Promoting Yourself

How can you avoid this trap? How can you be sure to embrace the challenges of your new position? This section provides some basic principles for mentally getting ready for your new position.

Establish a Clear Breakpoint

The move from one position to another usually happens in a blur. You rarely get much notice before being thrust into a new job. A lucky new leader gets a couple of weeks, but more often the move is measured in days. You get caught up in a scramble to finish up in your old job even as you try to wrap your arms around the new one. Even worse , you may be pressured to perform both jobs until your previous position is filled, making the line of demarcation even fuzzier.

Because you may not get a clean transition in terms of job responsibilities, it is essential to discipline yourself to make the transition mentally. Pick a specific time, such as a weekend , and use it to imagine yourself being promoted. Consciously think of letting go of the old job and embracing the new one. Think hard about the differences between the two and in what ways you have to think and act differently. Take the time to celebrate your move, even informally, with family and friends . Use the time to touch base with your informal advisers and counselors and to ask for some quick advice. The bottom line: Do whatever it takes to get into the transition state of mind.

Hit the Ground Running

Your transition begins the moment you learn you are being considered for a new job (see figure 1-1). It ends roughly 90 days after you begin the job. By this point, key people in the organization ”your bosses, peers, and direct reports ”expect you to be getting some traction.

Figure 1-1: Key Transition Milestones

A three-month time frame is not a hard and fast rule; it depends on what type of situation you are entering. Regardless, you should use the 90-day mark as a key milestone for planning purposes. It will help you confront the need to operate in a compressed time frame. If you are lucky, you may get a month or more of lead time between learning you are being considered and sitting in the chair . Use that time to begin educating yourself about your organization.

Regardless of how much preparation time you get, start planning what you hope to accomplish by specific milestones. You probably won t have much time, but even a few hours of preentry planning go a long way. Begin by thinking about your first day in the new job. What do you want to do by the end of that day? Then move to the first week. Then focus on the end of the first month, the second month, and finally the three-month mark. These plans will be sketchy, but the simple act of beginning to plan will help clear your head.

Assess Your Vulnerabilities

You have been offered your new position because those who hired you think you have the skills to succeed. You probably do.

But as we saw in the cases of Julia Gould and Douglas Ivester, it can be fatal to rely too much on what made you successful in the past. As one senior executive expressed it, Everyone has an urge to work at one level below where they are. You need to work where you are, not where you were.

One way to pinpoint your vulnerabilities is to assess your problem preferences ”the kinds of problems toward which you naturally gravitate. Everyone likes to do some things more than others. Julia Gould s preference was marketing; for Douglas Ivester it was finance and operations. Your preferences have probably influenced you to choose jobs where you can do more of what you like to do. As a result, you perfect those skills and feel most competent when you solve problems in those areas, which reinforces the cycle. This pattern is like exercising your right arm and ignoring your left: The strong arm gets stronger and the weak one atrophies. The risk, of course, is that you create an imbalance that leaves you vulnerable in situations in which success depends on being ambidextrous.

Table 1-1 is a simple tool for assessing your preferences for different kinds of business problems. Fill in each cell by assessing your intrinsic interest in solving problems in the domain in question. In the first cell, for example, ask yourself how much you like to work on appraisal and reward systems. This isn t a comparative question; don t compare this interest with others. Rank your interest in each type of problem separately, on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 10 (very much). Keep in mind that you are being asked about your intrinsic interests, not your skills or experience. Do not turn the page before completing the table.

Table 1-1: Assessment of Problem Preferences

Design of appraisal and reward systems __________	Employee morale __________	Equity/Fairness __________
Management of financial risk __________	Budgeting __________	Cost-consciousness __________
Product positioning __________	Relationships with customers __________	Organizational customer focus __________
Product or service quality __________	Relationships with distributors and suppliers __________	Continuous improvement __________
Project management systems__________	Relationships among R&D, marketing, and operations __________	Cross-functional cooperation __________

Now transfer your rankings from table 1-1 to the corresponding cells in table 1-2. Then sum the three columns and the five rows.

The column totals represent your preferences among technical, political, and cultural problems. Technical problems encompass strategies, markets, technologies, and processes. Political problems concern power and politics in the organization. Cultural problems involve values, norms, and guiding assumptions.

If one column total is noticeably lower than the others, it represents a potential blind spot for you. If you score high on technical and low on cultural or political, for example, you may be at risk of overlooking the human side of the organizational equation.

The row totals represent your preferences for different business functions. A low score in any row suggests that you prefer not to grapple with problems in that functional area. Again, these are potential blind spots.

Table 1-2: Preferences for Problems and Functions

	Technical	Political	Cultural	Total
Human Resources
Finance
Marketing
Operations
Research and Development
Total

The results of this diagnostic exercise should help you answer the following questions: In what spheres do you most enjoy solving problems? In what spheres are you least eager to solve problems? What are the implications for potential vulnerabilities in your new position?

