Vareity What’s Up

Here’s the blitz of what’s on my mind and what I am doing right now:

1. Anon vs Brand? Should I keep blogging anon? What’s the value to me in doing that? If I keep blogging anon, nobody connects my expertise and writing skill to me, myself, and my actual brand — which I need. But if I don’t blog anon, can I still effectively write about the tender parts of my career development, and about the object lessons from staff and colleagues? But is blogging about others anon ethical?  I am getting alarmed with myself that I am NOT being ethical! I am leaning towards scrapping this whole thing and starting anew, as myself.
2. Is Penelope Trunk crazy or the true new wave? Is she taking the blend-your-professional-and-your-personal-and-tell-all meme to the non-useful extreme, or is she just the new normal? At least she’s ethical.
3. I am pissed at my boss. And I told him so. But I don’t think I told him effectively enough.  He stripped me of a responsibility (goal) without telling me that he’d done it nor telling me why.  And this after he happily agreed that we should de-prioritize it.  His action was more about getting control of one of my peers (he gave my goal to her boss) than about punishing me.  It’s well known that I don’t effectively influence her.  But not telling me was reactionary, and somewhat chickenshit. I’m pissed at myself for fumbling a great opportunity to be more candid. It will be on my agenda at my next career development status with him.
4. I am doing a personal brand assessment using Reach 360. They are a very interesting company that I have been following for a few years, but I’ve never used their 360-degree brand assessment tool before. I will let you know what I learn. They have good teleseminars – go check them out.
5. I am reading Back of the Napkin, and thinking about how to apply it to both project planning and communication.
6. I got great feedback from two people this week. That’s nice.
7. I am giving up one of my direct reports to someone else. I was expecting this, at about this time of year – her project is ending and she is working on something new.  But I am still bummed. My little empire is shrinking, that never feels good!
8. I think my least-resilient employee wants to kill me. Too bad. That’s her responsibility.  Just imagine how pissed at me she’ll be when I share the consequence of her behavior, hostility and inability to engage with the team — she is missing out on a great opportunity because we the management team won’t offer it to her due to track record of behavior, hostility and inability to engage with the team.
9. I am giving a stretch assignment to one of my other employees. That always feels great!
10. The stretch assignment involves an initiative I own that stems straight from the CEO. THAT always feels good!
11. I am recommitting to networking. I have set up regular lunches and coffees with some key leaders with whom I want to reconnect and talk both work and development. I still need to set up regular connections with three VPs with whom I’ve worked in the past, and one VP whom I’ve never met (but he went to my college and he may be the only other Obie at the F50C).  I have also set up some tracking so I can better manage my contacts, track stuff I want to talk about, and not let so much time go between meetings.

Cheers, y’all!

Slightly Shocking Advice

G is a colleague who is one of the most amazing leaders of people I know.  He has been doing it for 14 years. I often look to his example & mentoring for advice. Yesterday at lunch he gave me some slightly shocking advice.

Background: At the F50C, annual and mid-year review time brings with it something I’ll call Leadership Assessment to help me avoid being dooced.  In the Leadership Assessment process, all managers of a department get together for a marathon session in which they discuss every employee: their strengths & weaknesses, potential for promotion, readiness for promotion.  They also set the employees’ review score and any compensation increases above & beyond what the score brings.

What’s nice about this is that important things like score and potential for promotion are not at risk to be in the hands of just one power-mad, jackass boss.  The group is a tempering, if not eliminating, influence on that kind of managerial abuse.  Of course what’s totally uncomfortable about this process is knowing that every manager on the team is sitting around talking about you, judging you, and sharing dirty laundry about you.

The slightly shocking advice:

Before every Leadership Assessment period, G asks his boss, What are you planning to say about me at Leadership Assessment? If that isn’t enough for the timid folks out there, G then tells his boss, After Leadership Assessment I’m going to come back to you and ask you what you actually said about me, and what everyone else said about me.

Wait, it gets better:

Then G goes in turn to each of his employees, and tells them: Here’s what I plan to say about you at Leadership Assessment, and then afterwards I’m going to come back and tell you what I actually said and also what everyone else said about you.

