Features

Published October 2009

The Eight Toughest Transitions for Leaders

Michael D. Watkins

Since The First 90 Days was published in 2003, I’ve worked with hundreds of leaders who have applied the fundamental transition concepts. While thankful for the help, they also posed challenging questions — most of which revolved around how to apply the principles in specific, transition situations.

“I’ve been promoted from VP of marketing to country manager, and I’m struggling to know what to focus on.”
“I’ve moved from an operating role to a regional HR position and feel like I’m wading in quicksand.”
“I’ve been transferred to a supply-chain role in China and don’t know how to operate in such a different culture.”

The more conversations I had, the more it became clear that every successful career is a series of high-stakes transitions into ever more challenging roles. Through hard-won experience, the best and brightest get promoted and learn to lead others. They seek out greener pastures and greater challenges at new companies — and learn to adapt to unfamiliar cultures. The path to still greater corporate heights often leads them through international assignments or different functional areas of the business, and likely both. If all goes well, they win responsibility for whole businesses and all that entails.

So I decided to catalog the types of tough transitions leaders experience during their careers and think about how they could all be accelerated. Doing so was relatively straightforward because I’d been surveying participants in my transition acceleration programs for many years on the types of moves they were experiencing.

Most leaders experience transitions almost continuously throughout their careers. A group of 90 participants that I taught in a Harvard Business School general management program, for example, averaged 16 years of business experience. In that time, the average participant had experienced 5.5 promotions, worked for 2.4 companies and made 1.5 international moves. Never mind that they had experienced many hidden transitions when they got new bosses (on average every 1.5 years), when they were given additional responsibilities or when the organization itself changed in significant ways, although their titles remained the same.

After much analysis, I identified eight types of career moves that most executives face during their careers.

The promotion challenge: Moving to a higher level in the hierarchy and understanding what success looks like at the new level, including issues of focus, delegation, developing leadership competencies and demonstrating presence.
The leading-former-peers challenge: An important variant of promotion in which the leader is elevated to manage a team including his or her former peers, with the associated challenges of establishing authority and altering existing relationships.
The corporate diplomacy challenge: Moving from a position of authority to one in which effectiveness in influencing others and building alliances is critical.
The on-boarding challenge: Joining a new organization and grappling with the need to adapt to a new culture, develop the right political “wiring” and align expectations up, down and sideways.
The international move challenge: Leading in an unfamiliar culture while at the same time moving one’s family and creating a new support system.
The turnaround challenge: Taking over an organization that is in deep trouble and figuring out how to save it from destruction.
The realignment challenge: Confronting an organization that is in denial about the need for change and creating a sense of urgency before emerging problems erupt in a crisis.
The business portfolio challenge: Leading an organization in which different parts are at different states — startup, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment and sustaining success — and figuring out where to focus and how to build momentum.

This is by no means a definitive list of all the possible shifts business leaders experience during their careers. Absent are moves from one business function to another — for example, from sales to marketing — as well as the challenge of being assigned a cross-functional project role. Also missing are some specific organizational change challenges such as integrating an acquisition or shutting down a failed operation.

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