Page 22 - Roy W. Rice - CEO Material How to Be a Leader in Any Organization-McGraw-Hill (2009)

Introduction • 3

firms we use follow the criteria we’ve established that fits our culture.
...But if I put myself through the company’s criteria, I would
have failed.
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Below the VP level people don’t realize how much of this type of
conversation is going on. People are evaluating you all the time with
a limited set of information, infrequent interaction, often from
second- and third-hand information. That’s just the reality. And as
you move up, people below you are evaluating you just the same.

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People will say it doesn’t happen this way, but it does.

If you are looking to bust through from supervisor to manager, man-
ager to division head, division head to vice president, vice president to
senior vice president, and senior vice president to CEO or from a small
organization to a big one—every stage is about differentiation.
For every 5 formal qualifiers, there are 30 disqualifiers, and they can
be almost anything and everything.
You need to know both. Every chapter in this book discusses the
qualifiers (tangible and intangible) that, if you ignore them, become a
disqualifier. The formal depends on the process your company has laid
out, which you have to pay attention to, as well as the informal: “What
are her warts?” “Is he going to lose weight?” “Did she quit smoking?”
“How is his spouse with this?”
My goal is to separate out the messiness and help you to anticipate
and understand those intangibles. It’s like a renowned interior home
designer who explained aesthetic design, “It’s not the color of the walls
that makes a difference but the color of the air in the room.”
Let me make it clear: You do not need to be the company’s record-
producing individual performer to be talked about in a glowing manner.
You do not have to be an alumnus of a blue-chip company, a graduate
from a top B-school, or have the highest IQ. You do not have to have been
the fastest kid in the class or the smartest in math. And you do not need
to have a “leader” gene in your DNA.