Your Next Move: Surviving your next promotion

Michael Watkins has done it again with his latest book: Your Next Move (Harvard Business Press, 2009). A former professor at both the Business School and the Kennedy School at Harvard, Watkins scores a winner with his new transition book—which follows on the heels of his best seller The First 90 Days. With this new book, Watkins “officially” becomes THE guy when it comes to professional transitions. In fact, I think this book will get greater play than ...90 Days because it’s about all the most common types of promotional challenges such as, leading former peers, the international promotion/move, the realignment promotion, the turnaround promotion, and the on-boarding promotion. If you know someone either in the midst of a new challenge/promotion transition, this would make a great holiday gift. If not, just wait a year or two, and they’ll need it (transition is inevitable)! This week I’ll be reviewing Your Next Move in some detail in a series of posts.

How Executives Can Survive the First 90 days.

This is the first of several posts of the coming week based on my book review of The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leader at All Levels by Michael Watkins (Harvard Press).

**Startling Statistic: Executives coming into a company fail at the rate of 40-50% at a cost of $2.7 million to the company.

According to Harvard Business School professor Michael Watkins, an executive gets 90 days (three months) to move from a value consumer (costing the organization) to a value creator (value added)—and thus hit the break-even point. The faster this transition takes place the better off the organization is and the more likely the transitioning executive is to be successful. As mentioned, the failure rate for senior executive outside hires into a company is a whopping 40-50%, at a cost of $2.7 million per executive in both direct and indirect costs. Watkins does an excellent job setting up a new executive to succeed. He uses ten steps (PAMS-NAB-CRE)—I need mnemonics to help me remember things. I'll review each of the steps in the next week. You may want to buy this book if you're heading off to a new job--if just as an insurance policy.

One note: I've been working with transitioning executives for some time now--those coming into a new company from the outside, those being promoted from within, and those leaving the company. I've found the process of transition to be done exceptionally and uniformly poorly. In fact, I'd say with rare exception, it's never done well and the results are universally devastating for the employee, his family and the company. Truly, these transitions are the most blatant lose-lose situations I've seen.

Post your transition stories here.

HBR Leadership January 2009 Issue—Must Read

If you or your company is in any sort of a transition (and who is not these days!), I highly recommend the current (January 2009) issue of the Harvard Business Review. This week, I'll highlight several of the articles...but go out an buy a fistful of copies of this issue and hand it out to your key leaders.

Article Highlight: Michael Watkins (author of The First 90 Days—search for my review of this book in this blog) in his article—“Picking the Right Strategy” instructs leaders to first understand the kind of transition they are in before acting on it. He describes his STARS model (start up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, and sustaining success). New executive failures in companies typically happen in the first two years and cost the company $2.7million—so pay attention.