Winning: The Answers: Confronting 74 of the Toughest Questions in Business Today (7 page)

Y
es—start campaigning. The company’s higher-ups have just appointed you boss. Congratulations. Now comes the hard part: you need to go out and get elected by your former peers.

And this part is not just hard, it’s
very
hard. In fact, the transition from peer to manager is one of the most delicate and complicated organizational situations you will ever experience. For months or even years, you have been in the trenches with your coworkers as a friend, confidant, and (probably) fellow grouser. You’ve heard secrets and told a few. You know about every little feud and grudge. You’ve sat around in airport waiting rooms and at weekend barbecues with your closest colleagues and ranked everyone else on the team. You’ve pontificated about who would go, who would stay, and generally what you would do if you ran the group.

And now you do.

Surely, some of your former peers are cheering your promotion and are eager to fall in line. That will feel very good to you, but don’t let their support lead you to do something disastrous—namely, come out of the gate with guns blazing. No, keep them firmly in your holster.

Why? Because just as surely as some are cheering, others are not. No matter how sure you are that you are right for the job or how popular you once were as a member of the team, some of your former peers are uncomfortable with your promotion. A couple may have wanted the job themselves and thought they deserved it, so they’re feeling anything from hurt to bitter. Others will simply have some level of anxiety about you going from “one of us” to “one of them”—especially with what you know, not to mention your opinions (known or suspected) about certain people and the way things are done. Either way, these former peers are in a holding pattern right now, checking you out.

And that’s where you should be too—in a holding pattern, checking
them
out. In fact, checking everything out.

Which is why you need to start campaigning, that is, winning them over. You need to create an atmosphere of stability and cohesion where sound judgments about the future can be made—by everyone.

Look, the last thing you want in your new role is a revolution or an exodus or even low-level disgruntlement. You want people settled down and functioning. The reason is straightforward enough. When and if there are changes down the road, you want to make them on your terms.

In other words, you want to make changes amid strong buy-in from a team of engaged supporters—not despite the resistance or over the nattering of a confused or chaotic crew.

And by the way, it does nothing for your career or your political standing in an organization to launch into your new job with a period of turmoil. Much better to be known as a keeper of the peace who leaps into action only when the troops are prepared to fight for a mission they believe in.

And so, campaign you must.

But here’s the rub: you have to do that without compromising your new authority. That’s right: you have to run for office while holding office—and doing all the things an officeholder must do!

And there’s your quandary—the hard part, as we said—the need for you to campaign and command simultaneously. That’s what the transition from peer to manager is all about.

Getting it right is all about timing.

Your kinder, gentler election drive cannot last forever. In fact, give it three months—six at most. By that time, if you haven’t won the vote of a former peer or two or three, you won’t ever. In fact, after a certain point, the softer you are, the less effective you will become as you fight battles that do nothing but wear you down. So, save your energy and attention for bigger things, and begin the process of moving steadfast resisters out—and bringing in people who readily accept the changes that you and your new core of supporters see as necessary.

The fact is, running for office goes with the territory of being promoted, and all effective managers go through it—often, several times in their careers. Fortunately, the transition period does not last forever, and if you handle it right—with a campaign and not chaos—you’ll be in a great position to do what’s best for the organization and yourself.

Lead from strength.

S
top trying. With the best of intentions, you have created a classic entitlement culture, in which your people have the deal exactly backward. They think
you
work for
them
.

This phenomenon is not uncommon, although it tends to be more prevalent in small organizations, where employees can more easily develop casual, familial relationships with their bosses, and bosses more often blur professional lines themselves.

In the end, such cozy familiarity can backfire, as is happening with you and your moaning, groaning employees.

It’s irrelevant, however, how you got yourself into your predicament. It only matters now that you get out quickly, and the first person you need to get straight with is yourself. You are running a company, not a social club or a counseling service. Your number one priority is to win in the marketplace so that you can continue to grow and provide opportunities for your people. Of course, you want your employees to be happy. But their happiness needs to come from the company’s success, not from their every need being met. When the company does well because of their performance, they will thrive, personally and professionally. Not the other way around.

Consider this way of thinking your new creed.

