Lead Upwards. Sarah E. Brown
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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.
MINDY LAUCK ON BEING A NON‐FOUNDER STARTUP TEAM MEMBER PROMOTED TO EXECUTIVE, AND THEN CEO (TWICE!)
Mindy Lauck, CEO of Broadly, has been in two situations where she's not the founder but made her way up to CEO. She's been a non‐founder CEO both times she's been CEO (at About.me and Broadly), and by being promoted to suddenly inheriting a board, executive team, and company.
“I inherited my executives, the team, everything was pre‐made,” says Lauck. “Founders don't have to deal with this,” says Lauck.
Lauck assessed the startup phase they were in, understanding the state of the startup and whether certain executives and programs were right for their stage.
“I tried to really think about what phase are we in, what phase are we going to, and are these the right people for the right phase?” says Lauck.
Lauck had to adapt the mindset of executives who are non‐founders and make the best of the situation she inherited while focusing on contributing her strengths to grow the business.
“You're not doing the business a favor if you wait too long to make those decisions, especially when it's at the executive level,” says Lauck. “I let go of the executives that weren't the right fit, and focused on building trust and communication as well as aligning around values with the team that stayed.”
Lauck credits her swift action with her success in the role, and being promoted again to CEO, since she had a proven track record.
CHALLENGE FOR FIRST‐TIME EXECUTIVES: SAM MCKENNA SHARES HER STORY OF BEING PROMOTED TO VICE PRESIDENT OF SALES
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.”
MAKING THE TRANSITION BY LEARNING TO WORK DIFFERENTLY
The level of execution you'll do as a startup leader depends on the size and scale of your organization. You may be years away from being able to delegate. In the early stages of building a sales function, for example, as the executive, you may be standing up some of the processes and/or using tools like a sales enablement platform and CRM in a hands‐on way. But once you scale, you'll hire a sales ops manager, and/or outsource this to another member of your team. Becoming clear what tasks would change around you moving to director or executive is important.
FROM BIG COMPANY LEADER TO STARTUP EXECUTIVE: COO ERIN RAND'S STORY
For operations executive Erin Rand, COO of PlasticBank, her first executive role was at a larger organization and her first startup executive role came later. At the larger organization, a rapidly‐scaling company of thousands of employees, she described her first‐time executive experience as “getting my ticket punched.”