The First 90 Days, Updated and Expanded

After eight years in marketing at a leading consumer electronics company, Julia Gould was promoted to lead a major new product development project. Up to that point, her track record had been stellar. Her intelligence, focus, and determination had won her recognition and early promotion to increasingly senior positions. The company had designated her as a high potential and had positioned her on the fast track to senior leadership. Julia was assigned to be the launch manager for one of the company's hottest new products. It was her responsibility to coordinate the work of a cross-functional team drawn from marketing, sales, R&D, and manufacturing. The goal? To seamlessly move the product from R&D to production, oversee a rapid ramp-up, and streamline the market introduction. Unfortunately, Julia ran into trouble early on. Her earlier success in marketing was the result of extraordinary attention to detail. Accustomed to managing with authority and making the calls, she had a high need for control and a tendency to micromanage. When she tried to continue making decisions, members of the team initially said nothing. But soon two key members challenged her knowledge and authority. Stunned, she focused on the area she knew best—the marketing aspects of the launch. Her efforts to micromanage the members of the marketing team alienated them. Within a month and a half, Julia was back in marketing, and someone else was leading the team. Julia failed because she did not make the leap from being a strong functional performer to taking on a cross-functional, project leadership role. She failed to grasp that the strengths that had made her successful in marketing could be liabilities in a role that required her to lead without direct authority or superior expertise. She kept doing what she knew how to do, making her feel confident and in control. The result, of course, was the opposite. By not letting go of the past and not fully embracing her new role, she squandered a big opportunity to rise in the organization. It's a mistake to believe that you will be successful in your new job by continuing to do what you did in your previous job, only more so. They put me in the job because of my skills and accomplishments, the reasoning goes, so that must be what they expect me to do here. This thinking is destructive because doing what you know how to do and avoiding what you don't can appear to work at least for a while. You can exist in a state of denial, believing that because you're being efficient, you're being effective. You may keep believing this until the moment the walls come crashing down around you. What might Julia have done differently? She should have focused on better preparing herself for the new position. At the broadest level, preparing yourself means letting go of the past and embracing the imperatives of the new situation to give yourself a running start. It can be hard work, but it is essential. Even promising managers fail in new roles because they've failed to prepare themselves by embracing the necessary changes in perspective. The starting points for preparing yourself is to understand the types of transitions you're experiencing. To illustrate the challenges associated with different types of transitions discussed in the introduction, I focus here on the two most frequently experienced types of transitions, transitions and onboarding into new companies. Getting Promoted A promotion marks the result of years of hard work to persuade influential people in the organization that you're willing and able to move to the next level. But it also marks the beginning of a new journey. You must figure out what it takes to be excellent in the new role, how to exceed the expectations of those who promoted you, and how to position yourself for still greater things. Specifically, every promotion presents new leaders with a core set of challenges to be surmounted. Balance Breadth and Depth Each time you are promoted, your horizon broadens to encompass a wider set of issues and decisions. So you need to gain and sustain a high-level perspective in your new role. To be successful, Julia needed to shift her focus from her marketing function to the full array of issues relating to the product launch. You also need to learn to strike the right balance between keeping the wide view and drilling down into the details. This juggling act can be challenging because what had been the 50,000-foot view in your previous role may be equivalent to the world at 5,000 feet or even 500 feet in your new job.