Performing After Promotion

EPISODE #269 TRANSCRIPT

LEARN TO LEAD, AND GET PROMOTED!

One of the positive (and virtually inevitable) outcomes of improving your leadership confidence and capability is that your opportunities for promotion will start to come thick and fast. And there’s a reason for this: as your leadership skill improves, so do the results that your teams achieve.

You simply perform better than other teams in your company, by any objective measure. And the people above you don't just notice the better results: they also notice when high performers starts to congregate around a particular leader; they notice when low rates of turnover contribute to a team dynamic of trust, respect, and robust challenge; they notice when you have the maturity and confidence to step into the void that's left by weak leaders.

But one of the downsides to all of this is that, when you've demonstrated extreme competence and achieved high-end results, you’re expected to already know what you're doing in any given situation.

Which is why, when you're promoted, you’re often given little training or guidance… and there are not many role models around you to learn from. The people above you just assume that you'll continue to be largely self-sufficient—but that's not always the case when you're thrust into an unfamiliar role. 

This is why you need to approach the transition to a new level very deliberately and consciously. If not, you could end up in what I like to call, “the be-careful-of-what-you-wish-for phase”.

I start today's LinkedIn Newsletter with some general principles for transitioning to any new role. Then I focus down on the common scenario of being promoted to lead the team that you were once part of. And I finish with some tips for how to draw a line in the sand to reset your team's expectations, so that it doesn't just become a case of, same sh!t different day for your new team.

GETTING YOUR FEET UNDER THE DESK

When you take on any new role, there are things you're going to need to do pretty much straight away, if you want to understand how to be successful. I want to start with some principles for approaching any new role. These principles apply to a promotion from within, a role in a completely new organization, or a sideways move that results in a change of portfolio (and remember, lateral moves can be some of the most rewarding).

I got pretty good at going into new roles in completely unfamiliar territory during my corporate executive career. I had to transition to roles in completely different industries, going from mining, to insurance, to rail freight transportation, then to energy. And I also did the tour of different functional responsibilities, from technology, to strategy, to finance, and finally to sales & marketing. By the time I transitioned to the  CEO role, I had a pretty good idea of how to handle it.

I developed a very reliable system for being able to get my feet under the desk in a new role, and today I want to share that with you, so that every transition you have to a new role from here on in is easier, more predictable, and wildly successful.

Just as a little teaser, Em and I are working on a new content series that we'll be releasing incrementally over the next six months to give you really specific tools and techniques to help you nail your first 90 days in any role. Get on the waitlist for that here.

The first priority in a new role is to get an idea of what you're dealing with. Your early weeks should be all about listening and learning. Spending time with your direct reports is a pretty obvious first step, but having random conversations with the people below your direct reports can also be incredibly valuable. Listen to everything, but don't put too much weight or importance on anything… well, not yet at least.

In those early weeks, you’re just trying to calibrate information. You’re gathering pieces of the jigsaw puzzle and just trying to see how they might fit together. But you're still a really long way from where you need to be to see the complete picture, so don't rush to judgment or form hasty conclusions.

I know I've mentioned this in a recent episode, but it bears repeating briefly here: one of the best ways I've found to gather information in a new role was to ask my newly formed team of direct reports to host a series of presentations for me. I'd normally set the task as soon as my appointment was announced with the expectation that they'd present to me in my first week on the job.

There was no template and no guidance, other than to say, "Tell me everything I need to know about your part of the business. You decide how to best do that. You've each got two hours. The first hour is for you to present, and the second hour is for me to drill in and ask questions. You can also decide who from your leadership team you want to bring in with you."

This was an incredibly instructive experience:

• I'd find out where their focus was—on the detail or on the big picture?

• I'd see their balance of attention between leadership, culture, and capability, as opposed to technical detail and knowledge.

• I'd work out how open and honest they were about the problems they were facing.

• I'd see how they interpreted failures—was it just due to bad luck or did they take accountability for their results?

• I'd calibrate all of this with the discussions I'd had during my interview process and all the information I'd gathered from other sources, like annual reports and investor briefings.

This process was invaluable and, by the end of that first week, I had a pretty good idea of what I was dealing with in terms of the capability and culture of the team I'd just inherited. Everything from that moment on either served to confirm or contradict my initial impression. But make no mistake, the baseline was set.

