There's No Google Maps for Leadership

I drove a rental car through a country whose road signs I could not read.

Some of them I could guess. A red circle probably means stop doing whatever you're doing. Others I decoded only after doing the wrong thing in front of a line of Italians who were kind about it, mostly. At one intersection I gave up and asked a stranger, in a language I do not speak, and then had to decide in about four seconds whether the stranger's directions were good.

Who you ask matters as much as that you asked.

A leader promoted into a senior role is driving in a country where she can't read the signs.

She was excellent at the last job, which is why she got this one. The last job had signs she'd learned over years. This one has a board packet she's never seen, a finance vocabulary she's guessing at, and three unwritten rules about which meetings you don't miss and which VP you don't cross. Nobody hands her the map. The organization assumes the map is implied, because everyone who's been there long enough has stopped noticing they're reading one.

So she does what I did. She asks whoever is nearest.

Whoever is nearest is usually the wrong person.

The peer who applied for the job she got. The predecessor, on his way out the door, with opinions. The CEO, who is the right person and has eleven minutes a week, most of which she'll spend proving she doesn't need them.

I've watched new leaders build entire mental maps of an organization from the advice of one bitter colleague, because he was the one who answered the phone. The map was accurate about the terrain and wrong about everything else. Two years later she's still driving on it.

The other thing about driving somewhere unfamiliar: you find out fast what you didn't pack.

Most organizations promote on the last job's evidence and never take a proper read on what the new one requires. Readiness gets assessed by feel, from the CEO's own memory of her first year, which is a rating system with a sample size of one. There are better instruments. The Leadership Circle Profile is one; a structured conversation about what this role actually demands is another. Either beats "she'll figure it out."

I'll say the quiet part. Being a beginner in your fifties is humbling in a way that's hard to describe to someone who hasn't been competent for thirty years. Every promoted leader feels it and almost none of them say so, because the uniform (see Post 1) forbids it.

She doesn't need the map handed to her. She needs someone riding along who has driven these roads, who she can ask without it costing her anything, and who will tell her which stranger to trust.

You can assign that person. It's one of the few things about her first year you actually control.