You can do a lot to compensate for your vulnerabilities. Three basic tools are self-discipline, team building, and advice and counsel . You will need to discipline yourself to devote time to critical activities that you do not enjoy and that may not come naturally. Beyond that, actively search out people in your organization whose skills are sharp in these areas, so they can backstop you and so you can learn from them. A network of advisers and counselors can also help you move beyond your comfort zone. These strategies for compensating for your weaknesses are discussed in detail in chapter 7, Build Your Team, and chapter 9, Keep Your Balance.

Watch Out for Your Strengths

Your weaknesses can make you vulnerable, but so can your strengths. Every strength has its attendant pitfalls. The qualities that have made you successful so far can prove to be weaknesses in your new role. Both Julia Gould and Douglas Ivester were attentive to detail. Though clearly a strength, attention to detail has a downside, especially in tandem with a high need for control: The result may be a tendency to micromanage people in the areas you know best. This behavior pattern can demoralize people who want to make their own contributions without intrusive oversight.

Relearn How to Learn

It may have been a long time since you faced such a steep learning curve. Suddenly I realized how much I didn t know is a common lament from leaders in transition. You may have excelled in a function or discipline, like Julia Gould, and now find yourself in a general-management position. Or having flourished in line positions , you may have been called on to manage in a staff position or a matrix management arrangement. Or you may be joining a new company where you lack an established network and sense of the culture. Regardless, you suddenly need to learn a lot fast.

Having to start learning again can evoke long-buried and unnerving feelings of incompetence and vulnerability, especially if you suffer any early setbacks. You may find yourself mentally revisiting a juncture in your career when you had less confidence. Perhaps you will make some early missteps and experience failure for the first time in ages. So you unconsciously begin to gravitate toward areas where you feel competent and people who reinforce your feelings of self-worth.

New challenges and associated fears of incompetence can set up a vicious cycle of denial and defensiveness, as Chris Argyris noted in Teaching Smart People How to Learn in the Harvard Business Review:

Because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure. So whenever their . . . learning strategies go wrong, they become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the blame on anyone and everyone but themselves . In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it the most. ^[5]

Put bluntly, you can decide to learn or you can become brittle and fail. Your failure may be dramatic, like Julia Gould s, or it may be death by a thousand cuts, as in the case of Douglas Ivester, but it is inevitable. As we discuss in the next chapter, denial and defensiveness are a sure recipe for disaster.

Relearning to learn can be painful. Transitioning into a new job may revive some deep fears about your capabilities that you thought you had long laid to rest. So if you find yourself waking up in a cold sweat, take comfort. Most new leaders experience the same feelings. And if you embrace the need to learn, you can surmount them.

Rework Your Network

As you advance in your career, the advice and counsel you need changes. Promoting yourself calls for working proactively to restructure your advice-and-counsel network. Early in your career, there is a premium on cultivating good technical advisers ”experts in certain aspects of marketing or finance, for instance, who can help you get your work done. As you are progressively promoted, however, it becomes increasingly important to get good political counsel and personal advice. Political counselors help you understand the politics of the organization, which is especially important when you plan to implement change. Personal advisers help you keep perspective and equilibrium in times of stress. As discussed in chapter 9, transforming your advice-and-counsel network is never easy. Your current advisers may be close friends, and you may feel comfortable with technical advisers whose domains you know well.

Watch Out for People Who Want to Hold You Back

Consciously or not, some individuals may not want you to advance. Your old boss may not want to let you go, for example. So you have to negotiate clear expectations, as soon as you know when you will be transitioning, about what you will do to close things out. This means being specific about what issues or projects will be dealt with and to what extent and, critically, what is not going to be done. Take notes and circulate them back to the boss, so that everyone is on the same page. Then hold your boss, and yourself, to the agreement. Be realistic about what you can accomplish. There is always more that you could do, so keep in mind that time to learn and plan before you enter a new job is a very precious commodity.

Friends may not want their relationships with you to change. But change they must, and the sooner you accept that (and help others to accept it too), the better. Others in your organization will be looking for signs of favoritism and will judge you accordingly .

If you have been promoted to supervise people who were once your peers, some may be jealous. Some may even work to undermine you. This may subside with time. But expect early tests of your authority and plan to meet them by being firm and fair. If you don t establish limits early, you will live to regret it. Getting others to accept your promotion is an essential part of promoting yourself. So if you conclude the people in question are never going to accept the situation, then you have to find a way to move them out of your organization as quickly as possible.

^[5] Chris Argyris, Teaching Smart People How to Learn, Harvard Business Review, May “June 1991.