexible, but they worry that they need to mobilize around every brainstorm.”

  Finally, Bert was still adjusting to the increasing external demands on his time. While he had of course listened in on analyst calls in the past, he was now expected to lead the discussions and field tough questions. Other types of requests were flooding in to the unit leader’s support staff, as well: Could Bert participate in important industry/government forums sponsored by the corporate government affairs group? Would Bert be willing to sit for an interview with an editor from Forbes magazine? Could Bert speak at the various industry conferences, awards ceemonies, and other events happening locally and overseas within the next few months?

  The Promotion Challenge

  As Bert’s experience suggests, a promotion definitely marks the end of years of hard work to persuade influential people in the organization that you’re willing and able to move to the next level. But it also marks the beginning of a new journey in which you must figure out what it takes to excel in the new role, how to exceed the expectations of those who promoted you, and how to position yourself for still-greater things. That’s the promotion challenge.

  What does it take to meet this challenge? In The First 90 Days, I stressed the importance of “promoting yourself.” Rest assured, I was not advocating the ego-driven selling of oneself, but rather, highlighting the need for executives to prepare themselves mentally to move to the next level of the organization and to meet any personal-change challenges. As I put it in that book, promoting yourself doesn’t mean believing that you will be successful in your new job by continuing to do what you did in your previous job, only more so. It means letting go of the past and embracing the imperatives of the new situation.1

  As you work to promote yourself, it also helps to distinguish between challen
ges that are common to most promotions and challenges that are specific to the level and position to which you’re ascending. The common challenges flow, in large part, from predictable changes in the information-processing demands placed on leaders as they rise up through organizations. As I will discuss in the following sections, for example, coping with increasing issue breadth and complexity requires leaders to rethink how and what they delegate each time they get promoted.

  But it’s not enough to focus on these common promotion challenges, because there are specific, level-dependent competencies that leaders must develop to be successful. It’s here that newly promoted leaders tend to get into the most trouble; their experience better prepares them to deal with the common challenges of promotion (e.g., delegating differently) than to develop wholly new level-specific competencies.

  Bert Vandervliet, for example, is trying to figure out what it means to move from a functional vice president’s role to a true general management job. To solve this riddle, he’ll need to identify both the core challenges and competency gaps he faces, and then organize himself to deal with them most effectively. He’ll have to exercise personal discipline to do things he normally wouldn’t, build a team that complements him, and think hard about what advice and counsel he’ll need and how he’ll use it.

  Core Promotion Challenges

  Many of the core promotion challenges leaders face, listed below, are actually by-products of the different information-processing and influence demands transitioning executives encounter at higher levels of the organization.

  Your impact horizon, or the range of issues and challenges you have a direct hand in addressing, broadens significantly as you move up; you are juggling more things and are forced to do more multitasking.

  The complexity and ambiguity of what you have to deal with increases: for any given issue, there are many more variables to consider, and cause-and-effect relationships often become less clear as you move to higher levels of the organization.

  Organizational politics become more challenging at higher levels; peers and bosses are more capable and have stronger personalities.

  You need to lead farther from the front lines, which can make it difficult to communicate strategy downward and stay informed about what’s happening on the ground.

  You are under more scrutiny by more people, more frequently; there are fewer private moments when you are not on stage.

  For each of these common core challenges, there are associated strategies for what you need to do to promote yourself. (See figure 1-1.)

  FIGURE 1-1

  Core promotion challenges

  For each core challenge there are corresponding strategies that newly promoted leaders should employ.

  Balance Breadth and Depth

  Each time you’re promoted, your impact horizon broadens to encompass a wider set of issues and decisions. Whereas Bert was formerly focusing on his function and its impact on the larger business, now he has to deal with the full array of issues affecting the unit.

  To deal with this increase in scope, leaders have to be able to gain and sustain an integrative view of the business. In The Nature of Leadership, authors B. Joseph White and Yaron Prywes describe this as a “helicopter view”—a broad perspective on the organization, encompassing its past, present, and future.2

  But the leader-as-helicopter metaphor has even richer possibilities: Helicopters don’t just hover; they move up or down in response to the pilot’s needs. In the context of promotions and transition challenges, it’s helpful to emember that even as you gain managerial altitude and perspective, you must preserve your ability to dive deep into issues when the situation demands it. You can’t afford to always stay at fifty thousand feet. You have to be able to pick an issue of concern and start digging into it, asking questions and pushing for answers until you are confident there is a firm foundation for people’s opinions and judgments. Doing this well means knowing which are the critical “fulcrum issues” that now or will impact the business, which in turn rests on your ability to gain and sustain the integrative view. It also means, as I will discuss shortly, being an effective “problem finder.”

