A promotion is an exciting adventure. The excitement often contains some fear as well, as managers may not know what to expect in their new role. While each situation is unique, there are predictable obstacles. To increase your success on the journey, here is a forecast of the likely – yet often hidden – challenges which you will face at each level.
Use this map to anticipate and navigate the preparation needed to face the challenges. That will enable you to redirect fears you may have back into a motivating excitement.
Suggestion: Read the roles sequentially in order to take in the overall progression of building necessary skills, or skip ahead to your own current level, or the one you want to attain.
Director
At the director level, you may have several groups you are responsible for managing. Here is the challenge. How can you manage your managers, without knowing their staff? In a way, it’s even worse if you do know the staff well and impose your assessment of their performance. That interference demotivates the managers who work for you. Your job is to build them up, make them look good. Be a deliberate role model. Be the manager to them that you want them to be to their staff. Support them in identifying and resolving obstacles to productivity and growth. Offer them growth and opportunity. Be accountable for overall results without being in the weeds.
Challenge: How can you monitor and be accountable without micro-managing? How do you manage your managers and help them look good? How do you help them learn to hold their own staff accountable, to measure and monitor the output?
Vice President
You have mastered delegating, holding people accountable, engaging and motivating, and monitoring. You know how to manage managers. You have arrived: you are part of the senior team. What else is there? Up until now, you mainly had to keep your own manager happy in order to get good reviews, raises and promotions. You have learned to manage up. But wait! You just got dinged for not working well with that other VP. Who ever said that was a job requirement? Your protective advocacy for your own staff, or for your department’s budget, no longer wins you a gold star. You have learned to set strategic direction for your function (marketing, finance, engineering). Now you have to have a whole-company view.
Challenge: What does it mean to work well with others across the entire company? How can you keep those keen advocacy skills and expand your inquiry skills, to find out what your peers need? How can you extend your strategic thinking beyond your department, to consider the whole company?
COO
Very often the COO is a training ground for CEO. In most companies, the difference between VP and COO is that VP role is typically responsible for one functional area such as Engineering. The COO is often responsible for more functions and departments, which may include operations, manufacturing, engineering and quality departments. You may even have finance under your umbrella, or customer service or human resources. Inevitably COO responsibilities include managing managers in areas where you don’t have deep expertise. The skills previously described which are required for Directors and Vice Presidents are still needed here. Additionally, it is critical to learn how to be political and authentic: how to influence up, support the CEO, and challenge appropriately.
Challenge: How can you manage managers in areas where you do not have expertise? Can you amplify a consultative manager-as-coach? How can you be astutely political: remain authentic and manage up?
CEO
It really is lonely at the top. But it doesn’t have to be. As CEO you already know the organization well, you know your leaders’ skills, how to set strategy. In these fast-paced times, strategy doesn’t always stick, so the CEO role requires agility and flexibility. Just when you have a great plan, something changes: a regulation, a competitor, a supplier, a key staff member’s departure. Self-awareness and alignment with values provides strength in the turbulence ahead. To reduce the loneliness, be sure to balance leadership direction with ongoing consideration of different ideas. Develop your team to depend on each other — as well as you. This provides learning for them, and relief and resilience for you.
Challenge: How can you develop flexibility and agility? How will you deepen self-awareness and alignment? How can you foster teamwork among your executives?
CASES
In this section, each set of the promotional challenges will be illustrated with a case. These challenges can be anticipated and navigated. Successful promotion requires the paradox of leveraging your expertise, with a willingness to be a beginner in the management area: being open, curious and experimental. The competencies needed to address these predictable obstacles will be identified and described so that you can be better equipped for your new role.
Director
Yolanda had worked at her company just a few years, so she was thrilled to be promoted from within to a Director level role. She knew this would be challenging, because she had previously managed just eight staff. Now she had a group of 60 people she was responsible for. Of course, they were not all direct reports; she had four managers under her. She had learned how to best deploy her former small staff, and knew their capabilities and stress points. She knew who was a fast learner, and who needed more repetition. She knew who could be relied on if the project was predictable, and who needed challenges to stay engaged. She was a little overwhelmed at the idea of learning about so many new people. She was particularly concerned about how to be the one ultimately accountable for all her managers’ departments, without knowing what each staff member did, and how well they did it.
The big challenge at the Director level is how to manage managers and be accountable without micromanaging. Micromanaging—staying in-the-know about all the nitty-gritty details of other manager’s groups, interfering with how someone works—is demotivating. It stifles innovation and keeps those managers from using their own judgment and holding their staff accountable. Exerting mandates such as who to hire or promote, robs managers of their authority and reduces the commitment to outcomes.
