Your Best People - What do they think you are?

Moving up the career ladder into wider leadership roles requires an individual to do a number of things. It’s not a simple or smooth process, nor is it simply a matter of doing the same sort of things that made one successful in the last job, only more of them. Taking a first leadership role, or moving from one leadership role to a higher and broader role, means doing some key things differently.

One of the main reasons people fail as they move into new roles is that they apply the same approach and the same behaviour that created success for them in their last job. It’s very difficult to overcome this tendency. Behaviour is learned and the learning process involves finding out what works and what doesn’t. Quite obviously we continue to do things that bring positive results and we stop doing things that bring negative results or fail to result in positive outcomes. The psychologist Edward Thorndike called this The Law of Effect. We call it common sense. Very few people persist in things that fail and stop doing things that succeed.

The common belief is that performance leads to results and results lead to success. But performance is not the only important “p” word and results is not the only key “r” word. There is a second “p” – perception, and there is a second “r” – relationships. The perception of performance has to be managed. And relationships have to be managed, because the majority of tasks an individual is required to perform cannot be achieved without the cooperation or assistance of others.

When people move to a new job it’s exceedingly rare for them to be given a blueprint of what they need to do to be successful. By the same token they aren’t told what not to do either; they’re left to work that out for themselves. Your success in a job, especially in the crucial first 90 days, depends to a large degree on how you are perceived by others. Perceptions of you are principally based on your observed behaviour – what you say, what you do, what decisions you make, how you react to situations, how you treat people, etc. You are what people perceive you to be. Individuals who fail to understand that limit their career potential severely.

The higher up the leadership ladder you move the more the things you say and do are scrutinised and magnified. As Niall Fitzgerald, the former chairman of Unilever, pointed out, “One of the things that leaders don’t fully recognise is that when they speak or act they are speaking into an extraordinary amplification system”. Actions you take, to which you may pay little or no attention, are closely watched, and much like the plays of Shakespeare are continually subjected to interpretation. “What did she mean by that?” “What’s he really saying?” “What’s the message that’s being communicated?”

We know that behaviour drives performance – it’s what you do that determines results. But it’s slightly more complicated than that. It’s not just the things you do that determine the results you get, it’s also the way those things are perceived and interpreted. A manager we know tells the story of how he inadvertently created the perception among the staff of a factory he ran that it was going to be sold to a Japanese company simply by taking a group of visiting Japanese managers on a tour of the factory to show them some new processes that had been developed.

But while managing perceptions is essential to making the successful transition to a new role, so is the development of relationships. Relationships are a critical element of success in any leadership role. Leadership implies getting other people to do things. However followership is not the pure reciprocal of leadership. Getting things done depends on a lot of people other than one’s direct reports. Without the support, assistance, guidance and advice of individuals in many different parts of the organisation one simply can’t work through the obstacles that systems, processes, procedures and interest groups create. Every successful manager knows there is a formal structure and system and an informal one and it is the latter that actually makes things work.

Research on the failure of people to succeed in new leadership roles shows that more than 75% of the time they haven’t got a clear idea of what behaviour is expected of them in the role and what behaviour is censured, and they don’t know who the important people are in terms of creating necessary relationships. Unless they can establish a good relationship with their manager and other important colleagues who can provide them with this information the probability that they will be successful in their new role is low.