by Jack Welch
Don’t go there.
In the long run, luck plays a smaller role in your career than the factors that are within your control.
While I never sorted these factors out while I was working, I have thought a lot more about them lately because audiences ask so many career questions. They come in every variety:
“I like my staff job at headquarters, but I want to move into operations. What do I need to do to convince my boss I can make the change?”
“I don’t have any chemistry with my mentor, but she’s really important at my company. How can I get ahead when I don’t have someone pulling for me?”
“I’m in manufacturing, but I want to move into marketing. Will I ever get out of the factory?”
Career concerns, incidentally, are not confined to any one country or type of industry. In China, with its nascent market economy and “egalitarian” culture, business people are fiercely curious when they ask: “What does it take to get ahead?” And the same question has come at me in Portugal, France, Denmark, and even Slovakia, where capitalism is less than fifteen years old.
I think the same answer applies everywhere.
Basically, getting promoted takes one do and one don’t.
Do deliver sensational performance, far beyond expectations, and at every opportunity expand your job beyond its official boundaries.
Don’t make your boss use political capital in order to champion you.
These imperatives are not everything, of course. There are four other dos and one other don’t, and we’ll look at them in turn, but first let’s focus on the two big ones.
THE POWER OF POSITIVE SURPRISE
When most people think about delivering sensational performance, they imagine beating agreed-upon performance goals. That’s all well and good.
But an even more effective way to get promoted is to expand your job’s horizons to include bold and unexpected activities. Come up with a new concept or process that doesn’t improve just your results, but your unit’s results and the company’s overall performance. Change your job in a way that makes the people around you work better and your boss look smarter. Don’t just do the predictable.
I learned this lesson for myself my first year at GE, while I was still working in the laboratory, developing a new plastic called PPO. A vice president was coming to town, and my boss asked me to give him an update on our progress. Eager to impress both of them, I stayed late at work for a week, analyzing not only the economics of PPO, but of all the other engineering plastics in the industry. My final report included a five-year outlook, comparing the costs of products made by DuPont, Celanese, and Monsanto, and outlined a clear route to a competitive advantage for GE.
My boss and the VP were surprised, to put it mildly, and their incredibly positive response showed me the impact of giving people more than they expect.
I would see this dynamic again and again over the next forty years.
Take the case of John Krenicki, who made everyone around and above him look better by expanding his job’s horizons.
GE sent John to Europe to manage its $100 million silicones business in 1997. It was by no means a plum assignment, but it gave John a chance to run his own show. The business, while No. 2 globally, was a weak No. 6 in the European market, mainly because its biggest cost—raw materials—had to be sourced from the United States. It just could not compete with the local players.
Back at headquarters, everyone would have been happy if John had grown silicones by 8 to 10 percent a year by pulling the usual levers: on-time delivery to existing customers, finding new ones, and developing new products. But John had bigger ideas. He proposed building a new plant in Europe to produce his key raw material.
The price tag was well over $100 million. We said, “No way.”
But John couldn’t accept that there wasn’t a solution to his cost bind. He tried a long-shot approach. Expanding his job’s horizons, he entered into talks with several of his European competitors in search of a partner who would bring local sourcing and technology expertise to the table in return for GE’s global strength.
After a long year of negotiations, John found what he needed, a silicones joint venture with the German company Bayer, with GE holding a majority stake in the new company.
I recently asked him about this experience.
“It was just persistence, I guess,” he said. “I knew we had to become self-sufficient somehow. If we had just kept doing things as usual, even if we grew the business by a reasonable amount, we would have never broken out.”
Today, the European silicones business is No. 2 in the local market, and with a recent acquisition, its sales are more than $700 million.
As for John, he was promoted in 1998 to CEO of GE Transportation, and in 2003 to CEO of GE’s $8 billion plastics business.
YOUR OWN WORST ENEMY
If exceeding expectations is the most reliable way to get ahead, the most reliable way to sabotage yourself is to be a thorn in your organization’s rear end.
Of course, no one sets out to do that. But it happens, and every time it does, you force your boss to use his political capital in order to defend you.
At this point, probably most people are thinking, “Who me—make my boss use his political capital? Never.”*
Well, think again.
You can have the greatest results in the world, but if you don’t live your company’s values and behaviors, you run the risk of this happening.
Take the case of an extremely smart and capable employee I’ll call James. We hired James into our business development program at headquarters. This two-year, up-or-out program was designed for MBAs who had been with consulting firms for three or four years and wanted to get off that track and into operations. To test them, we put them in short, intense field assignments, transferring GE’s best practices from business to business. In most cases, one of our businesses would “steal” these MBAs from the program within a year and place them in meaningful operating positions.