THREE CRITICAL TRUTHS TO BEAR IN MIND

The foundation is laid for you to do a lot of listening and learning in the first weeks and months of any new role. If the new role is in the organization you're already a part of, then you'll already have a pretty good feel for a lot of it (I'll get into more on the finer points of an internal promotion shortly).

But with any new role, there are certain areas that you should consider by starting with a clean sheet of paper. As I said, listen carefully, but don't accept anything on face value. Everything is open to question and change, if it's going to make a material difference to how the team performs.

There are three incredibly important concepts here that I want to cover off briefly:

1. Be aware of artificial constraints. I call them artificial constraints because we place them upon ourselves, whether they're genuine constraints or not. The classic example is in the make-up of your team.

It's very rare that you get to build a team from scratch. More often than not, you inherit a team from your predecessor. Most leaders think to themselves, “Well, now I have my team and it's up to me to work out how to make it all work.” This is a mistake!

You wouldn't just come in and get rid of everyone, using a wide broom: that's reserved for only the direst of circumstances… but you absolutely do need to be able to pick your own team. You are ultimately going to have to take accountability for results, so you also have to be empowered to make whatever decisions are necessary to achieve those results. And it starts with building the right capability.

It’s really important to not see the team you've inherited as a constraint to your success. I’ve seen a lot of leaders over the years complain and make excuses about the capability of their team, but that can only last for so long. In my head, after six months in a role, all bets are off. The people you have are there because you're choosing to have them there.

2. Don’t assume the work program is right. Just as you shouldn’t necessarily accept the team that you've inherited, you shouldn't blindly accept the work program that you inherit either. It's up to you to work out how you can maximize the use of resources that you've been given to get the highest value outcomes for your company. This means questioning every initiative, every activity, every make or buy decision, and every investment.

Part of your job in getting your feet under the desk is to work out what your team is doing that's highly valuable, and what your team is doing that's really just activity for its own sake. You need to realize, of course, that there's going to be huge resistance to any change here. The hardest thing you will ever do as a leader is to stop work that has already been started. It gets a life of its own, and people become emotionally attached to it, for all sorts of reasons.

3. Know that you will be corrupted. It’s important to accept the fact that you will become corrupted by the organization over a period of time. If you come into a new organization from outside, sometimes the differences, both positive and negative, are really stark. Once people start convincing you of why they do things a certain way, you'll begin to accept things that initially seemed illogical, unproductive, or inefficient.

This is unavoidable—it's human nature. We become conditioned to the environment we're in. but there are two behaviors that you can lock in on to guard against this inevitable corruption:

a) Have a strong sense of urgency. You know that decisions are going to need to be made before your people's push to preserve the status quo overwhelms your desire to seek change and improvement.

b) Constantly ask yourself the question: “Am I just being corrupted by my people's staunch defense of the status quo, or was my initial instinct genuinely wrong?” Artificial constraints, and the process of gradual corruption are the silent enemies of progress, change, and performance.

ASK YOURSELF THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

Just a quick word on working out what's different in your new role. The tendency for most leaders in new roles is to keep doing what made them successful in their last role—but this, too, would be a mistake. No two roles are the same, and at every level you go up, your role should be materially different. If it's not, you have to question whether the role is necessary at all.

Start by working out what the differences really are. You'll no doubt find it useful to ask yourself some simple questions which are going to help you to identify what's different, and think through where you need to put your time, energy, and focus.

Questions like:

• How is the scope of this role bigger than my last role?

• What does my team have to do to be successful?

• What are the biggest value levers I have at my disposal?

• What relationships are most important to me?

• What groups am I now a part of and how do I need to contribute to those groups?

• Where should I spend the majority of my time?

• Who are the people I'll most rely on to lead the change?

• What's most important to my direct boss, and what are her expectations of me in this role?

• Do I have the talent and capability I need to be successful?

• What skills and capabilities do I personally need to develop in order to be successful in this role?

• What skills do I bring to the role that are going to be valuable?

• What habits and behaviors do I need to leave behind because they're no longer valuable at the new level I'm operating at?

You get the picture–any question that forces you to think about how your new role differs from your previous role is going to set you up for success.

Without a deliberate approach to transition planning, you’re likely to stay in your comfort zone. You'll fall into old habits, and eventually find out that you aren't doing the job you're being paid to do.

When you first make the transition to a new role, it's going to feel really uncomfortable, and that's a good sign. If it doesn't feel uncomfortable, you're probably missing something.