  You need to do this selectively, of course, and you need to be able to move back up to a higher level once you’re satisfied: it’s dangerous to hover near ground level for too long, regardless of how interesting the scenery is. This is especially the case if you find yourself focusing too much on the business activities or functions you were involved with before you were promoted. The concerns raised by the VP of HR that Bert was “overmanaging” his VP of sales and marketing suggest that he might be at risk of falling into this trap.

  Understanding when to keep soaring and when to swoop down for a closer look is something that every leader needs to relearn each time he or she gets promoted—because the fifty-thousand-foot view in your previous leadership role may just be the world at five thousand feet, or even five hundred feet, in your new job. Key here is to have early discussions with advisors about how to approach this. It also helps to identify one or more role models, people who are viewed as highly effective at the level to which you have been promoted. Talk to them or people who have worked with them if you can; study them from a distance if you can’t.

  Rethink What You Delegate

  The complexity and ambiguity of the issues you are dealing with will increase as you move into a new role—which means you’ll need to reorganize your approach to handling particular projects, products, processes, and so on. In particular, you’ll need to rethink what you delegate.

  Management sage Peter Drucker said it as far back as the early 1950s: the ability to delegate lies at the heart of leadership.3 Regardless of where you land in the organization, the keys to effective delegation emain pretty much the same: you build a team of competent people whom you trust, you establish goals and metrics through which you can monitor people’s progress, you translate higher-level goals into specific responsibilities for your direct reports, and you reinforce them through some sort of management-by-objectives process. In other words, the “how” of delegation is a constant.

  However, “what” you delegate—the basic units of analysis through which you engage with your direct reports—often needs to change when you get promoted. If you are leading an organization of five people, it may make sense to delegate specific tasks such as drafting a piece of marketing material or pursuing a particular customer. In an organization of fifty people, your focus may shift from tasks to projects and processes. At five hundred people, you often need to delegate responsibility for specific products or platforms. And at five thousand people, your direct reports may be responsible for whole businesses, and so on.

  Influence Differently

  Conventional wisdom says that the higher up in the organization you go, the easier it is to get things done. Not necessarily. Paradoxically, when you get promoted, positional authority becomes less rather than more important for pushing agendas forward. You may indeed have increased scope to make decisions that affect the business, but there are significant differences in the ways you need to make those decisions. The process becomes more political—less about authority, and more about influence—which isn’t good or bad, simply inevitable.

  There are two major reasons why this is so. First, the issues you’re dealing with become much more complex and ambiguous when you move up a level—and your ability to identify “right” answers based on data and analysis declines accordingly. In this milieu, decisions are shaped more by others’ expert judgments and dominant worldviews, so, despite your positional authority, it’s actually the people who exhibit that expertise and create those worldviews who have the most influence on what happens.

  Second, at a higher level of the organization, critical constituencies are more capable and have stronger egos. Remember, you were promoted because you are able and driven; the same is true for everyone around you—peers, bosses, and other stakeholders. So it shouldn’t come as a complete surprise that the decision-ma
king game becomes that much more bruising and politically charged the higher up you go. It’s critical, then, for you to become more effective at building and sustaining alliances and for you to become expert in corporate diplomacy.

  Communicate More Formally

  The good news about moving up is that you get a broader view of the business and more latitude to shape it. The bad news is that you are farther from the front lines and more likely to receive filtered information as a result. “Now, folks shield me from information that I ordinarily would have received in my old job,” one newly promoted executive told me.

  To avoid this, you’ll need to establish alternative communication channels. You might maintain regular, direct contact with customers and select front-line employees, for instance, or create formal protocols so people at lower levels can raise serious legal or ethical concerns—all without undermining the integrity of the chain of command, of course.

  You’ll also need to establish new, more formal channels for communicating your strategic intent and vision across the organization—convening town hall–style meetings rather than individual or small-group sessions, or using e-mails and video more frequently to broadcast your messages to the widest possible audiences. Your direct reports may also end up playing a greater role in the spread of critical information—something to emember when you’re evaluating the team members you have inherited and the leadership and communication qualities they possess.