The Mobile MBA: 112 Skills to Take You Further, Faster (Richard Stout's Library) (27 page)

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Make yourself busy and indispensable in your current role.
This makes it very hard for anyone to poach you out of your current role against your will.

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Find a powerful sponsor:
these are the people at least two levels above you who know what is coming down the pipeline and will be able to guide you toward the right role. Often senior executives like to have people they can sponsor. Partly it is an ego trip for them: they like to have someone who seems to respect their advice and admire them. But it is also practical: these people like to have moles in the organization who can tell them what is really going on, and perhaps help out on some non-budgeted activity of theirs, such as gathering information or writing a speech. Make yourself useful to them and they will, normally, be keen to reciprocate.

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If you see an interesting opportunity arising, hustle.
The easiest way to hustle is to volunteer your services: help out the good boss on the emerging assignment. Show interest and enthusiasm. Most bosses will get the hint fast: they are always on the lookout for good talent. It is best to let them try to poach you: then you will not be seen to be disloyal to your current boss, and you give yourself a strong hand in negotiating the right role. If the boss is a bit slow, then ask if there are any opportunities, but keep your current boss happy as well.

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Work your network.
Gossip is good. You need to find out what opportunities are coming up before they are put in the hands of HR for staffing. Once the formal processes have taken over, you are at the mercy of a bureaucratic procedure. You may as well spin the roulette wheel. If you hear about the opportunity early, you can take control. Either you put on Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility by working harder and becoming more indispensable in your current role, or you start working your sponsor, calling in favors, and perhaps making yourself useful to the new boss.

Much has been said about how bosses should manage their teams. But there is more or less complete silence on a far more important topic for most people: how they should manage their bosses. If we mess up our team, our team suffers. If we mess up our boss, we suffer. And if we can manage our boss, we can manage more or less anyone.

I discovered the importance of managing upward when I picked an argument with my first boss. I was right, and then I was fired. It was a good outcome for all concerned. Learning from experience can be painful. Instead, it is easier to ask bosses what they expect of team members. The answers from 2,000 bosses I have interviewed and surveyed are surprisingly simple. Here are five things bosses consistently expect from their staff:

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Hard work.
Sorry, there are no shortcuts. One-minute managing may be possible, but one-minute working is not. In the real world, real results take real effort.

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Be proactive.
Bosses want teams which take the initiative and make things happen. This is good news for people who do not want to be slaves to their boss, but want to have some freedom to think and act for themselves.

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Intelligence.
This is not about emulating Einstein. It is about being smart enough to deal with day-to-day challenges without always asking the boss, “What do I do next?”

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Reliability.
Always deliver: if you make a promise, keep it. Bosses hate surprises, because they are rarely good. And they hate the uncertainty of not knowing whether something is going to happen or not.

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Ambition.
The good news is that bosses encourage ambition. Ambitious people are more likely to make things happen than people with low ambitions, aspirations, and achievement.

These may seem like very low expectations, and they are. The reason that bosses picked these criteria is because they so often see people failing to leap these very low hurdles. If you can beat these hurdles, you will probably beat your colleagues.

most (but not all) bosses are pretty forgiving of mistakes

The good news is that bosses know, from their own experience, that screw-ups happen. Most (but not all) bosses are pretty forgiving of mistakes. But there are some things that they find hard to forgive. The one sin that does not get forgiven is disloyalty. Disloyalty is not just about plotting the overthrow of your boss. It can be failing to stand up for the boss in public when the heat is on; keeping information back; or telling other people first about important developments. The problem with disloyalty is that it breaks the bond of trust between you and your boss. If your boss can no longer trust you, then you will find that there will be a parting of ways. And the parting may not be on your terms.

I was chairing the promotions commission. We faced 50 massive documents, which were all unstinting eulogies of various people seeking promotion. The problem was that we only had 25 promotions to give out, and it was impossible to tell which eulogy was the best. In the end, we ended up asking three questions:

1. Who is sponsoring each individual?
We might not know each staff member well, but we knew all the senior managers who were their sponsors. Some sponsors were credible, others were not. It was easier to believe the promotion packages which came from strong and credible sponsors, than from some weaker sponsors.

2. What is this person’s claim to fame?
Everyone got checks in all the boxes, so that was not enough. We needed something which made them stand out. Successful candidates had done more than overperform against target: they had done a special project, reached beyond their own department, or taken the initiative in some eye-catching way.