On the other hand, delegating without follow-through is abdication. Yolanda needs to keep on top of progress without interfering or redirecting staff under her managers.
MACRO manage instead of micro-manage. MACRO managing is not abdicating responsibility for months only to be outraged that a project has not been on track. MACRO managing involves staying on top of progress and obstacles as a project unfolds. Being knowledgeable about the parts that are stalled out, and providing a sounding board for managers to trouble shoot and address them. This level consists of monitoring indicators or predictors of success, so that a hands-off approach is combined with a keeping-track approach. It may involve reassessing resources.
Manager as Coach. When managing managers, development of their leadership skills is key. This is best done through one-on-one support and is more coaching oriented than training for skills. That kind of supportive manager-as-coach consists of asking open ended questions to elicit manager’s thinking, options, and decision making. It consists of helping managers become aware of their own process of discernment and judgment, deepen their confidence, and look good. While there are challenges for Yolanda to wear both hats (manager and coach) there are also rewards. Open-ended questions create a collegial conversation while gently directing managers to areas that will enhance their overall effectiveness:
Manager-as-Coach Questions
- How do you ensure that work is evenly distributed?
- How did you decide which staff handles what work?
- What surprises have you had regarding attainment of goals lately? What did you learn from it?
- What is the most satisfying part of this?
- What does the morale seem to be? What indicators do you rely on to determine that?
- How do this year’s results differ from last years? What do you attribute that to?
In the spirit of support and development, these kinds of questions help managers anchor their confidence in actual successes, and highlight their awareness of those results. Weaknesses or omissions will surface, but in the context of capabilities. Confidence comes from competence. The more that self-awareness is regarded as a valuable management contribution, the stronger the departments become. Development of others is not icing on the cake, to fit in when there is time. It is an integral part of the Director role.
For productivity goals, Yolanda had seen other managers overly rely on a perceived agreement about outcomes, only to be disappointed by the results in their departments. She knew the “buck stops here.” She was responsible for effective management of her managers, and the results of each of their groups, but not the evaluation of each staff member or even necessarily what processes were used. Her role was to be a resource, be clear about outcomes, use her influence to pave the way for their success, and develop their leadership skills.
Acquire a Systems View. Sometimes managers of managers like Yolanda become the central focus to her team. The hub to the four other spokes. This dynamic can sap her of energy, and deprive the other managers in her group from learning from each other. A Director who fosters knowledge-sharing and support creates a learning environment. She can use the experience to illustrate the need to keep in mind how changes in one group often have unintended impacts on another group. In other words, managers need to move out of a silo type orientation focused only on their group and have a more integrated view of the interaction of all parts, a systems view. Periodic department meetings, even if their work is dissimilar, are one way to assert the value of this collaboration.
The competencies for Director:
- Macro manage instead of micro-manage: identify and monitor key performance indicators
- Improve managers’ delegation and accountability skills by being a manager-coach
- Acquire a systems view to provide group learning and team interdependence
Vice President
With so many well-developed leadership skills through the Director level, what else is there? Victor found out the hard way. He had received the promotion to senior leader, Vice President, following years of determined advancement. He drove his department to achieve results and had a track record to prove it. He advocated for his group, and for himself. He received raises and promotions for his staff, and even managed to borrow time and skills from support staff outside of his own group by his charisma and persuasion skills. He knew all of these actions were what got him his latest leadership promotion. But when it came time for the annual review, one year into his VP role, his driving ambition and single-minded focus on his own group cost him. Other VP’s saw how he presented relentless arguments for increasing his budget or staff, how he quickly debated others’ recommendations, how he siphoned off other department’s people, even insisting that his right to a conference room was more important than those who had reserved it. Despite having achieved key performance indicators, his bonus was half what he expected.
Stronger peer relationships. The same competitive spirit which earned Victor his promotion is now damaging his reputation. Prior to the VP level, Victor was evaluated on his department’s accomplishments alone, and the approval of his one manager. Now the challenge is that he is expected to consider his department as part of the interlocking dependencies of contributions from all groups. At this level, formal or informal peer input is key to one’s stature and regard.
One challenge for a Vice President is to be vigilant to power-creep. This inflated sense of power can result from believing the title alone is proof of competence. It can result from a history of building strong departments which operated too independently, oblivious to impact on other groups. The successful track record of promotions can lead to a Vice President applying those old success strategies to a new map. Like navigating a road from an old map, Victor needs to revise his route. What got him here won’t get him there.
Strategic Thinking. Stronger peer relationships will help Victor to develop the next competency: strategic thinking. While the Director level role requires strategic thinking about his own department, the Vice President leader’s role requires strategic thinking for the benefit of the whole company. The strategic view means he may have to occasionally postpone his own department’s needs in order to support a big win for the company, or acquire valued new customer. He needs to “draw the circle wider.”
