Page 249 - Just Promoted A 12 Month Road Map for Success in Your New Leadership Role

234 Just Promoted!

Superior Leadership Is Your Daily Goal and Primary Work Value
To be a superior leader brings us eye to eye with our true selves—our strengths,
weaknesses, concerns, and dreams. To strive to be superior is simultaneously
enriching, energizing, and challenging. To perform at the upper limits of our
ability requires complex knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors.
Superior leaders have a master plan, a vision of what they wish to accom-
plish. Accomplishing that plan is akin to eating an elephant—just one bite at
a time. Superior leaders create and make operational their vision, with activ-
ities that, one at a time, help them constantly upgrade their abilities.
Feedback from direct reports, peers, and her boss helped make Carla more
aware of her strengths and weaknesses. The weaknesses were, in particular,
preventing her from becoming a superior leader, and she knew they would
slow her success and promotion.
From her subordinates she learned they needed better systems and proce-
dures to automate elements of the work that were repetitive. They wanted
Carla to provide more frequent and specific feedback and to tell them when
they did a good job more often.
Managers of other departments said they needed better information on
her group’s work, so those who handled the work knew it was managed in
time, and those to whom she sent her work (her clients inside the company)
could better plan for what was coming. They also said she was making too
many last-minute requests of them, which created timeline pressures that
interfered with their normal work.
The feedback from Carla’s boss was the most critical because his impres-
sions would affect her salary, bonus, career advancement, and in fact, whether
or not she would continue in her job. At the six-month appraisal, she found
her boss had already heard the complaints from her peer managers, who had
been going to him with their complaints rather than to her. They felt when
they went to her that she listened but didn’t change anything. So in frustration
they hoped he would be able to get through to her.
Her boss had some suggestions about her personal attire, the stacks of
papers and unfinished work on her desk and sometimes even on the floor, and
her office furniture. To him, these were symptoms of the lack of organization
and planning cited by Carla’s fellow managers. He also wanted more account-
ability from her, so that when he was asked about her work he could report
exactly on productivity and short-term accomplishments.