Читать книгу Lead Upwards - Sarah E. Brown - Страница 32

Rachel Beisel spent years as a marketing manager in the outdoor industry before pivoting to technology marketing, eventually becoming promoted from Director to VP at her company (she's since become a C‐level executive at another technology company). She credits the help of a mentor in making the leap, including learning how to navigate the startup environment and become an executive.

Samantha McKenna is an accomplished sales leader, former VP of Sales at LinkedIn and On24, and now runs a consulting firm called Sam Sales. In her first executive role, she was promoted from within her organization. She said one of the challenges to making the leap from individual sales contributor to sales executive was, ironically, her high performance as a rep.

“In many organizations that lack forward‐thinking growth, they do not want to lose the revenue that you, as an individual contributor, bring for the organization,” says McKenna. “They want to keep you in your role, with the millions of dollars that you bring in every year.”

McKenna says the key to getting promoted was to master doing her current job while also starting to take on the ownership and “stretching” beyond the role simultaneously.

“For anybody that wants to get promoted, ask yourself, how do I do the job that I was hired to do very well, and then how do I stretch myself beyond that? I needed to prove that I could proactively do more, not just by taking instruction, but by looking for gaps in the business and ways that I could contribute my skill set to fix those issues,” says McKenna.

For McKenna, after two‐and‐a‐half years of being highly successful, coming in first place numerous times for crushing her sales quota, she decided to go for the executive seat.

“I really had my sights set on leadership and I had a leader in October of a particular year who promised me that if I finish the year off successfully that I could get promoted. In November of that year, the executive was fired,” says McKenna.

McKenna says that when she went to his replacement the following January, it took her three months to even get the conversation on the books. Despite having finished the previous year as the second highest performing member of the sales team, by April she had fallen behind in her quota and was told that she couldn't get promoted given her Q1 performance, and would need to prove herself. Again. The lesson she learned: regardless of the relationship you have with leadership, get commitments in writing. Further, this was a call to action to leadership. Promotions and honors shouldn't only be based on an individual having proven themselves; it should also be based on the potential one sees in someone.

“I had to hustle, but I had to carve out this role for myself. So I had to not only carve the role out for myself but then prove I was worth it twice,” says McKenna.