James was about thirty-two when we brought him in from a top-tier consulting firm where he had worked since graduating from business school. He was European, articulate, and as I said, very bright, with excellent experience consulting in several industries. We figured at least three GE businesses would be fighting over him within six months.
A year came and went, and no one would touch him. I couldn’t figure out why until I sat in on his first performance review with his boss and the HR team. There I learned that James came into the office at ten or eleven each day and left late, at 8:00 p.m. or so. Those were plenty of hours to put in, and that kind of schedule was fine—for an individual contributor. We had people in R & D who liked to work at night, for instance, and people in sales who came and went according to the needs of their customers in three time zones.*
James’s hours, however, were not going to make it in a company where line managers generally showed up at 8:00 a.m. or earlier, and every meeting and work routine revolved around that.
But James didn’t seem to care about GE’s routines. He had his own way of doing things.
I saw that dynamic up close when James called my assistant and asked for an appointment. When we got together, after a few minutes of chitchat about his career, the real reason for his visit became clear.
“Would it be OK,” he asked, “if I flew my own plane to my meetings in the field?”
I told him he was nuts. “Do that only if you want to piss everyone off,” I said. “Your hours have already gotten you in enough trouble. That kind of showing off is going to kill you around here. It’s not our culture.”
“But I’d pay for the gas!”
“This is not about gas!” I said.
Despite James’s disconnect with our values, he did land a job in operations. Because of his brainpower, energy, and background, I put him in charge of a relatively small, troubled business we had acquired in Europe. Two American transplants hadn’t worked out. Putting James there was a classic corporat
e “stuff job,” in that I stuffed him (despite my misgivings) down the throat of the business.
It didn’t work. GE’s European business culture wasn’t any more amenable to James than its American one, and eventually he had to leave the company.
In the end, there wasn’t a person left with any desire to spend political capital on him.
By contrast, take the story of Kevin Sharer, who started in the same business development program as James.
Before joining GE, Kevin had received a degree in aeronautical engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy, served a four-year stint on nuclear attack submarines, and worked for two years at McKinsey & Company. Without question, he was as smart as James in terms of IQ. He was also industrious and, like James, ambitious, the latter of these traits mitigated by his maturity. Kevin knew that GE valued teamwork; he was the ultimate team player. He showed up early, worked incredibly hard, and never looked for personal credit.
Kevin worked in business development for two years and spent the next three years in operations. By that time, he was so universally respected we made a huge bet on him by offering him a position as one of the company’s one hundred vice presidents, running our marine and industrial turbine business.
Unfortunately, the same day that we tried to promote him, Kevin told us he had decided to leave for a huge opportunity at MCI. We tried desperately to keep him, but he was determined to run his own show. He left MCI a few years later to become COO of Amgen, and in 2000 was appointed its CEO. In the years since Kevin joined Amgen, the company’s market capitalization has grown from $7 billion to $84 billion.
It was obvious from the beginning that Kevin was a star. He had everything going for him, starting with performance. And you can be sure no one ever had to expend a drop of political capital when they mentioned his name. No wonder his career has consisted of one promotion after another.
OTHER POLITICAL CAPITAL DRAINS
Along with transgressing company values, there is a related but more egregious way that you can use up your boss’s political capital. It has to do with character—that is, with the kinds of behaviors that can make people ask, “Hold on, can I really trust this person?”
Take lack of candor. As I mentioned earlier in the chapter on candor, I’m not talking about boldface lying, but a tendency to withhold information. That behavior is far more common, and it frustrates teams and bosses to no end.
We had a manager in one of our larger businesses whose results were quite good, but after several early promotions, his career hit a wall. The reason was whenever he was in a business review or a deal proposal session, we had to pepper him with about thirty questions to get him to explain what was really going on. And even then, we didn’t feel as if were getting the whole story. All we got was hemming and hawing and then a hesitant “It’s OK now” or a cagey-sounding “We’ve got it under control.”
At every HR review, I would ask his boss why this guy played his cards so close to the vest. “It’s his personality” was the answer. “He’s not a bad person. He just doesn’t like to open up.”
“What’s he hiding?” I asked. “Because when he withholds information the way he does, he just comes across as if he’s not telling the truth. And I know I’m not the only one who feels that way.”
“Yeah, that’s true. It bugs other people too. But he’s not lying. He’s just guarded.”
“But we need to talk about the business openly.”
“Yeah, I know it’s frustrating. I’ll tell him again.”
And back and forth like that.
Eventually his boss got tired of the routine, and soon thereafter, the too-cagey manager was demoted.*
The point is: Don’t make your boss ask the perfect question to get information from you. If you want your character to stand up for you and make life easy for your boss, open up and tell it like it is.
