Winning (24 page)

OTHER POLITICAL CAPITAL DRAINS

Along with transgressing company values, there is a related but more egregious way that you can use up your boss’s political capital. It has to do with character—that is, with the kinds of behaviors that can make people ask, “Hold on, can I really trust this person?”

Take lack of candor. As I mentioned earlier in the chapter on candor, I’m not talking about boldface lying, but a tendency to withhold information. That behavior is far more common, and it frustrates teams and bosses to no end.

We had a manager in one of our larger businesses whose results were quite good, but after several early promotions, his career hit a wall. The reason was whenever he was in a business review or a deal proposal session, we had to pepper him with about thirty questions to get him to explain what was really going on. And even then, we didn’t feel as if were getting the whole story. All we got was hemming and hawing and then a hesitant “It’s OK now” or a cagey-sounding “We’ve got it under control.”

At every HR review, I would ask his boss why this guy played his cards so close to the vest. “It’s his personality” was the answer. “He’s not a bad person. He just doesn’t like to open up.”

“What’s he hiding?” I asked. “Because when he withholds information the way he does, he just comes across as if he’s not telling the truth. And I know I’m not the only one who feels that way.”

“Yeah, that’s true. It bugs other people too. But he’s not lying. He’s just guarded.”

“But we need to talk about the business openly.”

“Yeah, I know it’s frustrating. I’ll tell him again.”

And back and forth like that.

Eventually his boss got tired of the routine, and soon thereafter, the too-cagey manager was demoted.
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The point is: Don’t make your boss ask the perfect question to get information from you. If you want your character to stand up for you and make life easy for your boss, open up and tell it like it is.

There’s another behavior that will also force your boss to use political capital because it really alienates people. It’s wearing your career goals on your sleeve.

With most people, ambition is a positive thing—it’s fire in the belly, it’s energy and optimism. It’s pushing yourself and the organization forward so that everyone wins. Kevin Sharer had plenty of this kind of drive, and so do most people who succeed.

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.
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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 was a thirty-five-year-old manager when he took over the Six Sigma program in Plastics after running GE Plastics-Pacific. Using Six Sigma, he and his team drastically reduced product variation and stretched plant capacity 30 percent with little additional investment. Three years later Wayne was promoted to CEO of GE’s $2 billion global silicones business.

Dan Henson is another case in point. Dan was running a GE Capital lending business in London when he had the courage to volunteer to spearhead Six Sigma throughout GE Capital, a business where a lot of people doubted it had any value. Dan found out exactly where Six Sigma applied, and equally important, where it did not. In two years, Dan achieved variation reduction in highly repetitive activities, such as credit card processing and mortgage insurance applications, and the results were impressive. Today, Dan is CEO of one of GE Capital’s largest businesses, Vendor Financial Services.

GE is so big, if Wayne and Dan hadn’t put themselves on the radar screen, who knows when they would have been made CEOs. Certainly, it would have happened eventually, but not nearly as quickly.
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The best proof of the radar screen dynamic is in the numbers. Today, more than half of the senior vice presidents reporting to Jeff Immelt have worked in global assignments, and one-third of the company’s approximately 180 officers have significant Six Sigma experience.

Amassing mentors.
The third career do concerns mentors, a burning topic while I was at GE, and these days, wherever I speak.

People, it seems, are always looking for that one right mentor to help them get ahead.

But in my experience, there is no one right mentor. There are
many
right mentors.

I had dozens of informal mentors over the course of my career, and each one taught me something important. My mentors ranged from the classic older and wiser executive to coworkers who were often younger than I was.

Some mentoring relationships lasted a lifetime, others lasted just weeks.

One of the most meaningful mentors in my life never called himself my mentor, nor did I ever identify him that way. I thought of Si Cathcart, who was ten years my senior and a member of the GE board, as my friend. To my great sadness, he died in 2002.

