The Normality of Struggle

Most people struggle with their first leadership position. In fact, if you make a seamless transition from individual contributor to manager—if you don’t have any bad days, doubts, or fears about your leadership capacity—then you’re probably in denial or your company culture prizes self-confidence so much that you find it difficult to acknowledge the challenge of this transition. Most new leaders experience some difficult moments in the first year or so in a new position. To deal effectively with them, do the following:

• Reflect and talk about the feedback you receive. For many people, this is the first time they have received 360-degree feedback. In the majority of cases, this feedback challenges your self-perception. You think of yourself as tremendously empathic, and your people are telling you that you’re oblivious to their concerns. Don’t become defensive about what you hear and don’t refuse to listen. Feedback is not a judgment of your capability. It is a summary of the perceptions of others. Force yourself to reflect on what you’ve been told and talk about it with someone you trust—your boss, a coach, or a mentor.

I learned a lot from [my first boss]. He spent time with me—a lot of personal time with me because it was a small organization. He was teaching me the things that he had learned. He had built these businesses from nothing. It was an extraordinary thing—the value of a mentor who is older, more experienced, and has seen the battles, to take someone under their wing. This is a tremendous boost to their future.

Ray Viault, Vice Chairman, General Mills

• Heed your instincts. This may seem like an odd bit of advice, but a great deal of business leadership is instinct—a fact that you may not learn in business school or as an individual contributor. Great leaders follow their gut when the data don’t give them a clear choice, and many first-time leaders are overly reliant on analysis. In this first leadership job, you’ll struggle with the dilemma of what you sense is true versus the expectations of your culture.

  For instance, you feel the right thing to do is outsource a task, but the decision could result in workforce reduction. Or perhaps your company emphasizes keeping certain tasks in-house in order to exert control over processes. This is a dilemma, and much of leadership is managing dilemmas (“right versus right” choices) rather than solving problems. Dealing with dilemmas becomes easier with experience. Early in a leadership career, though, you have to remind yourself to try to satisfy expectations without doing so at the expense of what you believe. People fail during this passage because they ignore their instincts and try to please others. They try to meet their boss’s expectations or conform to organizational norms and never form their own point of view. In fact, a key challenge of this passage is to both support your boss and differentiate yourself from your boss, sometimes at the same time. Those who try to satisfy their boss as repayment for their promotion to leadership may temporarily succeed because they meet expectations but ultimately fail as leaders because they’ve never developed their own take on things. Without this personal perspective, leaders can’t create original, compelling visions; they come off as ungrounded or fickle.

• Make the time to focus on people. This goes back to the challenge of “tasks versus people.” The reflex is usually to focus on tasks; you want to deliver great results to prove to everyone that you deserved your promotion. Fight this reflex. Be rigid with your schedule and priorities, making sure you create time for the dialogue and conversation that results in people development. Sometimes this expenditure of time may seem less efficient, but it is an essential element of leadership and supervision. Commit yourself to signing up for training, working with a coach, or just being conscious of people’s needs and concerns, and devote time to people-related learning.

• Grasp the network of influence and politics. Some new managers take to this right away, but others resist it. The independent individual contributor may have always disdained what he feels is subservience to others and believes people should be judged based on their work alone. This idealistic perspective is fine in an ideal world, but the organizational world reflects society, and we haven’t found many utopias. Networking is absolutely essential for leadership. Understand power and where it comes from, how things get done in your organization, what tradeoffs are made, and who has influence. Build your own network so that you can gain support for your initiatives. This isn’t about being a game-player; it’s not about being sycophantic or manipulating people. Instead, it’s about learning the network and how it functions and plugging yourself into it.

I remember (early on when we were preparing the filing for Chapter 11) when I had the conversation with the team when we had been living here on Chinese food. It was every single night, and it was six days a week. We had a conversation about what we were needing to do. I said, “We are going to have to now start to behave like this might go on for ever.” I still remember one of the guys in the group and the look on his face. I think he thought I meant that this was going to go on forever. I said, “This is going to go on for much longer than any of us can imagine, and we are going at sprint speed, and we can’t do that forever. I want people to take weekends off; I want vacations to get scheduled. That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to call you but you’ve got to get out of here.” As I said, I had no idea how long this was going to take. We had to come up with a way to chunk out the work and bring it back to the team. We chunked it out to a couple of key guys here and had them constantly bring stuff back in. For a while, we met every day.

Bob Glynn, chairman, CEO, president, PG&E Corporation

• Don’t abuse your power. Maybe this won’t be a problem for you, but in the name of speed or efficiency or “directness,” some people who are promoted into managerial jobs suddenly become the worst type of boss. The power associated with advancement reinforces their arrogant tendencies, and they become directive, controlling, and always right; they make unnecessary demands, antagonize support staff, and generally engage in negative behavior. To avoid abusing your power, keep the learning matrix in mind. When you believe you have nothing to learn, you’re being arrogant and vulnerable to these types of power abuses. If you approach the job believing you have a lot to learn, you’ll be much less likely to apply your positional power crudely.

  We’ve found that first-time leaders learn to use their power appropriately by studying how other leaders they respect use their authority. They see how these leaders navigate around roadblocks without being a bully and how they build coalitions rather than engage in melodramatic behavior. It’s also useful to study leaders who abuse their power to understand what not to do.

• Do the right thing, but don’t be convinced you always know what the right thing is. Again, this may sound like a Zen paradox, but the point is to have an open mind about what the right course of action is in a given situation. Some new leaders are so zealous about following their beliefs (the opposite of the politicians and those who focus only on results) that they offend everyone with their self-righteousness. It’s great to do what you feel is right, but leaders need to recognize there are shades of gray when it comes to right and wrong. Until recently, the Bank of America had as a key value for leaders “do the right thing.” Over time, however, it became clear that “the right thing” by one group of stakeholders might be exactly “the wrong thing” for another group. The bank has recently modified this key value to “make good decisions,” which reflects the relative rather than absolute aspect of doing right.

Just when our management group had achieved a major market victory, entitling us to well-earned bonuses, the then-chairman of the company intervened and said, “I’m going to make a big decision here.” He canceled the bonus program, full company. He had made a wrong decision, which created our company’s overall bad results, and even though my department—and a few others—had actually done a very good job and contributed strong numbers, he punished the whole company. That led me to realize this is not leadership. It is not the right way. You should take the blame, but you shouldn’t punish the people who have produced the results. It was an unfortunate decision in my opinion. The net result of it was that within six months of that time, I left the company.

Ray Viault, vice chairman, General Mills

Listen to other people’s points of view, even if you initially find them off-putting, and be open to negotiation and compromise. This does not mean that you should always negotiate and compromise. Good leaders learn when and how to pick their battles. This is the passage where you start learning this lesson. Be conscious of how you look and sound to others when you start fighting for what you feel is right. Listen to yourself. Are you objectively weighing other ideas and opinions? Are you considering other options besides your own before digging in?