I find this advice amazing, mainly because it never would have occurred to ask this of my boss, or tell this to my employees without their asking first.  As much as I love and crave feedback, I am timid when it comes to asking for my leaders to lay my brand perception, potential and reputation all out on the table like that.  And I was super impressed when G told me he did this for his team.  He says consistently they love it.  I talked about managerial courage a little bit the other day: that’s nothing compared to this courage.

Are you bold enough to have your leadership really lay out for you all the external perceptions & reputation?

Are you bold enough to ask your manger to be frank about your potential for promotion?

Are you courageous enough to tell these things frankly but fairly to your employees?

Rypple Again

I swear this is it.  But I did try out Rypple on my team and 100% of them ended up replying! And they were very candid, which is awesome.   Not just candid, but focused, specific and actionable.  VERY awesome, totally usable.

(Rypple says if you ask 4+ people you have a stronger chance of candid response and full participation.  I think this is because the people you ask can see the count (not the who) of people you ask, and with 4+, folks are more comfortable that they’re truly anonymous.)

So, ta-da, here I share with you:

What my team said about me

Keep Doing

• Empower your direct reports, which makes them feel their commitment and work is valued and does add to the bottom line.
• Be very proactive & take follow-up action.
• Share knowledge, contacts & resources with your tea.
• Hold career development conversations.
• Recognize us, & hold us accountable.
• Give immediate feedback.

Start Doing

• Consistently ask for feedback and make those discussions open and comfortable.
• Ask, trust & limit over-advising when it sounds like things might be working out.
• Don’t react quickly to bad news. Let us talk through it together to arrive at next steps or a solution together.
• Provide information on how we each fit into your area and how your area fits into the team space. Provide leadership and direction on how we can add value to the broader business intelligence efforts at our company.

This is only slightly wordsmithed:  I reformatted it into keep doing/ stop doing form, and changed the “Don’t do X” statements into “Do Y” statements, because it’s always more effective declare what you ARE or WILL be instead of what you are NOT or SHOULDN’T BE.  I firmly believe you accomplish much more when you run towards something instead of running away from something.

I really like how candid everyone was. They called out a couple of blind spots which I didn’t know I had! Specifically:  jumping in to give too much advice too soon, and over-reacting to bad news.  Wow, I’m glad to hear i do the latter because I always hated it when I had managers who did that!  I can see it in myself now — I hear bad news and my bias for action goes into  fix it fix it fix it mode.  My team members will be better served by letting them — and holding them accountable to — fix the messes themselves.  This means holding back the advice, asking more questions like, “what do you think we should do?” and tempering my over-reactions.

I’ve sent this same summary to my team and my boss, so that all can see what people like about my management style and so that all can see what I want to hold myself accountable to address.

I hope that some of you are totally shocked that I shared the results back to my team & boss, at review time no less.  Good, if you are shocked you should be! We managers should absolutely be modeling how to know and own our strengths & weaknesses, and if we are going to hold our teams accountable to be more effective & use feedback, then we should in turn model it ourselves and avoid hypocrisy. Try it, try being honest & show your integrity!

If you manage people and think asking your team for feedback and then heaven help it, letting everyone know what that feedback was is too risky or immature or sets a dangerous precedent or whatever, then there is something wrong with you and you shouldn’t be managing people. Also you are a total coward.  I’m serious, go find a new job where you aren’t allowed to manage or review others.

I Turned Down A Job Offer I Never Even Had

In this economy? WTF?

As mentioned, I’m here to tell you how I turned down a job offer I never even had, and strengthened two key relationships as a result.

Here’s the deal:  I’ve had some small irons in the fire for a while now, around a possible next move to an organizational change team.  They are doing really interesting work with a huge multi-year project that will have wide-ranging impact.  But as I’ve said to my boss & the hiring managers of this and a couple of other teams I’m interested in, I only want to make a move if it’s truly the right role.

