Winning - Jack Welch [100]
Career lust looks different. It shows itself in tearing down the people around you, insulting or disparaging them in order to make your own candle burn brighter, as the old saying goes. It’s covering up your mistakes or (worse) trying to blame them on someone else. It’s hogging meetings, taking disproportionate credit for team success, and gossiping incessantly about people and events in the office. It’s seeing the company’s org chart as a chessboard, and making an open display of watching the pieces move.
If you’ve got this problem, your best hope is to repress it, fight it, and keep it out of sight. If you don’t do that, when the time comes to be promoted, there won’t be enough political capital in the world to save you. It’s very hard to champion someone over the clamor of objecting coworkers.
FURTHERMORE…
We’ve just looked at the two biggest factors in getting you promoted—getting great results while expanding your job’s horizons and not using up your boss’s political capital.
That said, there are four other dos that certainly help too and one don’t.
The dos are:
Manage your relationships with your subordinates with the same carefulness that you manage the one with your boss.
Get on the radar screen by being an early champion of your company’s major projects or initiatives.
Search out and relish the input of lots of mentors, realizing that mentors don’t always look like mentors.
Have a positive attitude and spread it around.
The don’t is:
Don’t let setbacks break your stride.
Let’s look at the dos first.
Managing down. Every business advice book tells you to network with people within your company and industry. They tell you how important it is to build a mutually respectful bond with your boss. That’s all good advice, and you should take it.*
But to get ahead, you also need to tend to your subordinates with the same level of attention and concern.
The boss-subordinate relationship is easy to neglect. Your boss is in your face, and your peers are on your mind, while your subordinates generally do what you say.
But be careful, because the boss-subordinate relationship can easily fall into two career-damaging traps. The first, and by far more common, occurs when you spend too much time managing up. As a result, you become too remote from your subordinates, and you end up losing their support and affection. The second occurs when you get too close to your employees, overstepping boundaries, and end up acting more like a buddy than a boss.
Either way can catch up with you.
Your goal in managing your relationships with subordinates is to try to walk the line between the two extremes. When the time comes for your promotion, the best thing employees can say about you is that you were fair, you cared, and that you showed them tough love.
I learned this lesson firsthand. In the final showdown for CEO of GE, I was strongly opposed by two powerful vice-chairmen, who supported their own candidates.
Unbeknownst to me, I was really helped by my direct reports. I found out later that they had advocated relentlessly for my promotion with Chairman Reg Jones, telling him I was tough but fair, and that I would push GE harder and faster than any of the other CEO finalists. I’m not sure all of them liked me—I was rough around the edges and pretty short on patience. But I guess they respected me for respecting them and building relationships with them not just when I needed them, but years before.
Getting on the radar screen. As I’ve said, the first and best way to get noticed is with results.
But you can also raise your visibility by putting up your hand when the call comes for people to lead major projects and initiatives, in particular ones that don’t have a whole lot of popularity at the outset. At GE, two of those were globalization, which we launched in earnest in the 1980s, and Six Sigma, which was launched in 1995.
Wayne Hewett is a perfect example of a person whose career benefited from this dynamic. Wayne