Loading summary
Transcript50 lines
- [00:00]
A
Welcome to Manager Tools.
- [00:03]
B
This is Sarah and I'm Mark.
- [00:05]
A
Today's podcast what to do when youn get promoted part 1 of 2 this.
- [00:10]
B
Cast answers these questions what should I do when I get promoted? After celebrating, of course. How can I be effective quickly after a promotion? Are there things I should do once I get promoted?
- [00:25]
A
If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. Virtual training is the next best thing to being there. Suffice it to say, in person learning is the gold standard. But what if your managers are scattered across the US or the globe, making on site training logistically challenging and flying your group of 30 people to one location simply too expensive? That's where our virtual instructor led training comes in. Since early 2020, we've refined our approach to deliver learning indigestible, highly interactive segments with time for dialogue, practice and feedback. We even recommend your professionals be on camera so everyone gets the maximum value from their experience. All of our core trainings the effective manager, effective senior manager, effective communicator, and effective hiring manager are available virtually. Licensing benefits and customization options are exactly the same as in person delivery. Contact Maggie by sending her an email you to customer servicemanager-tools.com to learn more. Today we're talking about being newly promoted. It's a super exciting time for any any manager, any executive, any, any professional really. It is. But believe it or not, it can often be a bit of a letdown. And the reason for the letdown is that you've been thinking about your present job and the job that you want, but you've not been thinking about that in between time, that transitional time between the two roles. And if you don't handle the transition crisply, you will very quickly get behind in the new role and you're going to start wondering why you ever wanted it to begin with.
- [02:04]
B
Yeah. So here's our outline. First, leave well, which doesn't just apply to getting promoted, but in generally 2. Learn about your new responsibilities. 3. Understand your boss's cadence as best you can. 4. Learn about your new team. 5. Announce one on ones before you start and 6 tell your team how to work with you.
- [02:30]
A
Perfect. So we're going to start with the beginning the leave well piece now folks. You're getting promoted.
- [02:36]
B
Yay.
- [02:36]
A
You. Congratulations. You don't be so focused on your new job despite your excitement that you do not do everything you can to make the transition easy on your old team's new boss and thereby take care of your old team during your departure. Leaving well, whether it be a job or an organization is an important part of both your professional life and the continuity and effectiveness of your organization. Even though we're going to recommend you do several things to learn about your new team, don't just get so excited about the departure that you abandoned your old team and in a rush it's going to look selfish, it's going to deflate your old team and you've spent all this time and energy trying to build them up and make them successful. Make sure you continue their success even in your departure.
- [03:29]
B
Yeah, because if you don't, there are people. Certainly executives will evaluate you based on whether or not your team runs well without you after you. And if they go downhill, it won't be all on the manager. The new manager will be in part on you because you haven't built a resilient team. So here are some simple actions you can take to make leaving your team a totally professional process where people will go, yes, she knows what she's doing. So first thing you've got to prepare a key project report, slash transition file. So start right away. In fact, if you're up for a promotion, you might want to start thinking about doing it then so you don't rush if they announce your promotion and say you have two days to move to your new job. So you start with a key project report, an overview of team activities and status about the stuff you and your team are working on. If it's only one page, guys, it's probably too short based on the op tempo of the vast majority of managers we talk to which say I don't even have time to breathe. So surely you can't describe everything your team is doing on one page. You can include spreadsheets of status and links to them and talk about what the status is of various projects. You would include links to other technologies you use to track status and so on. Don't be afraid to provide details. More is better rather than less.
- [05:01]
A
And folks, it's not just about keeping track of documenting the day to day, the what's going on now we'd also recommend that you describe what you've got planned for the next 90 days. So describe the activities that will need to be covered, the replacements that will need to be sent, the delegations which will need to happen, reports that will need to be prepared, these things. Reporting sending people to meetings in your stead, if you will, is often missed in a transition. And when your replacement finds out that they that these things were missed, they will have already missed a meeting or they will already have missed a report and they will then in turn be behind the curveball when you could have just given them some preparation to make sure that they were successful immediately.