Despite the recent layoffs, the org change team was able to post for an opening. Two separate people approached me about applying; the hiring manager was one of them.  The job looked interesting and was an excellent fit with my  strengths.  But I had a few misgivings:

• I’ve just been positioned in my current job to expand my responsibilities as much as I want to — given the goals we’ve set, I can really run as far as I feel like.
• I have a team of direct reports now and the new job has no direct reports
• It is a lateral move
• My job has a very clear upward path, as well as upward/outward options; the new job has no upward or outward path.
• I have long said, and firmly believe, that I struggle with the question of what adds more value to me & to the company: A) staying in my current area and bringing communication, strategic critical thinking and relationship strengths, or B) moving to a communication role and bringing project management & execution strengths.  I wrestle with this question all the time, and talk about it with hiring managers & mentors all the time.  I usually land on option A. In this case I definitely landed on A.
• I have heard some anecdotal feedback that working for the hiring manager of this open position is really hard, that she may require a lot of managing up, and that she may not be open to being managed-up.  On the other hand, I’m excellent at managing my current boss.

I met with my director-level mentor and the hiring manager, and talked through my concerns, with the exception of the last bullet point (which I did not discuss at all – that would be sooooo not Kosher in any situation).  By doing so, I also reinforced my personal brand, Of COURSE you want me for this position, you want me for LOTS of positions!

Each confirmed that they would love to see me in this role and that it would be a win for the org change team, but that it would be a bad idea for my career.  Each seemed pleased I was making this assessment, and thought I was assessing accurately.  I was able to get to, Thank you for eying me seriously for this role and keeping me top-of-mind, but I’m not going to apply ’cause I don’t want yer ‘ol  job. Not in so many words, right? But I was able to turn down something that was never even mine, reinforce that I should be sought-after for open roles, remind them of my strengths, and build credit in my relationships with these two leaders who are important to me.

It feels really good. And I’m blogging about it to reward this behavior in myself and remind myself how good this feels, so that I keep doing it.  One of my weaknesses is hesitance (and self-perceived low ability) to self-promote; it’s fantastic to practice self-promotion and get positive feedback and  results.

How I Manage Up

Everyone’s boss is different — we all have our weird blind spots and paranoias and strange weaknesses and hyper-focused strengths.  So my tricks for managing up may not work for you, in fact they probably won’t.  But if my boss ever hires you, you can use these tactics on him.

1.  I debate with him. He likes debate.  He likes to argue the point and the merits.  Once I got some feedback that he & my former director liked me because at the time I was one of the only people pushing back.  That little reinforcement was all I needed to get super comfortable saying, “I completely disagree, and here’s why.”  The real tactic here is that I communicate with him using his preferred style.

2.  I give him direct, relatively blunt constructive feedback. He’s from Jersey, he likes direct communication.  We live in MN, there’s a lot of passive aggressive communication.  I try to be plain & straightforward.  I give direct feedback to him on his performance and style because 1) he’s not very self-reflective and doesn’t always monitor the interpersonal after-effects of his approach.  And 2) he once invited me to give feedback.  The first time I gave it, it felt like a big risk.  But there were no bad consequences to me; in fact he thanked me.  And that encouragement was all I needed to keep doing it.  The real tactic here is that I help identify pain points & friction points, and suggest possible solutions, before they cause trouble.

3.  I demand clear expectations and well-defined, specific desired outcomes. Actually, I need to get better at demanding these things, at the time, in the moment, when the confusion is happening.  He’s strategic, and he’s often thinking out loud at a mile-a-minute clip.  He usually locks onto his desired outcome like a pit bull locking it’s jaw, but often the outcome is not fully baked and it’s up to the rest of us to bake it.  A lot of the time I feel like I’m trying to mind read.  Or, I’ll have to digest our conversation for a while and then go back to say, “This is what I think we discussed, and now that I’ve mulled it over, here’s what I actually think I should do.”  This, more than anything, directly causes most of my stress, so my goal in 2009 is to stand up for myself right in the moment and get specifics and clarifications.  Just like the ROWE people say I should.  The real tactic here is that I [should] insist on specifically defining, and agreeing on, desired outcome and timing. Also I [should] ask for proof/data/objective facts when he makes an assertion that’s way out of left field.

