Читать книгу Lead Upwards - Sarah E. Brown - Страница 34

On her path to her first executive role, entrepreneur and sales leader Sam McKenna was a director and then promoted to senior director before being promoted to Vice President. McKenna said she learned to advocate for herself while acknowledging that she was hired instead of a few team members who never quite accepted her in her new role.

McKenna overcame obstacles around this by focusing on empowering her team and proving she could build and manage a high‐performing sales organization. Knowing she “had their back” created a lot of trust and the foundation for her team to consistently exceed their goals.

“I really made a point of building my brand around success not at the expense of others,” says McKenna. “I let my team know, it's not a dog‐eat‐dog situation; it's we‐win or we‐die as a team.”

McKenna also had to work on building new relationships cross‐functionally thich she did not have to do as an individual contributor.

“As a top performer, I know I made a lot of demands of our legal team, including ‘I want it and I want it now.’ Patience is a word I still don't understand,” says McKenna.

In her leadership role, she had to make new inroads with that team, taking time to invest in cross‐functional leaders in a way she had not before.

McKenna says a common mistake she sees in scaling leaders who are trying to make the leap from director to VP is focusing on the wrong things to get promoted and/or letting their performance in their current roles slip.

“The sales reps that I speak to say, ‘Well, I hit 75 percent of quota the last three years, but I also created a birthday club last year … shouldn't that get me promoted,'” says McKenna. “I tell them, what matters first is the consistency at which you exceed your goals. You have to nail the job you were hired to do first, before you highlight anything else you've done above‐and‐beyond. Once that's underway, what you do to stretch yourself has to address the goals your executives are focused on; take the time to understand what your executives are trying to solve and then help them get there,” says McKenna.

If you don't do what you're paid to do exceptionally well, it's hard to make the case that you'll be more successful once promoted.

“Be the top of your class and then stretch yourself. And when you stretch yourself, it needs to be solving issues that are economic issues that are top‐tier issues for your executives,” says McKenna.

Before getting promoted to her first executive role, McKenna took time to interview her EVP of Sales. She committed to helping him solve his problems, and asked him, “what does success look like for you this year?”

When he told her attrition and not ramping fast enough, Sam took it upon herself to solve it as an executive would, even though she wasn't one yet.

She focused on making people on her team feel like “more than a number” so they wouldn't leave and creating an onboarding and mentorship program so that they ramped faster. Then she tracked it so she could prove the ROI.

“No one's sitting around telling you what's keeping them up at night, so you have to find out,” says McKenna. “Taking extreme ownership of the ‘stay up at night’ problems is the key to going from a director or manager to a true executive.”