- [05:47]
B
If you've been doing this successfully two years and reporting and certain meetings you go to are standard and you know they're on your calendar and so on. Your boss has gotten used to that. Don't expect him or her to be super understanding when the new guy doesn't know what they are because you didn't tell him and the team might not tell him and suddenly he's dropping balls and then your boss is saying, you know, couldn't you have done something to keep this person in the loop? So yeah. Also create a PDF document of your calendar for the next 60 days. That's 60 work days. Make sure it's one page per day, not weekly. Most people you can't read it if it's printed out weekly. In landscape mode, you print one page per day in portrait mode. Otherwise your successor will always be on their back foot for a while, responding to questions about whether or not they're taking the meetings that you were expected to go to relative to status and planning, for instance. It's up to them to decide whether or not they want to make changes, and that's fine if they do. But leaving them not knowing is just an embarrassing miss. Not having your calendar makes it hard on your replacement. Or for that matter, maybe there's an interim right? Maybe somebody on your team, maybe they haven't swam upstream enough to know what your cadence is and you've never told them. Shame on you. But you can solve that now. Give them your calendar and make things easier.
- [07:17]
A
Absolutely. And the next step we have then is prepare performance files on your team. And folks, you can combine this with the reviews that you're going to write. But we do recommend it be separate because reviews are often so limiting in what they ask for and what they ask about. What we recommend is in addition to the interim reviews, which we're going to get to a second here, that you do a one pager on everyone. And if you're looking for a format for it, we've got a Manager Tools Performance Review Template, a document that can be found under the Tools menu in the Template and Forms section of our website manager-tools.com and this document is a one pager. It will cover an individual's strengths and successes, opportunities for improvement and guidance for the future. It's just a really open ended way of reviewing so you're not penned into what did they do on leadership and how well did they do on accuracy and all of the other indicators that you're going to be asked. It's just your notes.
- [08:18]
B
Here's a classic example of something that would go on that which you probably wouldn't put on performance review. You might say for a weakness of somebody has very few friends on the team or for somebody else most like member of the team, always knows how everyone's doing or absolutely my best in a pinch, in a crunch, something like that. My go to person when there's a technical problem, for instance. And even though we're suggesting you use our performance review template, you don't have to write it in performance review style. This just gives you a way to think about and some areas to fill up. So you're not going from zero to one all by yourself. Next, you need to write interim reviews on your team. Depending upon your situation, you can either ask your team for input on this or not, it depends. But you can still go through the process even if you don't. Right? If you don't know for sure you're going to get promoted asking people for input. Three months for a performance review. You're going to write that when they already got a review three months ago that seems funny to them. Write it as an annual review using your firm system. And the reason for that is about you're only going to cover the period since their last review. But that will cover your portion. If you had three or four months with them and you leave in say April and there's not a new manager till say July, I'm just making that up. And so they have the latter half of the year. If you don't give them something like this, they're only going to review them for six months worth of work at a time when they're learning about them and they don't have the relationship you have and they're going to miss out on the successes that they had in the first three or four months. It's a classic case of recency effect which we talk about in our performance review guidance that we encourage you to avoid.
- [10:09]
A
Yeah, and. And folks, that it's not just about helping your team while it is about helping your team. It's also because you leaving you, you dumping and running essentially on the person to whom you're leaving the team. It makes a black mark on you. You look unprepared. You are being promoted here. You don't want to look in that moment like you just took off on your last team and you didn't do the due diligence that you should have done as a leader in the organization. And if you want to add more color to your input to your successor about your team members, you can prepare again a short one pager on each of them, including things like disc scores, including things like if you know details about their family, if you have little insights like Mark said, this is my go to person about technology or this is the person who always knows how everyone else on the team's feeling. Like those little things that aren't going to be captured in a review. Those little indicators will certainly be helpful to the person that replaces you.
