When any object moves through any medium, it creates suction behind it. When a superstar careerist moves rapidly up the ranks, anyone standing behind that person will experience a pulling upward. Every position that Person A vacates needs to be filled by someone, and it may as well be Person B, especially if Person B is a protégé of Person A.
In other words, it pays to stand in the shadow of extremely talented people. They create activity and movement, which in turn, creates opportunities for advancement. Advancement may come through outright promotion to fill in the position the talented person has just vacated, but it also may come from the mere commotion caused by the truly talented person. You may gain skills by taking on special projects spawned by the superstar, or, by being her close colleague, you might get to meet powerful and influential people that the superstar has attracted. A superstar can challenge you to go beyond your own comfort zone, inspiring you to excel and draw attention to yourself in your own right. When there is no excitement or activity, advancement pretty much comes from death and retirement, and assignments are based on seniority.
This benefactor isn’t necessarily more talented than you; maybe they’re just ahead of you, older than you, or more developed than you are at this stage in your career. Some careerists are reluctant to stand next to superstars for fear that they will be overshadowed by them and overlooked. Unless you are incompetent, there are myriad advantages to being associated with highly talented colleagues. In politics this is called coattails, and no politician would turn down a chance to be on the ticket with a political rock star who turns out the votes and creates buzz! It’s what gets you elected. And it does not mean that some day you won’t be the head of the ticket.
Of course, if you are incompetent, you don’t want to be anywhere near a high performer. But if you are reading this book, you are probably not incompetent.
Leadership Development Programs
Some corporations have formal leadership development programs. Companies use them to identify high-potential employees and put them into formal programs to develop their skills and channel them to opportunities. Sometimes people are chosen for these programs due to a high GPA when hired right out of college, or they are nominated by their supervisors. The H.R. pros I interviewed for this book were of divided mind over the utility of these programs. Some thought that candidates in the programs often failed to sustain high performance, thus negating the main rationale for them; others thought that the factors producing high performance were so complex and little understood that there was no scientific basis for selecting some workers for participation; still others thought they produced resentment among the rank and file, which tends to be also a fertile source of high performers. No one should turn down a chance to participate in a leadership development program that provides training and increased exposure to promotion opportunities, but any worker can design and create her own leadership development effort, and that is the main premise of this book.
Some people align themselves with powerful people as their lieutenants, as supporters of the superstar, and others align themselves with the superstar as colleagues, team members, and back-bench talent. Lieutenants tend to follow the superstar all the way, their futures permanently intertwined. Colleagues, team members, and back-bench talent are only temporarily aligned with the superstar; it’s more a marriage of convenience, over as soon as interests diverge.
Neither approach is wrong, but it is hard to switch from being a lieutenant to being a colleague. You have to be intentional in how you structure and represent this relationship.
I want to stress that there is no indignity or dishonor in being a lieutenant. There is a personality type that makes an outstanding lieutenant: Someone hypercompetent, well organized, good at execution, but who often does not want to stand up front and dodge the incoming rocks and arrows. They take pride in being part of a talented dyad and, frankly, most leaders cannot succeed without them. They are an important and necessary part of organizational efficacy. But a lieutenant would be unlikely to get the top spot, while back-bench talent is being groomed precisely for that ascension.
Over the years I have worked with many top officers who rode a series of moves created and driven by someone else. The superstar was moving like a shock wave through and between organizations, and the careerist’s main job was to keep being worthy of the opportunities that were dropped in his lap.
For a young person strategizing for career advancement, the lesson is to try to maneuver yourself to be chosen to accompany a rising superstar. When she gets promoted, you get promoted.
Senior-level function heads almost always like to surround themselves with some loyal troops. A smart CEO, president, or CFO wants to surround herself with people she can trust, people she has known for years, people who owe her for past favors. A top officer who doesn’t come with her own colleagues and spies is simply not politically savvy.
Anyone who gets promoted is an agent of change. They are causing change in the unit they leave, and they are authoring change in the unit they join. When you know someone who gets promoted, analyze both ends of this event to see if you can find a spot for you to get promoted or perhaps just increase your authority, budget, privileges, or head count.
Moving Up Together
Seven healthcare lawyers and a paralegal switched firms together, as a team, in Houston in 2006. This allowed some senior associates who had been denied partner status at the old firm to achieve it immediately in the new one, and it allowed a close-knit team to keep working together. The firm that recruited the team was well known to have a high associate satisfaction rate. One can only assume that the firm that lost the team regrets not advancing some of these lawyers to partner before this embarrassing public exodus.
The most obvious advantage to riding suction is that it creates promotion opportunities. But there are other valuable advantages. Superstars often challenge others to strive for and achieve excellence. You never want to be the smartest person in the room. You want to work with people who understand you, who appreciate and encourage your ideas, and who can guide you and help you develop. Superstars tend to collect friends, information, and connections as they move through life. Having a superstar as a close colleague gives you access to those people and that information. Remember, fast-track careerists tend to prefer obtaining their information from people in real time, rather than from databases. So, having a superstar just an IM or phone call away means you have that immediate information too. And a superstar who has your back can introduce you to people who can be of tremendous benefit to you, in terms of getting jobs, solving problems, doing favors for others—who will then owe you favors—and so on.