FROM PEER TO LEADER

Okay, that's a pretty good fly over the top of transitioning into any new role, but it's very common for a promotion, particularly early on in your career, to see you leading a team that you were once part of. Your boss moves up, and you need to manage your old team. On Friday they were your peers, but on Monday you're the boss. In this case, we need to think of a few additional factors.

The first of these is that the relationships you had with your peers won't necessarily be appropriate when you’re their boss.

You may have developed friendships with your peers and, as the boss, you'll need to put some professional distance between you. If you don't, a couple of dynamics will emerge: your friends will take advantage of your good nature, and you will cut them more slack than they deserve. Not intentionally—it's just a natural byproduct of a friendship… reciprocity is natural!

When this happens, others may feel like the team is very cliquey… that they're second-class citizens... that you're not running a meritocracy… so you've got to think about how you're going to reset the bar and create a level playing field.

We produced a podcast episode a little while back—Ep.197: Why Can't We Be Friends?—which explains this concept in more detail.

The second difference in an internal promotion is that you'll find it more difficult to shift your colleagues' perceptions of you.

Isn't it funny how some actors are typecast as either secret agents or evil villains or corrupt policemen? They get multiple roles portraying similar characters because that's how they're perceived by producers and casting agents.

In this same vein, your peers know you at a certain level, and they may find it hard to treat you the same as they would an external appointee. This is why you need to embrace many conversations to reset those perceptions.

The third and final difference I want to draw out with internal promotions is that it's even more important to take a position of respecting the past, while positioning for the future. If you come in, all guns blazing, and start tearing apart the fabric and nature of the team you've inherited, it can be seen as a slight to your old boss… you know, the one who probably decided to promote you?!

The best advice I can give here is to just try to be a little humble in your posture. Respect the past, but make no bones about the upside opportunity for change and improvement. This can be tricky, and I must admit I was particularly bad at it. I think I put quite a few senior people offside by not respecting the past when I went into new roles in other organizations. So, whereas I wasn't exactly biting the hand that fed me, there's nothing to be gained by being too vocal about the historical problems of the team. Always just look to the future with energy and optimism.

GIVE PEOPLE CLARITY, QUICKLY

As soon as you feel as though you have the lay of the land, and you're ready to take some forward action, it's important to be really explicit and deliberate about what's going to be different.

No one can read your mind. People won't even understand what you're trying to achieve unless you can make it clear and compelling. This may take dozens of conversations at both the team and the individual level.

Clarity is a premium. You need to be crystal clear about what it is you want, so it's really important to set any new expectations around behavior, super-fast. If you're going to enforce a higher standard, it's important to signal that from the earliest moment possible, and if you're going to talk about it, you'd better be serious about enforcing it. Make sure your actions support the rhetoric.

Once you know what's going to be different, boil it down to its simplest form. Work out how to link the company's purpose and strategy to the new direction in the work program and culture that you're trying to create, and spend time with people explaining what's different. Articulate the change in approach simply and concisely. Don't ever leave your people to guess at what it might mean.

Getting people's heads around any change in the way they work requires strength, will, and uncommon commitment. And that means dozens of conversations, not one town hall meeting and a follow-up email.

Remember, a good rule of thumb to bear in the back of your mind is, if there's no noise, there's no change. You have to expect resistance, and a rousing defense of the status quo from the old guard, who like the world exactly the way they built it. If you threaten their position, their status, or their power base, expect them to push back.

But also realize that if you don't get any resistance, then you're probably not getting any change either. You're just not making an impression. Everyone's paying you lip service, nodding and smiling, and they're doing exactly what they've always done. So, try not to believe your own bullsh!t.

YOUR PEOPLE ARE COUNTING ON YOU TO STEP UP!

Any new role presents a challenge to understand the context, and decide how to move the team forward productively as you try to blend the positives of the old with the opportunity of the new. While doing that, you also have to face the personal challenge that comes when you try to establish your own identity in the new role:

• to be seen at the next level up;

• to bring a fresh set of eyes to old problems;

• to set a new, more rigorous standard for performance and behavior;

• to look for new ways to improve team performance;

• to build real capability and make tough decisions on the people who choose to not be part of the future;

• to reset old relationships from your previous role; and

• to establish new relationships with the stakeholders who hold the key to your future success.

Performing after promotion depends on your attention to both the subtle and the more obvious differences in your new position. And, make no mistake, your team will look to you for renewed purpose and direction. Try not to let them down.