Si was everything people look for in a great mentor—a person who cheered me on and challenged me in equal measure. His judgment about people was pitch-perfect, and I rarely made a big decision on hiring without running it by him first. During the toughest period of my career, when I was choosing a successor to recommend to the board, Si spent several hundred hours over the course of five years visiting all of the candidates and sharing his impressions with me.
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Si, the longtime chairman of Illinois Tool Works, was on the GE board when I became CEO. We played golf often and chatted on the phone regularly. Si used both these venues to push my thinking up unseen alleys and around blind corners. “Are you sure that guy’s not a phony?” he would ask. “Do you think that acquisition is still going to make you happy when the fanfare dies down?” Si always knew the right question to ask.

I had another great mentor in Dennis Dammerman, who was not only younger than me by ten years, but my subordinate as well.

I met Dennis in 1977, when I was named head of GE’s consumer products group. I arrived in the job knowing basically nothing about insurance or financing, the main activities of GE Capital, one of the group’s businesses. Dennis, whom I had hired as my financial analyst, had spent several years there.

For months on end, Dennis taught me something every single day. His patience was remarkable. Here was his boss asking him to define the simplest concepts—I barely understood types of debt in those days. After all, I had come from the manufacturing side of GE. When we wanted money, all we did was make a pitch to corporate, and if the proposal was good enough, they sent it. Suddenly, I was dealing with combined ratios, delinquencies, leveraged leases, and the like.

Dennis basically downloaded his brain into mine. He never called himself my mentor, but he was nothing less.

There were countless other mentors who helped me in my career, from the executive education teacher who tried to teach me public speaking when I was twenty-six, to the young woman in PR who tried to teach me the Internet when I was sixty. But let me just add to the list one more mentor that can work for everyone: the business media.

Business is like any game. It has players, a language, a complex history, rules, controversies, and a rhythm.

The media covers it all, and from every angle. From my earliest days in Plastics, I learned mountains about business just by reading every financial newspaper and magazine I could get my hands on. From them, I picked up what deals worked and which failed, and why. I followed people’s careers. I tried to understand what kinds of strategic moves were criticized and which were praised. I kept up with different industries, from chemicals to medical technology.

And I used what I read. I learned, for instance, about PepsiCo’s executive training program from an article in
Fortune
magazine. I was so impressed by PepsiCo’s model—which used the company’s own executives as teachers—that I built it into the foundation of our training program in Crotonville.

I didn’t believe everything I read, of course, and the more I knew, the more I realized that some articles were off the mark in their analyses. Regardless, I still believe the business media is such a good teacher that I am always amazed when I meet a young person who doesn’t just
consume
it. Don’t let that happen—this mentor is right there for the taking!

My point is that mentors are everywhere. Don’t just settle for the mentor assigned to you as part of a formal program. Those official mentors teach you the company ropes, but they’re just a start. The best mentors help you in unplanned, unscripted ways. Relish all that they give you in whatever form they come.

Don’t be a downer.
The fourth and final way to help yourself get promoted is as hard or as easy as you make it—have a positive attitude and spread it around.

Yes, it’s nothing more sophisticated than that. Have a sense of humor, be fun to hang out with. Don’t be a bore or a sourpuss. Don’t act important, or worse, pompous. Smack yourself in the head if you start taking yourself too seriously.

In politics, people talk about each candidate’s likability factor, which is just another way of saying “personality appeal.” Both of those terms refer to something intangible, but they really matter—in politics and at work.

Obviously, being a congenial, upbeat person will not get you ahead by itself. You need everything else we’ve just talked about—great results, expanded job horizons, good character, visibility, mentors, and all the rest. But it is very, very hard to get ahead without being a positive person because, very simply, no one likes to work under or near a dark cloud. Even if the “cloud” is very smart.

I know it is not easy to always be upbeat. Life doesn’t always go your way. But every time you feel yourself spreading gloom at work, think of Jimmy Dunne.