now, say you are hired to manage managers, indicated the SVP actually has some faith in you.

what do you do for a start?

most likely you have no idea what the departments in your back yard is doing. at least you should tell yourself that.

you need to spend time to first identify which dept has the bigest impacts and some what easier for you to comprehend?

once you make your mind on that, that sit down with your new SVP and get his blessing by telling him that you want to tackle on what issues…do not over promise….

but before you try to do any thing, make sure you understand the company culture, the company policy and the company politics. your SVP will support you after you sahred with him on your plan, but he won’t spell out all detials for you because he/she is not your mother!

you will find it is not always possible to address what appear to be the prob in your backyard. because they all tie into each other:many upstream prob passed on to mid stream of the entire copany process, and surfaced at your end as the consequential prob…so you cannot really solve the prb by act on your own

you have to be careful: identify who is the most powerful
counterpart of yours within the company structure. then identify what is over his ass making him looking bad and yet that has some to do with your little turf. you go to solve that prob with him and for him within your power, and then you get him on board to help you out.

you would have to have a bunch of cross dept meetings
1/ identify issues at hands
2/ walk through the process and see who may contribute what
3/allocate actions
4/ set up a pilot program and give it a try
5/set a time line to check the result and further adjust the changes until there is a fix for bugs identified…

you will be a hero if you can fix some prob other are aware of but no one else either bothered to do any thing or tried and failed

most likely, no one would really support you, rather they look at you the new guy and wait for you to make fool out of yourself

so you must be able to rally and enlist supports from them by finding out what motivate them to join you. again, the thing always works is to find out what’s over their ass and start from there, address that and the result is more favorable to them then to you, if possive result is expected.

after you proved your vision, compassion and capability to solve prob with other depts, you get attentiosn from all levels of managements, and now you move back to your own yard. your subbordinating managers now dare not to ignore
what you are about to tell them

you still need to first understand what and how they have been doing to make it work. there is always room for improvements. but if it ain’t borke, why fix? only pick on those most visible prob and tackle those.

now, you are not obliged to show your loyalties to the guys working under the managers under you, but you do need to bond with them so you know what’s going on. (you need to know who could you put in charge if the managers under you takes a walk, and be prepared for that at any given time)

now you are looking at a bigger picture, you do not just care about the outfits under your direct control. you are part of the enterprise responsible for contributions to P & L. you need to either help produce more profits or great cost savings. so while you need to deal with prob coming in report to you, you also need to look at how can you make numbers on the book right in your part?

you do, to a degree, care about what CEO says, but your own boss is the SVP in your area.no need to consult him/her on every detail, but keep him/her in the loop in general direction on your actions. getting too close to your CEO is stupid because you raise alert of your SVP and the CEO will not promote you over that guy over you. what’s point?

you appear to be generally nice to all in the company, while you show what you are made of to those get in your way and act way out fo line. but no confrontation is needed. again fuck ups are always handy to be turned into help. wait until someone fucked up, then you move in. no need to argue with people for pointless and time wasting debate. offer what can make things right when they are wrong clearly to all

i will address in next session on what if you are not a manager