Vice President’s each bring their own expertise and perspective. It is therefore natural that they don’t know enough to appreciate the others’ contributions. While each VP has in depth knowledge Victor needed to find ways to engage in conversations that conveyed he and his peer VP’s are on the same team in achievement of company goals (and beating the competition). He needed to represent his department in the context of enabling others to achieve overall company goals.
Reflection on strengths and developing the polarities. Working well with other teams and leaders, and strategic thinking are key to VP level success. In order to achieve this, reflection on strengths provides some direction. Victor can appreciate all the results that hard-driving competitive competency helped him achieve and he can keep it. In the arena of competency development there is no need to change or abandon a competency, only to expand your range of options and add to them. Victor does not have to give anything up in order to expand competencies. New ones rest on top of past successes. Victor had a well-developed advocacy skill. He will always have that and it will be useful to access. Now he needs to add some of the opposite. What is the opposite of advocacy? One new skill might be inquiry: asking more questions of his peers. Another opposite of advocacy might be accommodation or harmony. Any skill which is applied to all circumstances is bound to miss the mark in some contexts. Inquiring more and advocating less – without giving up that ability.
So what is the opposite of hard driving and competitive? There isn’t only one opposite. He can experiment with several different options. For Victor, being accommodating might be a less-developed competency. Regarding competitive spirit, he can fully keep it but aim it outside the company instead of at his own staff or his fellow leaders. While self-promotion has its place, appreciation of others’ contributions goes a long way to convey a team spirit and high regard for peers.
Inquiry: Ask genuine questions in support of his peer VP’s goals. Ask about their challenges, and inquire about ways he can support them. Offer to brainstorm where cross-department dependencies have been bogged down. Hold a no-fault meeting on what has fallen between the cracks, between departments or in support of customers.
The competencies for Vice President:
- Work well across departments; moderate department-oriented advocacy
- Bring a strategic view: consider the whole company when advocating
- Reflect on strengths and commit to developing the opposite
COO
The Chief Operating Officer role varies greatly by company. Generally it involves being responsible for multiple functional areas, some of which the COO may never have worked in. By contrast, the VP role generally manages functions aligned with the VP’s prior expertise, for example engineering. It is easier to manage functional areas where one has expertise. The COO role may include operations, manufacturing, engineering and quality. It may even include finance, or customer service or human resources. In some ways, it is easier to maintain a true leadership role over functions which are new to the COO.
Managing many functions. COO’s who have no experience in those additional functional areas can still be outstanding leaders. It takes attention to communicating the overall strategy, attention to each department’s goals and outcomes, and ongoing development of those VP and Director level competencies.
Use extra care when managing a new functional area. The key is to convey respect for expertise that others have, and lead with inquiry well as providing strategic direction and clear expectations. The managers of those functions are training the COO about their areas. That’s fine; listening to someone teach what is important and what gets accomplished helps both parties learn. It does require that the COO be careful not to impose tactics or processes without first learning about the new area.
There is still plenty of leadership the COO can offer to those Directors and Vice Presidents. The competency of manager-as-coach is even more important. Developing leaders and fostering teamwork need continual attention.
Manage Up: In addition to managing managers in new functional areas, COO’s have an important responsibility to manage up. Many managers complain about politics. Politics has given effective advocacy and consideration of others’ goals a bad name. In corporations, politics is often fused with and confused with inauthenticity. The constructive version of politics is keeping a finger on the pulse of strategic direction, maintaining a responsible relationship with the CEO, and ensuring competence in each department. Differences of opinion are generally welcomed by CEO’s. They would rather have a spirited debate than no input or complete compliance. Learning to disagree artfully is the key. That is best accomplished when the CEO has confidence that overall strategy and priorities are understood and supported, and that differences of opinion are offered in support of those strategies and priorities. Offering support that challenges by describing a different perspective or potential return on investment is a valuable contribution to the organization. T
COO Competencies:
- Manage managers in new functional areas
- Manage up.
Conclusion
Knowing about the hidden challenges at leach level of promotion can equip managers to adapt and succeed more quickly in their new expanded role. These competencies can be anticipated and learned. Good leadership involves a range of skills. This article has focused on the hidden competencies often overlooked at the time of promotion.
Transformation Management provides coaching for managers being promoted. This coaching helps accelerate the development of the hidden competencies.
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Executive coaching for promotion: https://transformationmanagement.com/coaching/executive-coaching/
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Zoom Leadership: Change Your Focus Change Your Insights book on decision making.
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