- [11:08]
B
Yep. Next, prepare an interim successor document. And I say interim meaning they may not have time to fill your job. So maybe somebody from your team. Hopefully it's somebody for team. It might not be, but I doubt that an interim person is 95% of the time comes from your own team. And since your replacement won't arrive immediately, necessarily there'll be a need for an interim person. It's a simple one pager that goes to your boss on why your team member Rebecca should be the interim manager. Right. Describe strengths and weaknesses, why Rebecca is best for the role. And it may very well become a promotion document for Rebecca because if she's your number two, you should be making a case when you find out you're promoted. Hey, I think we should promote Rebecca. She's well liked, she's well respected. Here are strengths, she knows my cadence, she can step right in and she'll do a great job. And it's one less thing for your boss to have to worry about.
- [12:09]
A
You're absolutely right. The next one then is make yourself available to your replacement or interim successor. And folks, yes, you've already begun focusing on your new role, but you have an obligation to the organization, which, let's remember, you still work at, to reduce the inevitable efficiencies and lack of progress that come during these transitions. I mean, surely there'll be something you forget or some other random thing that comes up that barely ever comes up and no one knows the answer. Make sure you've given all the proper contact information to the person who is replacing you, whether permanent or part time, in order to make sure that they're successful.
- [12:52]
B
Yeah, and all this stuff can be put in a folder or file for them. You know, if you're going to provide the folder digitally, you probably want to put a password on it and share that so it doesn't go to other people. And ideally you'll schedule time with your successor to go over everything you've shared with them so they can ask you questions in the moment. Now, I've noticed a lot of successors tend to rush through this, and there's not a lot you can do about that, but you can provide them the raw material and encourage them to go back to it. I remember once being somebody's successor. They didn't do this. And so I asked them a question and they said, look, you've had the team for the month, for a month. I can't believe you don't know that. I was like, well, okay, I'm not going to ask you anymore. That's too bad. Why wouldn't this person see their responsibility as a leader in the organization rather than just they're in the role? They're overwhelmed, and they don't need questions from below. I thought, man, I don't ever want to work for that guy ever again.
- [13:51]
A
Yeah. And folks, you got to keep in mind, this is an application of the middleman test, of which we have a podcast. But you're coming into a role that you may not have been well prepared for, which, to mark's point, is not nice. Doesn't feel nice at all. The person that's leaving that role may not have given you any guidance or input or anything. So you're starting from scratch. Just because that was done to you doesn't mean it should be done to the person who's coming in to replace you on your team.
- [14:20]
B
Yeah. The way the middleman rule plays out here is what you want from the person whose role you're taking, the person who's taking your role wants from you. So why wouldn't you ask yourself, what do I want to know? And go, hey, it wasn't in the Manager Tools cast, but I'd want to know that they didn't mention it. So I'm going to put it into my packet for my successor, interim or otherwise. Next, you need to learn about your new responsibilities before you start in the new role and whatever time you have. Okay? Make appointments with key people. Obviously, your new boss, your predecessor in the role, your peers, the other people who are going to report to your new boss, and anyone else whom you think you're going to have to build relationships with. It may be an internal customer, it may be an internal vendor, it may be your boss or the person whose job you're taking when you get promoted was on a special project and maybe you're supposed to step into their shoes. There may be a couple of project leaders there that you'll need to meet with as well. And Again, this is before you start a new role, schedule a first day meeting with your directs. Need to get that on the calendar. Can't do that until after the announcement has been made. But you want to send a message to directs that you're going to do everything in your power to start on the right foot as quickly as you can.
- [15:42]
A
And you want to do the same thing with your boss as well. So with your boss, find out what his or her goals are for your organization. Then follow our guidance for getting your goals from your boss. Especially if you don't really get good goals from your new manager, which wouldn't surprise us. I mean, it happens all the time. Don't ding your new boss for not having exactly what you want in terms of crisp goals for you and your new role. Many don't, unfortunately. It's sad. But don't ding your new boss because of it and start working through getting the goals yourself.
