ARE YOU READY FOR YOUR NEXT PROMOTION?

Over my long career, I have discovered there a number of signs that indicate if people are ready for their next promotion. In my experience, there are three stages of maturity that people go through. I hope this will help you define which you are and therefore what is your next stage of development to get promoted.

Let me explain….

In my early career, like many people, I thought I needed to show people how clever I was in order to get promoted. I would analyze every situation, think through the implications and consider every single permutation. I would proudly go to meetings and explain to people how complex something was and how I had considered every angle before coming up with my solution. Four hours into my presentations people would be falling asleep!

As I climbed the career ladder I came to realize I was taking the wrong approach. I realized a simple truth, perfectly summed up by the Economist when reporting the recent death of Ronald Coase, a Nobel prize winner, who posed a very simple question, ‘Why do companies exist’?’, The Economist stated:

“It is the job of clever people to ask difficult questions.

It is the job of very clever people to ask simple questions”.

This inspired me to write this post. It outlines the three stages of maturity a person goes through in their quest to get promoted and helps ultimately determine their success. Which of the following types of people are you?

STAGE ONE – THE INTERVIEWER – THE ART OF ASKING QUESTIONS

One of the best pieces of advice I was given in my early career was, ‘you have two ears and one mouth, use them in that ratio’. ‘The Interviewer’ asks questions that make people think. But then listens to the answers. This is even more important.

There is a definite art to asking questions. Open questions starting with ‘who, what, where, when and how’ are always the best questions. Avoid closed questions where the person answers ‘yes’ or ‘no’. For example, asking “how do you propose to make this change”, is much better than, “are you making a change”?

Asking good questions is stage one…do you ask good questions?

STAGE 2 – THE SIMPLIFIER – THE ART OF MAKING THINGS SIMPLE.

Making things complex is very easy, especially in today’s world, and many people are good at this! Making things simple is very difficult. My advice is that it’s important to understand the complexity of a problem, by asking open questions. Gather the data and then use a phrase I use all the time, ‘let’s take a step back’.

In ‘taking a step back’ you can review all the data and look at the big picture. When I do this I am looking for patterns, insights and common attributes. I have discovered by first looking at the complexity, the detail is essential to discovering the issues, but the key skill is not to wallow around in the detail. It is imperative to take a step back, step up and look at the overall situation.

When you think the time is right you need to ask yourself the simple question, ‘what is going on here?’ Don’t allow yourself to get drawn into having to answer every single bit of a problem. Pareto’s 80/20 rule is essential. It’s essential you look for the 80% of the issue and not try to fix everything; otherwise, you will tie yourself up in knots.

I remember employing a person about 10 years ago who was very good analyzing the situation and very good at thinking of all the problems that could occur. Her big failing was that she could not ‘take a step back’ and look at the entire picture. She ended up being paralyzed by the details and was worried about the 0.001% of a chance that something would happen. I tried to coach her but she didn’t have the ability to change. She ended up tying the team up in knots as she was creating the fear that 0.0001% of chance was actually 50% of times. She never gained the promotion she craved.

Now we put to stage one and two together. Simple, open questions are very effective. For example:

What are we trying to achieve?
Why are we doing this?
What will happen if we do this?
How do we need to tell?
How will we do this?

STAGE 3 – THE INQUISITOR – THE ART OF ASKING SIMPLE, INSIGHTFUL QUESTIONS

I remember watching a sports commentator asking a soccer manager a question as they walked up the pitch. The commentator clearly wanted to impress the soccer manager with his knowledge of the game. The commentator’s questions lasted the entire length of the pitch, some 3 or 4 minutes! When the interview finally finished the questions the soccer manager looked at the commentator and answered with one word, ‘yes’! The question lasted 4 minutes, the answer 1 second!

All too often people ask long complex questions. Many times they are trying to show the person how clever they are. I have learned the higher you go in an organization the simpler the questions need to become. Let me be very clear, the implications of these questions and the answers can be very profound and change a whole company, but the initial question is simple. This is the key skill of the Inquisitor.

Let me give you an example. When I was working in corporate life I was running Customer Service and had 3,500 people around the globe in call centers. My CEO called me into his office and said: “Colin, I want you to improve our Customer Experience and do it at least cost”. Simple ‘eh? Not at all! The first thing I did was to go back to my office and think, ‘improve the Customer Experience, what is a Customer Experience?’ I had an idea what I thought it meant but the reality was I had never really considered what those words meant. Furthermore, back in 1997 when I was set this task, no one else knew either. There were no consulting companies to help me so I went about defining what I thought a Customer Experience is. I am proud to say our company, Beyond Philosophy, are now on our fourth version of this as our thinking continues to progress. You can see our definitions here.

The second thing I thought was ‘if I am to improve the Customer Experience the word ‘improve’ means I am somewhere today, and to improve it I should be somewhere tomorrow’. This means I needed to understand where we are today and define the experience we were delivering tomorrow. This led me to ask myself a simple, but in hindsight, an insightful question.

‘What is the experience we are trying to deliver?

A simple question right? You think an organization with over 100k employees and based all over the world would know the answer to that? You would also assume that a person like me who had 3,500 front-facing people would also know the answer. I didn’t. Don’t get me wrong everyone I asked had an opinion of what it should be but no- one knew.

We spent months working out the answer to this simple question. We discovered that the implications of the answer to this simple question are enormous. For example, if you are trying to create an experience when your customers say they feel you ‘care’ for them, what type of people should you recruit? Presumably, people that are naturally good at caring for people? You should also measure that. Were our processes designed to show customers we cared? No. The implications and the list go on…

Asking simple, insightful questions, becoming an inquisitor is the final stage of your development.

From a simple question, you can change the course of a business; in fact, you can change the course of a life and a career.

I will leave you with the economist’s quote again in the hope you remember this and repeat it to yourself during your career.

“It is the job of clever people to ask difficult questions. It is the job of very clever people to ask simple questions”.