Superstars have a magnetic field of power around them. They make great guardian angels and benefactors as the petty politickers that inhabit all levels of management are afraid of them. If you are known to be favored by a superstar, your detractors will think twice before trying to harm you intentionally. (They may still harm you in myriad blundering, unwitting ways, however.)
Interview with an Anonymous Fast-Tracker
“I really don’t want my name attached to this, but I’ll tell you what happened. I was an investment banker, and I loved being an investment banker, but when [the president of the United States] got elected, I started getting phone calls. I guess all the former Presidential Scholars got phone calls, but I got a lot of phone calls.
“I got appointed chief of staff to the deputy secretary of a department which I won’t name. I had been in the job for about nine months, when I got promoted by [the president] to become the second youngest person ever to hold my appointment. Bottom line, when I came on board, before the secretary was named, I did a diagnosis of what was dysfunctional in the department, and I moved out to fix that. Under the prior administration, this department had been allowed to languish; it had been neglected for years and it badly needed rehabilitation and reform. I had no agenda beyond the excellence of the organization; that was my goal.
“While they were actively searching to fill the open slot, I just started implementing my plan. I guess my apparent competence for leading organization change, the fact that my plan seemed to be working out perfectly—and I was getting along well with everybody, and people seemed to want to follow me, follow my leadership—got noticed. They said, ‘He’s already doing that stuff anyway.’ I got the job because I was doing the job.
“I ended up in a leadership role over all the other [people at my level], who were all a decade older than I was.
“My advice? You go out and assume you’ve got the role, and start behaving like you’ve got it. But it’s important to note that I didn’t do this in order to get appointed. I was just doing the job because that gap needed to be filled, and we couldn’t wait, as a country, for Washington’s bureaucratic gears to grind to a conclusion.”
What does a superstar look like? When you see someone rising rapidly through the ranks, who keeps getting many, rapid, sequential promotions, he’s either someone whose daddy’s name is on the door or a potential superstar. When you see someone who is much younger than everyone she supervises and she is known to be hypercompetent, then she’s a potential superstar. When you see someone who is an agent of change, who can change the direction of strategy or turn around business units from failure to success, then that may be a potential superstar. Superstars innovate and create at a pace noticeably higher than others around them.
You’ll notice that I use the term “potential” superstar in the preceding paragraph. You only know someone is a superstar when they sustain this type of performance over a long period of time. Superstars can only truly be identified in hindsight. At first they may be lucky, or they may have entered the organization well below their skill level. But if they keep advancing on the org chart, evolving their skillset, and anticipating organizational needs over and over again, then they are likely to be the real deal.
Identifying highly talented people before they become famous in the organization is a useful career skill. Once a superstar becomes a known entity, she’ll be mobbed by groupies and you’ll have competition for her attention.
If you are an ambitious and highly motivated person, actively look for high performers in the organization. Attach yourself to their projects, and see if you can get them involved in your projects. Find ways to collaborate with them. Get associated with and involved in their success. Learn from them. Interview them and get their advice. Enlist them into your pantheon of guardian angels and benefactors.
At the very least, get high performers like this into your own inner circle of career advisors. You want to learn what they are doing and how they are doing it. Analyze their success, and let it inform your own career strategies.
And if you are already higher up on the ladder, don’t be overly officious when it comes to superstars. They have ways of chewing up org charts, anyway, and realigning channels of power and information. Even if you are above them, give them special privileges above and beyond their station on the org chart, because favors you rain down today may be favors that rain down on you tomorrow.
There can be downsides to being or getting involved with high performers:
Fatigue and stress. Superstars spawn activity like a whirlwind, and there are certainly calmer areas to stand in any organization than next to a superstar. If you’re going to choose to align yourself with a high performer, you can expect to work harder than everyone else.
Resentment. Agents of change can generate resentment. If you are associated with a superstar, some of that resentment may be associated with you. This is often unavoidable, so be prepared for it.
Accumulated enemies. Resentment leads to enemies, and some enemies have a long memory for pain. If you keep moving through the organization, leaving your enemies behind, this is not a problem; but if you get stuck at any point, you may be surrounded by people who are eager to exact payback.
In any organization, the force of the status quo is so powerful it’s like the physical law of inertia. An object at rest tends to stay at rest. An object moving in a certain direction will continue in that direction and will not veer without an outside force acting upon it. An object moving at a certain speed will maintain that speed, neither speeding up nor slowing down on its own. A lot of people in any organization are like objects in space, being controlled by the law of inertia.
High performers are particularly skilled at forcing their will on objects that would naturally continue in stasis. Most people don’t like change, and anyone who makes them change is going to be resented. That resentment can be dangerous, so it needs to be factored into one’s career plans.
Some superstars are so charming and exude such leadership charisma that people follow them with a minimum of emotional friction. But even they will create a wake of impact and fallout from resistance to change. Obviously, if the superstar keeps moving, most of that impact will be behind and below her and not that much of a problem. But if she ever stops and has to endure a long assignment in place, then it becomes quite a different story.