- [16:21]
B
Yeah, exactly. For the relationship meetings, introduce yourself with a little background if necessary, ask about what they rely on your team for or what your team relies on them for. Ask about what kind of relationship they want going forward. We recommend bi weekly peer one on ones with your peers that report to your boss for a while. That said, peer one on ones you can only ask. You can't insist the way you can with your directs. So if somebody says no, just let it go and trust that you'll have better relationship with those people who agree to bi weekly peer one on ones with you.
- [16:59]
A
Absolutely. And then there's for your predecessor, right. You want to ask for an operational update that is projects, status, budget, et cetera. Remember to review what you did for your successor in your old role to make sure that you're covering all the bases. Essentially reverse engineer it. Right. What did you give them? Get those same things from your predecessor.
- [17:22]
B
And it's not explicit here, but it ought to be in the show notes for those of you who are licensees. By the way, having shownotes on a show like this, with all that we're covering in the details would be really great. And you can have them if you're a manager, tools licensee personnel reviews as well, you know, have them share with you the personnel reviews of their people or go to your HR business partner and get them. And HR sometimes box at that a little bit. They're wrong, okay? They think they have special responsibilities around confidentiality. But I can't imagine HR says no, I can't tell you anything about your new team that's confidential. That's just silly.
- [18:00]
A
Exactly. Want to learn what's really working for leaders? Today at the EM conference on October 8th and 9th, you'll connect with executives from every type of organization, sharing experiences, challenges and solutions that actually work. Time is running out to register for this chance to learn directly from peers who face the same pressures you do. Join us online at manager-tools.com Training the M Conference all right, so now we've kind of got you assimilated. We're working through your new responsibilities. We move now into understanding your new boss's cadence. And folks, we encourage you to find out about the cadence of larger organizational meetings and systems that you'll now be involved with.
- [18:47]
B
Or affected by.
- [18:48]
A
Or affected by. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Even those you'll not be involved indirectly, but your boss is will help you determine what you should be thinking about, what you should be doing. It's better to know what's coming than spending your first year learning by being surprised with taskings because you don't fully understand your new boss's cadence. So ask for a weekly one on one with your new boss and if your new boss says no, accept it. Another person you can't manage is beyond your peers your boss. So don't manage up, ask, don't demand a one on one.
- [19:31]
B
On the other hand, you can use a boss update meeting to create a regular meeting where you do a 50 minute update, hope he or she gives you something back. It serves as not a one on one maybe, but it basically has the same concept or structure in it. So you might be able to get away with that.
- [19:49]
A
Yeah. And that's the best time to try it. To start it. I would say that a new boss knowing that you know nothing is much more amicable to doing a regular meeting with you. And then you're more likely to continue it because it's going so well. So you might as well start now. Even if you're like, I don't know that I'll need it, just start it anyway. It's better to start it and then get rid of it than to have to try and start it later when there's less good reasons for it.
- [20:14]
B
Yeah, if you're doing them with your directs. If you've already said I'm going to start one on ones and we'll tell you that you should right after your first meeting if you tell them that. The middleman test suggests that if you're going to do one on ones with your direct directs, you want a one on one with your boss. Even if it's a boss update meeting we also highly recommend you listen to or read our guidance on Swimming Upstream, which is a this year 2025 Manager Tools podcast. And we have some highlights, the first one of which is the know your boss's calendar, which should have been obvious when Sarah said get to learn your boss's cadence, but sometimes it's not. So we just want to be clear. The first place to look for clues about the forces that are going to whipsaw you day to day in your new role is your boss's calendar. And we're not talking about looking at it every day when you come in, we're talking about studying it as a whole. We want to understand the cadence of what our boss does, because if they're going to operational or even strategic meetings, there will be deliverables falling out of those meetings that come to you and your team and you might as well know in advance about them. That takes looking at months of their calendar.