4.  I take abstract, vague ideas and execute them. I take the crazy ideas and make them happen.  Like I said, he’s often stuck in his desired outcome without a clear path to getting there or an understanding of all the steps to take and issues to clear, and a lot of the time he’s lighting a panicky fire to get there.  He’ll be the first to admit, he isn’t organized, task oriented or a process master. (On the HBDI: no green.)  So he hires people like me, who are.  The real tactic here is that I complement his weaknesses with my strengths. Part of the success here is that he hired me to be this complement — however, I spent a lot of time early on figuring out what his strengths & weaknesses were so that I knew where I could add value.

5.  I make sure he recognizes the team. I show off their wins to him, insist he send thank-you’s or notes, nominate them for awards he gives.  Because it’s not a strength of his at all, and because it helps him not be scary.  The real tactic here is just a variant of both #2 and #4.

6.  I make him look good. Because: DUH. His priorities are my priorities. I’ll drop everything to get him a deck for a meeting with his boss or an important client.  I scan his calendar to figure out when big-deal meetings are happening and either offer or ask what he needs. I feed him wins & measureable successes from my team so he can in turn show them off to his boss and partners. I get shit done. I warn him when trouble or stupidity happens, if it’s likely to get back to him — no surprises. The real tactic here is that I make him look good. Dang, I wish my own team would take this one more seriously with me! LOL.

7.  I delegate up. I am not afraid to give a clear request or assignment back up to my own boss.  I particularly like to deploy him when I think some particular action on his part will make it easier for me or my team to cut through an obstacle and move forward.  Becuse our success is his success. Also sometimes I just think there’s something he should be doing, not me. The real tactic here is that I protect the boundaries of my own work, and ask for the resources (usually action from my boss) I need to be successful.

Weekly Review 12/21/08

How did I do against the developmental goals I focused on last week?

1. Goal: strengthen reputation as outperformer. MIT: push hard hard hard in the goal/objective setting offsite Monday to ensure the management team in general, and I specifically, do NOT sign up for ANY objectives that are not seriously specific and measurable.

Sort-of accomplished.  The way the goal-setting session was run, it was hard to push for measurable objectives, because we rarely got down to the objective level.  However, I was an active participant and was vocal about making our goals specific and not boil-the-ocean big.  I was also able to ensure all my goals were represented and that I didn’t sign up for anything vague or that I didn’t expect.  And I made it abundantly clear — I was funny, funny, funny about it but very serious — to my boss (shout-out for managing up!) & a couple of peers that I am not signing up for any work that isn’t prioritized, meaning: doesn’t align to my goals

2.  Goal: strengthen my reputation as an outperformer. MIT: once the offsite locks down the management team goals/objectives, lock my g/o into a final draft by Friday.

Accomplished.  I noodled all week and took the the goals I owned coming out of the goal-setting session down to the objective level.  All my objectives are measurable, even the more strategic ones. (Don’t get me started on strategic objectives).  I’m working now on crafting a reference document that actually lays out the measures I’ll use. This will help me track performance and gather data along the way, and I’ll also review this document each Friday during my weekly review at work, to keep me focused.  I’ve also got my G/O document out for review & feedback with to of my favorite (read: smartest & most trusted) peers.

3.  Goal: be courted for new roles & new jobs.  MIT: work on re-opening my network, by scheduling two coffees, lunches or statuses, one with a hiring manager who has a prospect for me, one with a former manager, director or VP, to reconnect, hear what’s up in their world, drop my elevator speech, and remind them (sweetly, graciously) how great I am. 

Not accomplished!  I did set up coffee with that hiring manager, for after the holiday break. But I totally shied away from reaching out to any of my former leadership at that Director or VP level.  Why am I so shy about this? Well, reaching out and taking positive risks is the big weakness in my resilience profile.  What am I so skeezed out about? I have been thinking about it all week: more to come in a post about it some time this week.

Goals & MITs for next week:

1. Goal: strenghten my reputation as an outperformer. MIT: finish crafting the measures for my objectives. Review and revise my goals overall.

2. Goal: Be courted for new roles and jobs. MIT: figure out why I’m so gun-shy about networking with leaders way above my pay grade.

Only two goals this week, and probably fewer posts too: Merry Christmas!

Feeling Really Discouraged

So I found out Friday that two colleagues whom I like and admire have been promoted. This is great news and I’m very happy for them.  I am also feeling super discouraged.