There’s another behavior that will also force your boss to use political capital because it really alienates people. It’s wearing your career goals on your sleeve.
With most people, ambition is a positive thing—it’s fire in the belly, it’s energy and optimism. It’s pushing yourself and the organization forward so that everyone wins. Kevin Sharer had plenty of this kind of drive, and so do most people who succeed.
Career lust looks different. It shows itself in tearing down the people around you, insulting or disparaging them in order to make your own candle burn brighter, as the old saying goes. It’s covering up your mistakes or (worse) trying to blame them on someone else. It’s hogging meetings, taking disproportionate credit for team success, and gossiping incessantly about people and events in the office. It’s seeing the company’s org chart as a chessboard, and making an open display of watching the pieces move.
If you’ve got this problem, your best hope is to repress it, fight it, and keep it out of sight. If you don’t do that, when the time comes to be promoted, there won’t be enough political capital in the world to save you. It’s very hard to champion someone over the clamor of objecting coworkers.
FURTHERMORE…
We’ve just looked at the two biggest factors in getting you promoted—getting great results while expanding your job’s horizons and not using up your boss’s political capital.
That said, there are four other dos that certainly help too and one don’t.
The dos are:
Manage your relationships with your subordinates with the same carefulness that you manage the one with your boss.
Get on the radar screen by being an early champion of your company’s major projects or initiatives.
Search out and relish the input of lots of mentors, realizing that mentors don’t always look like mentors.
Have a positive attitude and spread it around.
The don’t is:
Don’t let setbacks break your stride.
Let’s look at the dos first.
Managing down. Every business advice book tells you to network with people within your company and industry. They tell you how important it is to build a mutually respectful bond with your boss. That’s all good advice, and you should take it.*
But to get ahead, you also need to tend to your subordinates with the same level of attention and concern.
The boss-subordinate relationship is easy to neglect. Your boss is in your face, and your peers are on your mind, while your subordinates generally do what you say.
But be careful, because the boss-subordinate relationship can easily fall into two career-damaging traps. The first, and by far more common, occurs when you spend too much time managing up. As a result, you become too remote from your subordinates, and you end up losing their support and affection. The second occurs when you get too close to your employees, overstepping boundaries, and end up acting more like a buddy than a boss.
Either way can catch up with you.
Your goal in managing your relationships with subordinates is to try to walk the line between the two extremes. When the time comes for your promotion, the best thing employees can say about you is that you were fair, you cared, and that you showed them tough love.
I learned this lesson firsthand. In the final showdown for CEO of GE, I was strongly opposed by two powerful vice-chairmen, who supported their own candidates.
Unbeknownst to me, I was really helped by my direct reports. I found out later that they had advocated relentlessly for my promotion with Chairman Reg Jones, telling him I was tough but fair, and that I would push GE harder and faster than any of the other CEO finalists. I’m not sure all of them liked me—I was rough around the edges and pretty short on patience. But I guess they respected me for respecting them and building relationships with them not just when I needed them, but years before.
Getting on the radar screen. As I’ve said, the first and best way to get noticed is with results.
But you can also raise your visibility by putting up your hand when the call comes for people to lead major projects and initiatives, in particular ones that do
n’t have a whole lot of popularity at the outset. At GE, two of those were globalization, which we launched in earnest in the 1980s, and Six Sigma, which was launched in 1995.
Wayne Hewett is a perfect example of a person whose career benefited from this dynamic. Wayne was a thirty-five-year-old manager when he took over the Six Sigma program in Plastics after running GE Plastics-Pacific. Using Six Sigma, he and his team drastically reduced product variation and stretched plant capacity 30 percent with little additional investment. Three years later Wayne was promoted to CEO of GE’s $2 billion global silicones business.
Dan Henson is another case in point. Dan was running a GE Capital lending business in London when he had the courage to volunteer to spearhead Six Sigma throughout GE Capital, a business where a lot of people doubted it had any value. Dan found out exactly where Six Sigma applied, and equally important, where it did not. In two years, Dan achieved variation reduction in highly repetitive activities, such as credit card processing and mortgage insurance applications, and the results were impressive. Today, Dan is CEO of one of GE Capital’s largest businesses, Vendor Financial Services.
GE is so big, if Wayne and Dan hadn’t put themselves on the radar screen, who knows when they would have been made CEOs. Certainly, it would have happened eventually, but not nearly as quickly.*
The best proof of the radar screen dynamic is in the numbers. Today, more than half of the senior vice presidents reporting to Jeff Immelt have worked in global assignments, and one-third of the company’s approximately 180 officers have significant Six Sigma experience.