- [21:26]
A
Absolutely. Think of it as being more proactive, less reactive, which you'll have to be if you don't understand what's going on and when. And full disclosure, the vast majority of bosses share their calendars completely, as should you, but some don't. Those that don't, I mean, in our opinion, probably aren't worth working for. And we're pretty serious about that. Think about looking for a different boss if your boss does not, or worse yet, refuses to share their calendar.
- [21:54]
B
Crazy, crazy.
- [21:55]
A
Don't assume it's for malicious reasons. It could be just an oversight. It usually isn't an oversight. So just like as a heads up there, if you have a good enough relationship with your boss, please ask them to share it. You could say something like, boss, it's probably an oversight, but I can't see your calendar. Would you mind sharing it with me? And if you don't have a great relationship with them, but they have maybe an admin, an assistant of sorts, you could ask the admin if it would be okay to share the boss's calendar with you. Now folks, just a little side note here, in the days before online calendars, many more bosses had assistance to manage them than do now. Be thankful in today's world that it is possible to share calendars.
- [22:41]
B
It's a small thing in the, in the technology, but the ability to share calendars is really powerful and really, really.
- [22:47]
A
Really hard without technology to do it.
- [22:50]
B
So the idea that somebody would say this technology makes it easy, why wouldn't I want people to know? And he says, no, I'm not going to do it. That's yeah. Now look, if they do share your calendar, their calendar with you, make it one of the calendars you can see on your calendar every day. Virtually all calendar management software clients allow this. It might make it harder at times for you to see yours easily because there may be several calendars showing on your calendar. But it's worth it to know day to day, what meeting your boss is just coming out of. Or you review it on Sunday night and you make some notes on your own calendar so you can know how his or her day and week are shaping up.
- [23:32]
A
Absolutely. And folks, we would, we would recommend you go a step further and essentially make a study of your boss's calendar. It's incredibly easy and we know of almost no one who does it. But again, it's that be proactive, not reactive. So this is how you would do it. First, you would print out, which could be printing to paper or to a PDF, whichever you prefer. The next 20 to 50 work days of your boss's daily calendar. So not a week, all on one page, one day per page. In this daily calendar, we're going to be looking for what amounts to three things. Recurring meetings, meetings that occur with people above your boss's level, and meetings that occur with internal or external customers that consume your team's work and outputs. And what you're going to do is you're essentially going to review it, make notes of the frequency of these recurring meetings. You should be able to tell which ones are most likely to matter, depending on the attendance, the topic of the meeting itself. For instance, your boss may be on a special project team as a function of her executive role. That doesn't necessarily have much to do with your team and your work. Or it might be something that has huge implications because they're meeting on a specific cadence with a customer.
- [24:53]
B
Yes.
- [24:53]
A
Who is consuming your team's work directly.
- [24:56]
B
Exactly.
- [24:57]
A
So you just want to look for those things. What's happening here? What's important, what's not important?
- [25:01]
B
We say recurring meetings first because they're usually where you're going to see the kind of systemic outcomes that will regularly, periodically, at a standard frequency, affect you and your team. So you got to know their frequency. Don't be afraid to ask your boss about outcomes coming out of the meeting. Changes in planning, strategy, changes in timelines, new work. Don't be afraid to ask about stuff you don't understand. I'm amazed the number of people that we tell new hires, please, we know you don't know anything. Go ahead and ask questions and then they still don't because they're afraid that if I ask a question, people will learn that I don't know, when in fact everybody knows you don't know, your new boss knows you don't know. And it does take them time. And so they get irritated, they have to spend a minute or two with you. But it's way better to be curious and not judgmental, as Ted Lasso would say.
- [25:51]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And folks, obviously if your boss does one on ones with you, yippee, you, you can make that one of your questions. So something like anything come out of your weekly ops meeting with the vp.
- [26:03]
B
Yeah, you're right.
- [26:04]
A
Yeah, right. And if something did, why not know about it before your boss has time to send that email to you and your peers about it? In one, three, five days from now, if you talk about it, you get to ask questions about it. And if you ask questions about it, you know more and likely better information than what you'd receive in that briefing email being passed down the chain.