Why does this bother me?

Because these two, I thought of them as peers.  Peers who were one management level ahead of me, one title ahead of me. (This isn’t about pay or pay grade for me, it’s about title and the publicness of title.)

So I was behind, right? This is my thinking. If they’re a title level ahead of me, yet my peers, I must be doing something wrong and need to catch up.  They were a yardstick of sorts, because we were more alike than different.  And I did not measure up.

And now they are two title levels ahead of me.

So I feel stuck. Stupid.  Not even stuck: sliding backwards.

But why does this bother me so much?

I have been asking myself this for a year, ever since I read The Resilience Factor and took a class from the author.  I’m not yet 100% sure.  I know I have big hot-buttons, icebergs the book calls them, about:

• Recognition, especially by authority
• Public recognition of success, in this case via my publicly-known title
• An idea that I’ve failed if others succeed at a faster rate than me

Icebergs are those really deep-seated beliefs, the ones that are hard to even make yourself aware of, let alone let go of.  I am not sure where these icebergs came from. Something in childhood, early school perhaps? My parents set high standards, but never unrealistic expectations nor conditional love.

These icebergs do not serve me.  These icebergs directly contribute to my caution in reaching out to take risks with big payoffs (like aggressively positioning myself for promotion) or trying new experiences (it took me a year to decide to start this blog, and six years to decide to go to graduate school).  Of the several types of resilience the authors have identified, I am far less resilient than the norm on reaching out.

Plus, these icebergs make it easy for me to feel embarrassed and ashamed about myself, depressed, and apathetic (“why try”).

So what am I gonna do about it?

Two things.

1. I will work to neutralize icebergs when they get activated. (The book has useful tactics for doing this, but they are new behaviors I have to learn.) I will keep working to consciously make myself aware when an iceberg gets activated, deliberately choose to feel differently instead of giving into the auto-emotional response, and tell myself, “This doesn’t serve you at all, let it go.”

I will also make lists of factual proof contrary to what the icebergs are telling me.  In this case, proof that I am not failing nor unpromotable includes my stellar performance review score and explicit statements from my boss, former boss, and director that I am ready to promote and that they are positioning me for promotion.

2.  I will figure out how to more effectively and aggressively promote my career. Advocating for myself is perhaps my biggest weakness. I’ve long complained that I don’t know how to promote myself, but this isn’t true: via feedback I know I’m a great career coach to my employees and other colleagues.  So I will become a student of this. (I’m the daughter of academics, after all).  I will look for concrete, actionable tactics. I will ask myself what I’d council another to do, and take my advice.  I will seek out blogs & books about career advancement and study them.  And I will ask a couple of trusted colleagues for recommendations on a mentor for this specific topic/skill set.

Oh, and I will blog about it

That’s why I started this thing, yes?  Among other reasons, I just need to lay bare my biggest shame and my biggest blind spot. Ruminate on it, learn from others, hear comments & feedback, think out loud.

Blunt Feedback I Wish I’d Given

Some of this is blunt feedback I wish I’d been given, early in my career.  Some of it is blunt feedback I wish I — or someone — had given various colleagues & employees. Why is it so hard for people to be frank about this stuff?  Maybe it’s because I live in Minnesota, where the official state personality is passive aggressive, but sugar coating or ignoring this stuff doesn’t do anyone any favors.

1.  Stop obsessing about pay grade. Obsessing about pay grade is the wrong strategic move. The more you obsess about your pay grade, the more I think you have no common sense and the less I want to increase your pay grade.  Why? You care about pay grade because you want to make more and feel like you’re being promoted.

But to make more and get promoted, you should instead obsess about outperforming in your current role, getting new marketable experiences, and getting marketable title advancement. These are the things you talk about on your resume and in your interviews, not pay grade.

Plus, pay grades usually overlap by enormous amounts, so is not necessarily an indication your compensation,  just your upside. Jumping pay grades doesn’t guarantee more cash.  But outperforming and racking up marketable experience both increases your likelihood of getting a raise (more cash) and jumping pay grades (more upside).

