Page 28 - Just Promoted A 12 Month Road Map for Success in Your New Leadership Role

You’ve Been Promoted, Now What? 13

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Collins’s Good to Great research. This Collins principle is referred to as “first
who, then what.” Chapter 4, “Selecting, Building, and Developing Your Work
Team,” provides helpful suggestions about how to choose and develop your
leadership team.
The seventh Just Promoted Leader Tool, the Team Integrity and Capabil-
ity Grid, should prove to be a very useful resource for you. It also will be intro-
duced in Chapter 4. In order to determine who will be in your most important
roles, you will need to decide the relative effectiveness, competence, trust-
worthiness, and leadership potential of your team members and other vital
members of your organization. Making these determinations should be an
ongoing process for you even after you have made the initial decisions as to
who will be on your leadership team. You will need to exercise fine-tuned
assessment, diagnostic, and organizational savvy skills to do this. You also will
need to demonstrate a touch for managing difficult people. These assessments
and your subsequent actions may also require courage when difficult people
decisions need to be made.
One of the first careful choices you will want to make for your team will
be to identify a very talented human resources leader who can partner with
you in making tough leadership, people, and organizational decisions. Newly
promoted leaders are often well served by selecting both their human
resources and financial partners before selecting others.

5. Make excellent initial impressions, and convey your key leadership com-
munication messages and strategies with conviction and enthusiasm. Percep-
tions of you as the team and organizational business leader will begin to form
in seconds following your announcement and introduction. Positive initial
impressions can be short-lived. But negative initial impressions tend to
be long lasting, and they can be very difficult to change. Keep your lines of
communication wide open. Be candid, upbeat, and appropriately forthcom-
ing. Use we and our rather than I and me as your pronouns of choice. Listen
as well as speak, and, as a general rule, try to listen more than you speak. Care-
fully, enthusiastically, and even inspirationally communicate your points of
view, perspectives, and priorities. People observe their new leaders very care-
fully. Use multiple channels and methods to communicate. Stay visible, and
make yourself accessible to those in your organization at a pace and in a way
that is both reasonable and inviting. Chapter 2, “Entering the Organization,”
will address these points, and it contains many practical communication tips.