Your Next Move - Michael Watkins Flashcards
“The promotion challenge: Moving to a higher level and understanding what you need to do to be successful there, including issues of focus, delegation, developing leadership competencies, and demonstrating “
The leading-former-peers challenge: An important variant of promotion in which you have been elevated to manage a team including your former peers, with the associated challenges of establishing authority and reengineering existing relationships.
“The realignment challenge: Inheriting an organization that’s in denial about its need for change and creating a sense of urgency before simmering problems force it into a turnaround situation.”
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
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“If you are experiencing a personal adaptive challenge, you need to ask: Given my history, mind-set, and capabilities, what are my most important development priorities? What do I need to do differently if I’ve been promoted, or joined a new company, or moved internationally, or some combination of these situations? What do I need to do more of and less of? What new competencies do I need to develop? What adjustments in my leadership style do I need to make? ”
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
“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.”
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
“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.”
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
“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. “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.”
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
“There also is a hidden dimension to the competency shifts new leaders face as they rise through the ranks that wasn’t explored by Charan and his colleagues. Put simply, it’s the move from managerial science to leadership art. Consider that the skills required of lower-level managers can often be reduced to rules and procedures. The basics of effective supervision, for example, have been well understood for decades and lend themselves brilliantly to conventional classroom training. As one rises through the hierarchy, however, the requiements for promotion can be less cut and dried, involving capabilities such as effective pattern recognition, the ability to make clear and quick judgments, or soft-side skills such as political and emotional intelligence. When examined through this lens, higher-level promotions become less about acquiring specific skills and more about making the right shifts in mind-set—for example, thinking more strategically about business problems and understanding how to shape the competitive and political environments in which the organization operates.”
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
“From analyst to integrator. The primary responsibility of functional leaders is to develop and manage their people to achieve analytical depth in relatively narrow, focused domains. By contrast, business unit leaders manage cross-functional teams with the goal of integrating the collective knowledge and using it to solve important organizational problems. As you might imagine, then, it’s important for new business unit leaders to make the shift to managing integrative decision making and problem solving and, even more important, to learn how to make appropriate trade-offs. Business unit leaders must also manage in the “white spaces”—accepting responsibility for issues that don’t fall neatly into any one function but are still important to the business.”
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
“From problem solver to agenda-setter. Many leaders are promoted on the strength of their problem-solving skills. But when they reach business unit leader status, they must focus less on fixing problems and more on recognizing and preventing what I call predictable surprises from occurring in the first place.”
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
“As discussed in the introduction, there are a handful of things that you can do to accelerate your personal adjustment to any new leadership role: assessing your strengths and weaknesses given the situation, disciplining yourself to do things that don’t come naturally, building a complementary team, and leveraging wise counsel.”
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
“guided through a series of positions, each with a designated purpose, which offered him valuable lessons in four important career-development dimensions:
Development in his core function and exposure to other functions.
Understanding of the company’s range of businesses.
Home country and international assignments.
Business unit and corporate assignments.”
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
Promotion Checklist
“What does it mean to “promote yourself” into your new role? What must you do more of, even if you don’t enjoy or feel fully competent doing it? What do you need to do less of or let go?
Which of the common promotion challenges—balancing breadth and depth, delegating more deeply, influencing differently, communicating more formally, and adjusting to greater visibility—do you most need to focus on?”
“Which level-specific competencies do you need to develop to be successful at the new level?
What can your organization do to help you accelerate your development?
What do you need to do to meet the personal adaptive challenge? Do you need to enhance your self-awareness and, if so, in what ways? Do you need to exert discipline to do things that don’t come comfortably? Do you need to identify or recruit natural complements in your team? Do you need to alter your advice network or use it differently?”
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
“being promoted to lead people who were formerly your peers is among the toughest transitions you can make, precisely because of the complex web of organizational relationships you’ve created over the years and must now redefine—with your boss, former peers, and new peers. You think you know everyone, and everyone thinks they know you. But those relationships were shaped, in part, by the roles you previously played. The protocols, perceptions, and interactions must all be different now.”
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
“Specifically, you should try to adhere to the following basic principles”
“Accept that relationships have to change.
Focus early on rites of passage.
Reenlist your (good) former peers.
Establish your authority deftly.
Focus on what’s good for the business.
Approach team building with caution”
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
“Julia should carefully draft a short script around a few central messages: that she is looking forward to working with the team to move the organization forward, that she values all team members’ contributions, and that she is looking forward to meeting with each of them individually. (Ideally, she would have already begun setting up those meetings.)”
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
“You also should think hard about whether and how best to engage with disappointed direct reports more directly about what they are experiencing. Should you talk with them right away or after they’ve had more time to process the change? Should you address their concerns directly or obliquely? Should you be empathetic or matter-of-fact in your communications? It really depends on the person and your relationship with them. If they are disappointed but not resentful, comfortable talking about such things, and you have a good relationship with them, then it can be effective to directly address the issue. If, as was the case with Julia and Andy, they harbor some bad feeling or are uncomfortable openly discussing such things, then it’s probably best to leave the ball in their court, while at the same time signaling that they are valued members of the team.”
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
“The sooner your new direct reports see that you’ll be “hard on issues and soft on people,” the better.”
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
“There are six important reasons for convening the group off site:
To gain a shared understanding of the business (diagnostic focus)
To create a strategy and define the vision (strategy focus)
To change the way the team works together (team-process focus)
To build or alter relationships in the group (relationship focus)
To develop a plan and commit to achieving it (planning focus)
To address significant conflicts (conflict-resolution focus)”
“Before you reflexively schedule an off-site meeting, you need to step back and answer two interrelated questions: What am I trying to accomplish? And is an off-site the best way to achieve my goals? There are a number of reasons why you’d answer no to the second query—a chief one being the risk that you’ll fuel the rise of opposing coalitions. If some people are likely to resist the changes you want to make, then an early off-site may only serve to galvanize that group of dissenters, no matter how latent their objections, to the changes the organization is making. Better to start at the micro level—building support one by one and in smaller group meetings before convening an off-site”
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
Excerpt From
Master Your Next Move, with a New Introduction
Michael D. Watkins
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.