3. What experience did we have of them directly?
Some candidates were invisible. Others had made their mark, sometimes simply by being enthusiastic, confident, and positive.

Clearly, this is an imperfect way of deciding people’s futures. And that is the whole point. Corporate life is rarely fair or rational, even though we try to be fair and rational. People who relied solely on the formal promotion process and worked to check all the boxes came up short. Successful people showed a little more political savvy. So if you are in a large machine bureaucracy, you will increase your chances of promotion if:

• You find a powerful and supportive sponsor: ideally this person is somewhere above your boss, and will work the system for you if you have done enough to help and impress your sponsor.

• Make sure you have a claim to fame which is visible beyond your part of cubicle land.

• Remember impressions count. Figure out who is on the promotions commission: being enthusiastic may count as a certifiable mental disorder in some organizations, but in most will help you stand out from the crowd.

It would be nice to think that smaller organizations are less political, if only because the performance of each individual is more visible. If anything, the politics are more intense and more personal because everyone knows everyone else, and because the promotion criteria are often less clear.

Leading from the middle is the hardest stage of any manager’s career. Whisper it quietly, but top management is far easier and more rewarding than middle management. At the top you have more control over your destiny, and more resources at your disposal.

Many people never make it out of the matrix in the middle of most organizations. Here are the five most common types of career hold-up:

1. The boy scout or girl guide
, who believes that working hard and honestly will get you to the top. No it will not. You need a claim to fame, to stake your claim, and to have sponsors who will look out for you at promotion, bonus, and assignment time.

2. The expert
, who gets promoted on the basis of deep functional expertise. These people are good at managing ideas and techniques: think accountants, lawyers, IT specialists. They fail to learn the top management skills of managing people, politics, and business.

3. The politician
, who is the opposite of the boy scout. Politicians always “associate themselves with success.” They vanish when there is trouble. They plot and connive. They can go far, but most get caught in the end: their enemies multiply over the years and eventually people notice that the politicians have not actually achieved anything.

4. The autocrat
, who acts like they already are top managers. Their version of being a team player is “play my way or you are not a team player.” Again, they can go far, but they are often highly divisive. Like the politician, they acquire enemies who are only too happy to stick the knife in as soon as the autocrat has an inevitable set back.

5. The cave dweller.
Most large organizations have functional silos and layers like a pancake. When you cross a silo with a pancake you get a cave: this is where some middle managers hide. They protect their little piece of territory, to recreate the certainty they enjoyed in junior management. They fail to work with the complexity, ambiguity, and opportunity which large organizations offer.

So how do you get through the middle management minefield? Successful middle managers all have elements, but not to excess, of the boy scout (hard work) and the politician (understand the organization) and the autocrat (make things happen). Most, but not all, are very good at working with people.

Inevitably, the skills that leaders really need to learn are ones for which there is precious little training. You have to discover the skills and the rules of the game yourself: many middle managers stay in the middle because they never discover the rules of the game for getting to the top.

Most bosses are reasonably forgiving. They will forgive bad hair, bad dress, and bad jokes. Within reason, they will even forgive poor performance and poor behavior. There is one sin which bosses never forgive and for which there is no second chance: disloyalty. As soon as you are seen to be disloyal, the bond of trust between you and the boss is broken. It may be weeks or months before you find yourself being eased out or moved on, but traitors never survive.

traitors never survive

Think about your own situation: do you want to work with a team you do not trust?

Disloyalty is not just about plotting to displace the boss. Disloyalty is often much simpler, for example:

• Gossiping negatively about the boss around the water cooler: such gossip travels fast and in the wrong direction

• Failing to follow the company line or policy

• Trying to shift the blame for a problem onto the boss

• Failing to speak up in support of the boss when the boss is in a tight situation

• Hiding bad news from the boss, who only finds out about it by accident (in a meeting with the CEO, for instance): maximum embarrassment and the boss looks out of control

You do not have to be a “yes-man.” Stand up to your boss and argue, in private so that you do not cause loss of face in public.

I have had the doubtful pleasure of sifting through several thousand CVs, looking for the people we need to interview. You need your CV to stand out. You are only as good as you appear on your CV.

Your CV should trumpet your many unique strengths. Experienced CV reviewers know that most strengths also reveal a weakness, so they routinely look at the other side of the precious coin you are presenting to them. What you say and what they hear are quite different things. This is what they find when they look at your CV or at a reference you have provided: