Over the last four years, I have frequently recommended the book Career Warfare, by David D'Alessandro, when I wanted to provide real, down-and-dirty advice about how to manage your career. There is probably no better guidebook if you're climbing the corporate ladder to help you build your "personal brand" and understand how to thrive in a company setting.
Now, however, if you have already achieved a fairly senior level but want break through even higher, to the top echelon of a company, you are in luck. D'Alessandro, the outspoken and colorful former Chairman and CEO of John Hancock Financial Services, has just come out (with Michele Owens) with a gripping new book, Executive Warfare - 10 Rules of Engagement for Winning Your War for Success (McGraw Hill).
"Not for the faint of heart"
As D'Alessandro told me in our recent interview, "This book is not for the faint of heart. It is frank and deals directly with subjects few people write about, especially how to deal with circumstances driven by human nature in organizational settings." There are many pieces of valuable and actionable advice illustrated by memorable anecdotes in Executive Warfare. The instruction is so important because unlike success at an earlier stage of your career, when you simply have to be smart, hard-working, able to show results, and have a positive, can-do attitude, the game ,changes fundamentally as you rise.
"When you enter the executive suite," D'Alessandro says, "there are many new intense influences on your career. Suddenly many more people are paying attention to what you are doing and what you are not doing. You have to manage an incredibly tricky network of relationships simultaneously, in private and in public, and in a way that announces your ability to lead." He says that you need to be prepared to deal with a complex matrix of new bosses that includes peers and employees from other parts of the company, the media; even the spouses of other executives.
Your immediate boss
While D'Alessandro stresses the complex web of multiple bosses that you will acquire as you rise, he has invaluable advice about how to deal with that one person who still has the most short-term influence on your career -- your direct superior. "The relationship you have with your immediate boss is one of the oddest you'll have in life," he writes. "You generally don't choose this person. You generally don't care for this person, yet you have to honor and obey this person."
The first thing to understand about the relationship with the boss, according to D'Alessandro, is that it's a business transaction. "Don't think that it resembles that of student to teacher or parent to child. Real teachers are civic-minded. Real parents are self-sacrificing. In 35 years in organizational life, I have yet to meet the boss who is any such thing. Bosses are all interested in precisely the same thing - in having you make them look better. So it's your job to make sure you get something in return -- that they help you rise."
So, how do you optimize the relationship with your direct boss? By becoming the most trusted and valuable person in your boss's stable. Specifically:
- Give your boss the truth, even when it's unpleasant.
- Recognize that once a decision is made, even if you disagree with it and have argued against it, you must drop your opposition and execute to the best of your abilities.
- Help your boss "move the ball from here to there," in other words, understand your boss's top priority and help him or her make progress on this goal.
- Be loyal and discreet, no matter how incompetent or unpleasant the boss might be; never make the boss feel betrayed.
What to do to demonstrate your material for higher management
According to Executive Warfare, some of the other things that you need to do to appear to be material for higher management include the following:
- Learn how to present well. "Meetings are the stage on which you rise or fall, thrill or flop, so make sure that you know how to express yourself there. Quietly take lessons, even if you need to at your own expense."
- Study to understand what is really going on in areas outside your own. "By learning as much as you can about the organization as a whole, you are able to prove that you belong in a broader role."
- Take appropriate risks. "The worst sin is not to be able to understand the risks you face, either because you are so risk-averse that you say ‘No' to everything or because you have no risk filter whatsoever. Some managers become reckless in their risk taking because the pressure is on them to generate new revenue. Just as dangerous as these risk-lovers are those people who never saw a project they didn't want to kill."
- Be a team player (even if like most ambitious people, you are a ruthlessly competitive individualist). "It's not important to be the solitary genius who dreamed up, financed, and implemented a great plan all by yourself. What's really valuable is showing that you are the kind of person other powerful people want to work with."
Be prepared for scrutiny
My favorite anecdote from the book illustrates the principle that as you rise into higher management, you are being judged all the time. This is true even when you aren't working. "I was once in a general store in a small Vermont town," D'Alessandro writes about the time when he was Hancock's CEO. "I went to check out and by the cash register there was a board with copies of people's driver's licenses and the checks they'd bounced. And I saw one of my own employees there. It wasn't a very big check, something around $37.90. Every time I saw the guy after that, or glanced at his name on a list of possible promotions, I thought, ‘How responsible can he be?'"
Rivals and outsiders
Just as there is a complex network of bosses out there, understand that as you rise in organizational life, so too are there many rivals for the top jobs. In order to handle your rivals intelligently, says D'Alessandro, you first need to know who they are. Your boss is a potential rival, as are the most visible of your own employees. Rivals can include executives from other organizations unfamiliar to you but who may have caught someone's eye at an industry conference or through an executive search. In a family business, the son or daughter who doesn't seem quite old enough for the job may be a rival.
Even the company's board members, especially those who are semi-retired, can be rivals, evidenced by the growing number of outside directors that have been drafted as interim CEOs only to become permanent. Executive Warfare has sharp advice for how to deal successfully with these myriad rivals. It also deals with other important issues that go into making it to the top: how to assemble your team, how to motivate the best people, how to influence the organization's culture, and how to deal with influential outsiders, such as clients, vendors, journalists, and professional advisors.
Schadenfreude
The truth about human nature, D'Alessandro suggests, is that some of the people in the complex matrix are actively - if secretly - rooting for you to fail. "Some of your peers will benefit directly if you go down in flames, and there are others with nothing to gain who simply enjoy a crash scene if they stumble across it." The frustrating reality is that some of the people judging you will inevitably be mean, power-mad, incompetent, or just plain crazy.
Nice guys finish...?
Given the complex, nuanced, and competitive necessities for reaching the top, do you have to be ruthless, manipulative or Machiavellian to succeed? "No," says D'Alessandro. "There are times you need to make certain you step back and maintain perspective so you can make appropriate decisions. And there are times you must have objectivity and coldness to do so. But I don't believe that you have to be either devious or a heartless machine. And no matter how tough the game gets, you are more likely to win if you maintain your sense of fun. In fact, practicing ruthlessness usually causes you to be a victim of other people's ruthlessness. If you don't believe me, ask Eliot Spitzer."
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