One type of high performer is particularly dangerous to follow: the gunslingers. Gunslingers are brought in to create massive, immediate change. They put their reputations on the line every single time. They hold nothing back; every project is a do-or-die situation.
Being a gunslinger may seem glamorous. They have the total attention of the CEO and inordinate, if temporary, power. They instill awe and fear. But the problem with being a gunslinger as a career choice is that you can only fail once; then you’re dead.
Gunslingers are definitely a type: He is the turnaround artist who chops and realigns like a drunken surgeon in a back-alley knife fight; the software release engineer who drives her team to exhaustion, meeting the deadline like a hero, but leaving a trail of burnout and blood behind her; the young executive with a short attention span, who creates an atmosphere of constant crisis and uses that sense of crisis to drive his projects forward. Gunslingers are to be avoided if at all possible.
By the way, a lot of CEOs are, in fact, gunslingers. A CEO who stumbles even a bit may not get another chance anywhere. It is easy for the company to get another CEO, but it may not be that easy for the CEO to get another top slot.
Knowing When to Get Off the Ride
It’s very important to see when your interests and the interests of “your” superstar diverge. Andrew Fastow attached his career to Jeffrey Skilling at Enron and followed him all the way into the CFO slot while Mr. Skilling became CEO. Needless to say, he didn’t get off the ride soon enough, and both were eventually indicted for their criminal activities there. When your goals no longer align with the path the superstar is on, it may be time to make your break.
A MAN WITH A LOT OF FRIENDS, TIMOTHY L.
I’m a lobbyist. My job is to know people, and because I know people, I’ve never had to look for a job, I’ve never applied for a job, and I’ve never been turned down for a job, so you could say I’m pretty good at managing my career. I’ll let you be the judge of that. Today I’m [director of government relations for one of the largest corporations in the world].
I have two points for your book, I guess. The first has to do with having friends who can help you get jobs, and the second one I’ll get to in a minute.
You need friends. When I was still in law school I worked summers for [the state attorney general], and he hired me part-time while I was finishing law school. When I graduated, I had my pick of divisions, and I chose criminal division. My two best pals worked there, and we could cover each other’s cases. Michael was older, and every time he moved up, Johnnie moved up behind him, and I took Johnnie’s spot.
The A.G. lost an election. So we’re all out. I called a friend of my mother’s, and got a job as a D.A. in [another city]. Michael got a job as a lobbyist for [a large energy company]. Then Michael goes to another energy company, and he calls me up to ask if I want to be a lobbyist? “I dunno,” I said, “What’s it like?” He said “It’s the best job in the world.” So on his recommendation, they put me in his spot.
One point I want to make right here: A friend can get you introduced to people, but after that, you have to deliver. You have to be worth your friend’s trust. Michael knew I could do the job. He wasn’t just setting me up as a favor to me.
So I am doing great at [this energy company], when it gets bought by Michael’s energy company! But by then, Michael has moved on to the company I work for now. I’m with the smaller [energy] company, so I’m in trouble. We all knew we were going to be fired. We literally would come in to work and not have anything to do. And then we’d go to lunch and not come back.
This was the largest corporate merger in history at the time. And this made a lot of Oil Patch companies nervous, and they went to their local congressmen and said, “We need protection from these outsider raiders.” They made a pitch for keeping the center of gravity for the energy business down there. They were getting some traction up on the Hill. They were fighting the merger.
[The bigger energy company] hired an outside lobbying team, and these crackerjack guys went in to [the Speaker of the House], with the two CEOs, and the Speaker’s personal lawyer. The CEOs told the Speaker about how this was going to be good for America, a big long speech, and after they were done, the Speaker turned to them and said, “Yeah, that’s all well and good, but what’s going to happen to my old pal [Timothy L.]? Why isn’t he here with you?” And so they have to promise that I’m in on the deal.
Now I don’t know anything about this, see? And when I arrived in the morning, there were two guys packing up my desk and taking my pictures off the wall. They said, “Come with us.” And by noon I was over at [the larger company], signing my new W-4. It was a lateral, but everyone else was fired, and I was the only one left standing from [the old company], out of forty people in the department. That’s the power of friends. The Speaker of the House saved my job, because he knew me and he cared about what happened to me.
Obviously, I got the job I have now because Michael brought me in here, too. I’m leaving out a few moves, but you get the idea. Every time, I knew somebody, and they knew me, and they believed in me.
So what’s my second point? You have to be there for your friends, deliver for them, too. Take care of people, along the way. Help everybody and it pays off. In fact, there’s a currency in sharing the credit. First of all, the person you give the credit to appreciates it. Acknowledge their good deed, their good work, and the bounce you get from that is priceless. A pat on the back is worth more than a raise, and it’s cheaper to boot. Getting a note of thanks is low cost too, with high payback. People never forget what you do for them. Little things are actually big things.
And don’t lose touch! I have friends I met once, twenty years ago, and we’re still friends. I can still call them up, and I could walk into their office. The door would open, and they would say, “[Timothy L.], it’s so good to see you! What can I do for you?” And it’s all because they know I’d do the same for them, and probably have.