In a New Role? Here’s How to Hit the Ground Running

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 16 November 2021

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rob Cross, management professor at Babson College, says people are changing jobs more than ever and too often falling short when they do. Surveys show nearly half of people promoted within their own companies are underperforming 18 months later. And up to half of executives in new roles are seen as eventual disappointments. Cross says research shows that’s because today’s hyper-collaborative workplaces demand new skills. He shares evidence-based practices to improve a role transition. Those include developing strategic networks and expanding the scope and impact of one’s projects. Cross is a coauthor of the HBR article "How to Succeed Quickly in a New Role."

Transcript

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0:00.0	So you got the job. Now what? Join me, Eleni Mata, on HBR's new original podcast, New
0:08.1	Here, the Young Professionals Guide to Work, and how to make it work for you. Listen for
0:13.8	free wherever you get your podcasts. Just search New Here. See you there!
0:30.0	Welcome to the HBR IDA cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish.
0:43.8	You know that saying, the only constant is change? Well, in today's organizations, the only
0:54.2	constant is turnover. People are changing jobs more often than they did in the past, and the
1:00.4	COVID-19 pandemic has only sped up the frequency of work transitions. Here's the problem. Many of
1:06.7	these work transitions are not succeeding as well as they might have in the past. For example,
1:12.2	research from Gartner finds that half of people who receive internal promotions under
1:17.4	perform within 18 months. McKinsey finds that around a third of executives who transition
1:23.0	into a new role end up being seen as disappointments or even failures. New research points to a big
1:29.9	reason for this, and that is the nature of work today has changed, and so the classic advice
1:35.1	for succeeding in a new role doesn't apply as much as it used to. To tell us more about this
1:41.1	research and how it highlights a new and better approach to starting a new role is Rob Cross.
1:47.0	He's a professor at Babs and College, and the co-author of the HBR article, how to succeed
1:52.2	quickly in a new role. Rob, thanks so much for coming on the show. Oh, thank you. It's a huge
1:57.0	treat to be here. So why is it so hard to succeed in a new role? What's the problem here? Well,
2:03.6	one of the big things that's shifted over the past really decade and a half as organizations have
2:08.4	delayed, have gone into matrix-based structures, and all sorts of things that have taken hierarchy out
2:14.0	of the equation, and simultaneously they've adopted all these collaborative applications that's made
2:20.3	work in the execution of work much more in the lateral network of relationships than in the hierarchy,
2:26.3	and that's shifted what people have to do to be able to come in and be successful in an organization.
	...

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