What do insiders know about executive success? Ask Scott Eblin
July 17th, 2008 by JD Kathuria
The statistic is staggering: Within 18 to 24 months of promotion as many as 40 percent of new leaders are no longer in the roles they were promoted to. What can leaders do to avoid becoming part of this alarming executive failure rate? In the following Q&A, Scott Eblin, author of The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success, talks about the behaviors that executives need to pick up — and let go of — to reach the next level.
You’re the author of The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success, what do the insiders know?
Scott Eblin: They understand that when moving to a next level role, actions have to change. Different results are expected, so it pretty much follows that some of the things you’ve been doing — even if they’ve worked for you in the past — are going to have to change.
What are some behaviors executives need to let go of?
Scott Eblin: Letting go of self-reliance and picking up team-reliance — that’s a big one. The typical executive leader was successful early in their career because they were the “go to” person for everything, no matter what. But at the executive level, your role is now so broad and deep that the “go to” profile no longer works.
What prompted you to write The Next Level?
Scott Eblin: An experience of deep personal pain [laughs]. I lived through this kind of transition myself back in the mid 90’s. I had been sort of a rising star in a financial services company and was recruited to join a Fortune 500 energy company as VP of HR for a major business unit. By the end of my first day in that job I was in over my head. I was lucky, though, because I had a boss, the CEO of the company, who recognized almost as quickly as I did that I was in over my head. She gave me a lot of coaching and a lot of support, pats on the back and kicks in the butt over the next year. She hung in there with me and allowed me the time and the space to learn a different way to lead and a different way to manage.
A lot of folks don’t have that kind of boss and they wash out. The statistics are that within 18 to 24 months of promotion as many as 40 percent of new leaders are no longer in the roles they were promoted to. In thinking about my own needs back then and the needs of my clients today, I saw that there are a lot of books on how to be the next CEO. But if you think about it very few of us are going to be the next CEO, but a lot of us are going to be a new member of the executive team. That is the gap that I saw and that is the experience that I lived through so my coaching work over the last several of years has really focused on people in that kind of situation and I wrote the book for them.
You’ve been involved in a just released study of the causes of success and failure in newly promoted and hired executives. What are the headlines from that study?
Scott Eblin: We asked about 150 different organizations, “How long does it take for both internally promoted leaders as well as externally hired leaders to become fully effective?” The average answer is at least nine months for both groups. So there is a pretty steep learning curve in these jobs. The second question we asked was “How many of them ever become fully productive?” For the internally promoted, the run rate is 20 -25 percent and for the externally hired it’s about 30 percent. It’s not because they don’t have the technical skills, or because we are hiring or promoting unintelligent, unskilled people. What they are missing is letting go of a lot of things they used to do themselves. At the same time, they are failing to pick up new skills around collaborating with peers and higher level leaders, both inside and outside the organization.
What can leaders do to avoid being part of this alarming executive failure rate?
Scott Eblin: My company offers a program called Next Level Leadership Group Coaching, which is a peer to peer program for small groups of high potential leaders. And in that program we run a 360 degree assessment related on Next Level Leadership behaviors. The lowest rated item across 300 people who have been the subject of that survey is one called “Paces himself or herself by building in regular breaks from work.” One of the things that I consistently see in corporate America is people running flat out until they crash. They don’t leave themselves any margin to step back and ask themselves, “Hey, what am I really trying to do here?” They just keep doing the same thing without taking a break to ask themselves, “Is this the right thing that I’m working toward?” and secondly “If it is the right thing, am I doing the right things to get there?”
It really sounds like delegating is the ultimate challenge.
Scott Eblin: It’s a huge challenge for leaders because so much of our self-identity is wrapped up in the technical skill sets that we developed early in our careers. That’s the first place most leaders get hung up— delegation. The question I like to ask my clients is, “What is it, given the new role that you’re in, that only you can do?” The hint is that that list should be brief but high leverage. It’s not a list of the things you could do or are good at doing, it’s the list of things that only you can do. That’s where the leverage is.
