Page 86 - Just Promoted A 12 Month Road Map for Success in Your New Leadership Role

Entering Your Boss’s World 71

the chairman about resources, making a statement that led to the chairman’s
first and then rapid subsequent public criticisms. In turn, William responded
in public. The ensuing discourse, including the conditions and price tag for a
proposed contract buyout, were conducted for others to hear, usually reported
by an enchanted media.
Of course, a number of mistakes were made. First, William was too
public before he had taken time to assess the situation. In his premature
diagnosis of the problems and choice of solutions, he caught himself in
contradictions.
Second, as we will see in a later chapter, William acted before he had
formed a leadership team that supported him. Essentially, when he made his
statements, he was speaking for himself, not for his leadership team. He had
formed no management consensus. He had no support, no one to help him
shape and defend his statements within his organization, with the board, and
with the public.
Third (and more to the point of this chapter), William violated a cardinal
rule of transitions: He did not understand the reasons for which he was hired.
From his boss’s point of view, several applicants could have done a good tech-
nical job. William was hired because his boss, the chairman of the transit
authority’s board, felt that William would do a good job for him. In doing a
good job, William would make the transit authority successful and make his
boss appear more professional, capable, and effective. William did not ade-
quately appreciate that doing a good job was linked to the mutual self-inter-
est of both William and his boss, and that both wanted to be effective.
If you have any doubt about the importance of safeguarding mutual self-
interests, it should be put to rest when you consider what happens when it is
destroyed. When it appeared that William was not serving his boss’s self-inter-
ests, the situation deteriorated rapidly. Each side lost confidence in the other,
and both suffered. The public increasingly perceived that the transit author-
ity was not being well led and was riddled with politics. Similarly, the transit
authority’s reputation for being well managed suffered. William seemed inef-
fective. Democratic politicians called for the chairman’s resignation; the area’s
major newspaper editorialized about the politicizing of the transit authority’s
management; one editorial called the transit authority “the laughing stock of
the nation.” The Chamber of Commerce publicly said that the transit author-
ity’s ability to manage itself was in question. How different would these per-
ceptions have been had the rift not occurred, had William abided by a primary