Page 80 - Just Promoted A 12 Month Road Map for Success in Your New Leadership Role

Entering the Organization 65

communicating, offering lukewarm support for management decisions, and
passing on critical comments as if they were informational.
Some employees will resent an insider’s promotion. They are more famil-
iar with an insider’s strengths and weaknesses, and they may not feel that he
or she was the strongest candidate. Some will welcome an outsider’s fresh per-
spective. If business is bad, your chances of a warm welcome are better, no
matter where you come from. In one company, an experienced sales director’s
energy and direction was greeted with relief, even by the piranhas.
Piranhas are those who would rather attack and criticize than support and
fit into the new organization. Their behavior may be overt or subtle. There
will be histories you probably won’t know—for example, that a veteran was
bypassed by your predecessor and is still resentful, or that another’s conflict
with a former leader makes him a suspicious subordinate. The management
team may not work well together because of jealousy or disagreements.
Administrative assistants, employees, or other managers may have morale
problems.
You may be associated with a disliked senior leader. Your promotion may
have been the outcome of a power struggle, and your promotion has already
alienated a power block. Managers or other leaders associated with a losing
candidate may be uncooperative.
Happily, most situations are mixed. Some people will be pleased, others
disappointed, but most will give you the benefit of the doubt. There are usu-
ally only a few certified piranhas in any organization.
Along with piranhas, watch out for submerged icebergs, which may be
more numerous and can appear unexpectedly. They evolve from the politics,
morale, jealousies, inefficiencies, and problems of an organization. Many will
be political.
The new hotel manager could not have known that the often inept direc-
tor of sales had once been the administrative assistant to the corporate finan-
cial vice president, or that the director of housekeeping was another corporate
officer’s mother. Nor could she have known that the hotel’s advertising direc-
tor was a make-work assignment for a favored but basically inept corporate
manager. She could not have known that the parent corporation, which was
not in the hotel business, viewed the hotel as a dumping ground for people the
company wanted to get rid of but didn’t have the heart to fire.
New leaders are frequently blindsided by networks they didn’t know
existed. Something you say about someone, some department, or some issue