Next, gather your people together, and let them know about your conversion experience, and your plan to convert them too. Together, you and your staff will need to create a list of behaviors that will result in the company’s winning. These behaviors will become your new company values—guidelines, if you will, to live by. For instance, one value could be: we will respond with a sense of urgency to customer requests. Or, we will only ship products with zero defects. The point of this process is very simple: to help your people understand that work is about…well, it’s about
work
.

Without doubt, you will hear yelps of pain as you dismantle your entitlement culture. Indeed, some employees that you like and value may leave in protest. Take the hit and wish them well.

They will soon find out the grass is not greener on the other side, and you will discover how much better your company operates when your main concern is not whining—but winning.

A
tempting idea but a tricky one. The answer is, in a phrase, it depends.

If you’re running a company that requires a rapid turnaround in a changing environment, and you are saddled with an embedded culture of employees in a state of denial, you’d be smart to bring along capable former colleagues you’d trust in a foxhole. Together, you’ll get the work done faster and more smoothly, and with the camaraderie born of your shared experiences in the past, it will be a lot more fun too.

But if you’ve been hired to lead a relatively good business that mainly needs a dose of reenergizing, hiring several members of your old team can create a lot of mayhem for very little gain. Nothing is more demotivating to a functioning organization than a little imported cabal that regularly invokes, “This is how we did it at our old company.” In the worst-case scenario, this dynamic gives rise to a two-class society: the boss’s favored insiders and the alienated has-beens.

Bottom line: survey the terrain. Bring in your old team only if you need fast change and resisters won’t budge. If you’re not in a crisis situation, search out the best among the team you’ve inherited, and give them a new sense of purpose. You may miss your former colleagues, but you sure won’t miss the havoc they would cause.

O
r how about this: you celebrate.

Look, the best thing that can happen to you as a boss—and you’re right, it has happened to both of us—is hiring a person who is smarter, more creative, or in some way more talented than you are. It’s like winning the lottery. Suddenly, you’ve got a team member whose talent will very likely improve everyone’s performance and reputation.

Including yours.

Yes, it’s human nature to feel as you do—fearful that a “superior” employee could make you look, well, inferior, and perhaps slow down your career progress. But in reality, the exact opposite usually occurs.

The reason is that leaders are generally not judged on their personal output. What would be the point of evaluating them like individual contributors? Rather, most leaders are judged on how well they’ve hired, coached, and motivated their people, individually and collectively—all of which shows up in the results. That’s why when you sign up top performers and release their energy, you don’t look bad. You look like the goose that laid the golden egg.

So, keep laying them. It is a rare company that doesn’t love a boss who finds great people and creates an environment where they flourish, and you don’t have to be the smartest person in the room to do that. Indeed, when you consistently demonstrate that leadership skill, and come to be known as the person in your company who can land and build the best, watch your career take off.

Now, we’re not saying that managing “superior” employees on your team is necessarily easy. Your question, in fact, reminds us of one we received in Chicago several years ago from an audience member who said two of his seven direct reports were smarter than he was, and asked, “How can I possibly appraise them?”

“What the heck happened to the other five?” was our attempt at a lighthearted response. But we took his point. How in the world do you evaluate people who you feel are more talented than you?

You don’t. That is, you don’t evaluate them on their intelligence or particular skill set. Of course, you talk about what they are doing well, but as important, you focus on areas in which they can improve. It is no secret that some very smart people have trouble, for instance, relating to colleagues or being open to other people’s ideas. Indeed, some struggle with becoming leaders themselves. And that is where your experience and self-confidence come into play and your coaching can really help.

In that way, then, managing superior employees is just like managing regular types. You have everything to gain from celebrating their growth—and nothing at all to fear.

B
eing a boss is one thing, and managing your career another. But business cannot move forward without certain principles and practices in place.

Right—but which ones? That’s the general question that the answers in this chapter grapple with. Grapple, because certain principles, such as candor and differentiation, and certain practices, such as strategy, budgeting, and HR, are controversial, to say the least. Take candor. We haven’t visited a country (including the United States) where people haven’t challenged its “appropriateness,” not to mention its practicality. But every aspect of management, as the following pages show, can be open to debate. And they should be; that’s how companies get better.