- [26:30]
B
Yeah. Regarding meetings or time your boss spins upwards and outwards, capture those on account on your calendar in a way that works for you. Again, be willing to ask about them and start paying attention to deliverables and delegations that come down to you afterwards so you'll be ready in the future. You could tell your team if you're in a staff meeting on Thursday and your boss, let's say you have a Thursday staff meeting at 10am and your boss is in an all morning meeting where he's meeting about some new operational planning. Okay, you're going to want to tell them, dudes, I think coming out of this meeting my boss is going to come back and say a couple of things you got to do. So keep that in mind. Don't be surprised. I think we all ought to reduce the number of surprises we give each other. I don't know what's coming. Maybe the topic will be surprising, but it shouldn't surprise you if all of a sudden I'm calling two or three, you'd say, hey, let's get together for five minutes and go over what my boss just dumped on my desk. Although dumping on my desk probably sounds negative, I don't mean it that way. But what you hopefully have come out of this is your team start saying, hey, I don't know if you noticed, but it's Tuesday and Thursday your boss is going to that all morning meeting. You may want to be aware of that, boss. I said, great, thank you. And I promise whatever I hear, you'll Hear it from me. Keep in mind, managers are never communicated to, they're always communicated through. And by the way, if your team knows more about what you're doing in terms of paying attention to your boss's calendar, they're going to be more understanding when there are delegations coming out of it and they're going to be more ready to deal with whatever happens.
- [28:08]
A
Absolutely. And then folks along the lines of, again, looking in the calendar, look for patterns in your boss's travel schedule. Like for example, maybe they go to corporate headquarters twice a year. Maybe he visits his three remote sites once each quarter. And you're a manager contextually here. So certainly if you have people in those locations, you ought to be letting folks know that your boss is on their way and what those dates will be. Tell them. Be ready for a town hall meeting or a skip level meeting. Be ready in some cases to brief the boss on what you're doing. Have them understand your boss's metrics and hot button issues. Recently, Mark was it in a podcast we were talking about when you're planning for an executive visit having like a little three by five card of like all like the, the important stuff that your team is doing, like kind of like an elevator pitch. Yeah. Get your folks to write a 3 by 5 card of the most important things that are happening in your location or on your team or the things that they think will be important just so that they don't in the hallway. Do that like hi and just dead and don't have anything useful to say. I don't know. I don't know.
- [29:22]
B
Yeah. In fact, a lot of times what happens is managers get nervous about this. Hey, my boss is going down, he's going to run and she's going to run into some of my people. Stop being nervous about it. You can't stop it. You probably don't have. You may, but you probably don't have the travel budget to match your boss. So tell your people in advance, hey, she's coming down. She's doing some stuff with some other teams. She may ask you, you know, in the next 24 hours, send me what you think over the three to five bullets you're going to talk about. If you need some help, let me know. I'll be happy to help you with that and be ready to talk about those things. And by the way, if he asks questions, don't lie. Okay. Don't try to make us look good. If he points out something that's not going well, say, yep, you're right, it's not going well. And then whatever else you do, please let me know about the conversation you had with the boss. Did she leave happy or not? Did she ask questions about things that were not doing as good on? Or did you hit it out of the park? I'll want to know that. I don't want her to come back in four days and come back and say, look, I talked to your team and there's all kinds of stuff going on. Why wouldn't you, after your team lets you know, say, send off an email real quick. Hey boss, I just heard from my team. They said you were with them. Glad you got to spend time with them. A couple of things came up. Alpha and Bravo. I just want to give you a quick briefing on those. I wish they'd have known more about it. My fault. But just to update you, we're on track despite how it may have sounded. Or yes, we've got a problem here. Don't be afraid to be true, truthful, and if it's a negative, tell them what you're doing about it.
- [30:53]
A
Exactly. Thanks, folks. Join us again next week as we continue this topic. Now help us help others and tell your friends. And of course, follow rate and review our podcast. And remember, five stars only, please.
- [31:14]
B
Sam.