PS: title is more important than pay grade because title goes on the resume and sets compensation expectations.  For example, in my company, there are certain Analysts who are higher pay grades than some Managers.  But Manager flags as higher-compensated on a resume.

2. Fix your image. Sorry to remind you but humans are evolutionarily wired to make snap judgments based on appearance.  Image includes clothes, hair, makeup, ironing, tie, jewelry, fingernails, etc.  For goodness sake, use a q-tip! Want to advance? Dress like you mean it. Don’t dress like your kid, or yourself from ten years ago,  or the funky free spirit that you think you are.  Right now, you are over estimating how professional you look. If you tell me that “suits are uncomfortable,” or “suits don’t fit me,” than I believe believe you’re not thinking maturely or strategically about your career, because it’s plenty easy to find a suit that fits, and by the way you need to get comfortable with using a tailor.

This rant about suits comes from the suit culture I work in:  you need to carefully examine the culture of your own organization.  How do the leaders in your company present their image? How do the people you admire in the job you want (not the job you have) present their image? Follow their lead.

3. Your communication style is getting in your way. If you are not an excellent communicator, people aren’t recognizing your smarts & your contribution.  People are getting tired of fighting the communication battle with you, or being eternally confused by you. The more tired you make them, the less they will want to work with you, or for you, and to promote you.

4. You need to manage up more. If you don’t know what that is, you need to find out or get a mentor.  It is not the same as brown-nosing: it’s managing expectations, ensuring your actions are aligned with your manager’s goals, appropriately triageing issues, ensuring your manager knows your successes, making life easy for your manager and making your manager look good.  Everyone wants their manager to have their back, right?  Think of managing up as returning the favor.

5. Invest more time in your boss and your boss’ boss. You can have the greatest relationship in the world with the client or your team, but if you don’t ALSO invest in having a great relationship with your boss – and for that matter, your boss’ peers, your boss’ boss and anyone filling in for your boss  – than you are not going to have a great review or get looked at as promotable, or get great new assignments. Or be able to have a candid enough relationship with your boss such that you can say no, influence priorities, and call her on her bullshit.

6. Own your own weaknesses, start mitigating them and take off the blinders.  Why is are so many people so reluctant to own their weaknesses? Maybe because so many of us have been punished for weakness in the past. But what, do you think you are perfect? Only a perfect person would either have no weaknesses or not have to mitigate them.

7. Stop taking everyone’s advice indiscriminately. Instead ask: out of the menu of advice I’ve gotten, which is most applicable for this current situation or this current culture or this current personality?

This goes for my advice, right here, too.   I’m just a data point for you, and you can’t use every data point — I might be an outlier. I don’t have some magic solution or the key to it all.  If I had the key, I wouldn’t need to be writing this blog to figure out what I am doing.

Is She Good?

Today I have to write about someone else’s performance, in order to write about my own performance.  For both of us, the question to answer: Is she good?

Let me start by saying that I firmly believe that my first job as a leader of people is to coach, develop & empower my team to be highly productive and to advance in their careers. (Be that advancement to higher levels or advancement as individual contributors to higher challenges).  Of course, I also need to set vision & strategy and at my management level I also have individual contributions, but my primary job is my team.  Why else am I managing people?

On all my teams, I’ve had mixes of star, average and poor performers.  Any team would have this, yes? And where my people land on that continuum — where any of us land — is not fixed through time.  Performance improves, performance slips, new challenges emerge and we rise to meet them, or not.

So when my client, who is several pay grades above me, asked today of one of my team, “Is she good?” it broke my heart but I had to assess fairly and answer no. She is good at some things, at work that is tightly scoped and appropriate for her pay grade. But my client was questioning whether she is good at handling the challenges before us, challenges that have evolved over the year.  And she has not risen to them. As much as the skills required to meet these challenges are crucial to moving our initiative forward, my client was also asking, “Is she good enough to promote?” and the skills are even more crucial at leadership levels.  So: No.

Here is why this is also about my performance: My primary job is to develop and empower my team.  In the first half of the year, I considered this employee one of my stars.  But over the year, she has slipped from star into average and seems to be continuing her slide. Granted, I was on maternity leave for part of this slide, but I have been asking myself what I could and should have done better to help her prevent her slide (and the disengagement that is going with it).  I have also been asking myself whether I even assessed her correctly in the first place.  And this is soooo important to me, because my primary job is my team.  How could I not have seen this coming, or stepped in to prevent?

