The First 90 Days, Updated and Expanded. Michael D. Watkins

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СКАЧАТЬ at a leading consumer electronics company, Julia Gould was promoted to lead a major new product development project. Up to that point, her track record had been stellar. Her intelligence, focus, and determination had won her recognition and early promotion to increasingly senior positions. The company had designated her as a high-potential and had positioned her on the fast track to senior leadership.

      Julia was assigned to be the launch manager for one of the company’s hottest new products. It was her responsibility to coordinate the work of a cross-functional team drawn from marketing, sales, R&D, and manufacturing. The goal: to seamlessly move the product from R&D to production, oversee a rapid ramp-up, and streamline the market introduction.

      Unfortunately, Julia ran into trouble early on. Her earlier success in marketing was the result of extraordinary attention to detail. Accustomed to managing with authority and making the calls, she had a high need for control and a tendency to micromanage. When she tried to continue making decisions, members of the team initially said nothing. But soon two key members challenged her knowledge and authority. Stung, she focused on the area she knew best: the marketing aspects of the launch. Her efforts to micromanage the members of the marketing team alienated them. Within a month and a half, Julia was back in marketing, and someone else was leading the team.

      Julia failed because she did not make the leap from being a strong functional performer to taking on a cross-functional, project-leadership role. She failed to grasp that the strengths that had made her successful in marketing could be liabilities in a role that required her to lead without direct authority or superior expertise. She kept doing what she knew how to do, making her feel confident and in control. The result, of course, was the opposite. By not letting go of the past and not fully embracing her new role, she squandered a big opportunity to rise in the organization.

      It’s a mistake to believe that you will be successful in your new job by continuing to do what you did in your previous job, only more so. “They put me in the job because of my skills and accomplishments,” the reasoning goes. “So that must be what they expect me to do here.” This thinking is destructive, because doing what you know how to do (and avoiding what you don’t) can appear to work, at least for a while. You can exist in a state of denial, believing that because you’re being efficient, you’re being effective. You may keep believing this until the moment the walls come crashing down around you.

      What might Julia have done differently? She should have focused on better preparing herself for the new position. At the broadest level, preparing yourself means letting go of the past and embracing the imperatives of the new situation to give yourself a running start. It can be hard work, but it is essential. Often, promising managers fail in new roles because they’ve failed to prepare themselves by embracing the necessary changes in perspective.

      The starting point for preparing yourself is to understand the types of transitions you’re experiencing. To illustrate the challenges associated with different types of transitions (discussed in the introduction), I focus here on the two most frequently experienced types of transitions: promotions and onboarding into new companies.

      Getting Promoted

      A promotion marks the result 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. You must figure out what it takes to be excellent in the new role, how to exceed the expectations of those who promoted you, and how to position yourself for still greater things. Specifically, every promotion presents new leaders with a core set of challenges to be surmounted.

      Balance Breadth and Depth

      Each time you’re promoted, your horizon broadens to encompass a wider set of issues and decisions. So you need to gain and sustain a high-level perspective in your new role. To be successful, Julia needed to shift her focus from her marketing function to the full array of issues relating to the product launch.

      You also need to learn to strike the right balance between keeping the wide view and drilling down into the details. This juggling act can be challenging, because what had been the fifty-thousand-foot view in your previous role may be equivalent to the world at five thousand feet, or even five hundred feet, in your new job.

      Rethink What You Delegate

      The complexity and ambiguity of the issues you are dealing with increase every time you get promoted. So you’ll need to rethink what you delegate. No matter where you land, the keys to effective delegation remain much the same: you build a team of competent people whom you trust, you establish goals and metrics to monitor their progress, you translate higher-level goals into specific responsibilities for your direct reports, and you reinforce them through process.

      When you get promoted, however, what you delegate usually needs to change. If you’re leading an organization of five people, it may make sense to delegate specific tasks such as drafting a piece of marketing material or selling to 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 entire businesses.

      Influence Differently

      Conventional wisdom says that the higher you go, the easier it is to get things done. Not necessarily. Paradoxically, when you get promoted, positional authority often becomes less important for pushing agendas forward. Like Julia, you may indeed gain increased scope to influence decisions that affect the business, but the way you need to engage may be quite different. Decision making becomes more political—less about authority, and more about influence. That isn’t good or bad; it’s simply inevitable.

      There are two major reasons 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 solely on data and analysis declines correspondingly. Decisions are shaped more by others’ expert judgments and who trusts whom, as well as by networks of mutual support.

      Second, at a higher level of the organization, the other players 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. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the decision-making game becomes 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.

      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. To avoid this, you need to establish new communication channels to stay connected with what is happening where the action is. You might maintain regular, direct contact with select customers, for instance, or meet regularly with groups of frontline employees, all without undermining the integrity of the chain of command.

      You also need to establish new channels for communicating your strategic intent and vision across the organization—convening town-hall–type meetings rather than individual or small-group sessions, or using electronic communication to broadcast your messages to the widest possible audiences. Your direct reports should play a greater role in communicating your vision and ensuring the spread of critical information—something to remember when you’re evaluating the leadership skills of the team members you’ve inherited.

      Exhibit the Right Presence

      “All the world’s a stage,” as William Shakespeare put it in the play As You Like It, “and all the men and women merely players.” One inescapable reality of СКАЧАТЬ