Here are some of the things I have learned from the situation, that I’ll try to apply going forward:

• I bias towards seeing the potential in people.  This is a good thing.  But some people give strong early impressions, and then can’t follow it up.  I’m going to be more cautious about assessing people as high-potential for promotion until I see a longer period of consistent strong results. And a long period of not being overly dramatic and acting overly entitled.

• The higher you go, the more important become communication, ability to reduce confusion & ambiguity, delegation, and ability to see the big picture and focus on what’s important.  When giving feedback in the future, I’m going to be more blunt about these being big limiting factors if people can’t get a handle on them and mitigate weaknesses in these areas. I’m good at giving actionable, behavior-based feedback but I think I haven’t been as blunt as I should have been about consequences, particularly promotion consequences, of not addressing problems in these areas.

• I am going to talk to my boss and my most trusted manager peers more regularly about their impressions & assessment of my team members. We do this well at my company at review time, and I do regularly ask the vague, Do you have any feedback for my team? I want to start asking specific things like, What do you see as the biggest value [name] brings, or How do you think [name] has been doing at [activity] or What do you see as [name]’s next destination? Also: How do you think I am doing coaching [name] around [issue]? Asking these things throughout the year will give me a pulse check on my assessments of their performance and my success at coaching, and give me insight into behaviors or interactions I may not be seeing directly.

7 Tips for Early Success When You’re New to the Organization….

….Or, What I Realized Today While Putting Out an 8:00a.m. Fire Involving the New Person, and Also Later While Eavesdropping Against My Will on the New Person:

1. Figure out the organization’s culture, and let go of your prior job’s culture. Invest some time in this; do it thoughtfully and deliberately. Is it command/control? Is it consensus-based? You have to be successful in this culture, because this organization is where you now work.  Don’t try to force your old culture onto your new job: nothing pisses off consensus people more than a dictator and nothing annoys command/control folks more than someone wasting time trying to build consensus.

2. Meet the communication needs of your clients & peers. You are new.  You will not be able to influence well right off the bat. You have to build relationships and deliver results in order to build credibility, reputation and influence.  You cannot build relationships if you are not communicating well.  Communicating well means figuring out what your partners need to hear from you and how they need to hear it.  It means explaining the context and the why’s of what you are doing and recommending. It means asking more and talking less.

3.  Don’t assume you know how the process/business/department works. Instead, watch, listen and learn. Listen three times more than you talk.  Draw out your partners, ask them what do they do, why do they do it? What are they concerned about? How do they measure results? What are they frustrated by?  Find out what are the sacred cows.  Don’t challenge the sacred cows too much until you have built up some credibility.

4.  Build up some credibility. Deliver excellent results.  But ensure you bring your partners & staff along fro the ride.  Great results alone don’t give you credibility, if they aren’t embraced by the client, or understood by your staff.  Develop a reputation for delivering, for innovating, for adding value to other teams, for helping other people.

5.  Keep a pulse on perceptions and manage them. The last thing you need is to have a client or partner think what you are up to is a direct threat to their job, methodology, way of life. If you were not hired to threaten or change those things, then monitor for signals that you are sending a threatening message, figure out what you are doing that sends the message, and stop doing it. If you were hired to threaten or change those things, then work hard to bring your partner along for the ride and generate buy-in instead of just compliance. Either way, reach out to those who feel threatened and clear the air. Approach it as a partnership and appeal to shared goals.

6. Be graceful in how you challenge & debate. Don’t be a steamroller, deliberately or accidentally.  Aknowledge you are debating; state when you are playing Devil’s Advocate.  Paraphrase back others’ points to demonstrate to them you heard and understand. (Engage in a little meta-communication).

7. Don’t assume your analysis is better. If your analysis is better, you’d better employ change management!

Hmmm, I’m seeing a communication theme here.

Well, good communication is 50% of the battle.  Does this battle sound too hard or too time consuming?  If you think like that it’s going to be a big limiting factor for you.