Harvard Business School: Navigating Major Career Transitions

Michael D. Watkins discusses how to handle your next move
is every transition unique or are their some communalities to every transition

The current economic s situation has generated an almost continues set of transition for people so even if they are not tkng a brand new job there job responsibilities are changing in pretty fundamental ways

So its not the traditional kind of transition such as promotions transfers etc, but also what hidden transitions such as down sizing restructuring and a lot of changes in job responsibility. These certainly are challenging time, in terms of general principles of making transitions

Certain principles as to what to do and what fundamentals to follow, looking at crucial things like how to learn about a new organization or a new role or how to secure wins, how to create alliances have become very important

Looking at certain classic kinds of transitions, it was found that there are two classic care components, one is what the personal adaptive challenge the person / organization is going through - in terms of the new competencies and skills and attitudes required for stepping up to the new role

On the other side there’s the organizational change challenge - what they need to do with their objective, what kind of transformational change they expect, what you or the organization should undertake

As long as the leaders get these to challenges into their mind in terms of what they need to do for themselves and for the organization provides them with a tremendous amount of clarity and allows them to transport forward

Obviously its very exciting to work so hard till this point to have ur work recognized and to get this promotion. That’s the good news,

The bad news is one has to sort out in reinventing ones own self, in order to be successful in the new role, because what had given the success in one role is not necessarily going to give success in another role

It is important to have to deal with disappointed competitor or people who liked the relationship you had with them as peers and don’t want to let it go , so its a very challenging time

Well first of all you cant mitigate all the negative impact there’s some amount of grieving process that goes on for families when they move
In situations of this nature don’t disrupt other things unnecessarily, try to create familiarity, for instance set up your kids rooms exactly like how they were, start making forward connections to the area immediately try to connect our significant other or your kids to the people in the new environment, try to maintain backward connection via skip or any other networking arena

It is better to get our support system functioning, doctor dentist etc so that one doesn’t feel that deep sense of dislocation. This is familiar with what people experience when they are moving into the job they are very much enthused and its exciting but for the family its a different issue. The person cannot be successful at the job when the family is unhappy.
If one looks at organizations they typically do not understand how many transitions are going on and the impact its having on the organization even in normal times at least a quarter of the managers in typical companies are changing jobs every year and every one of those people are impacting ten other people. and my belief is even of ur not in transition ur likely having someone else transition inflicted on you, so there’s this tremendous amount of network impact so if you can accelerate everybody if u cn gv everybody a common language and a common set of tools for approaching transitions and dis has an impact on the organization itself giving them a source of competitive advantage


King Fahd University for Petroleum and Minerals | Principles of Management MGT301 | Dr. Samer Hammad | Ahmad Al-Ghamdi

Reference:

1. http://www.youtube.com/user/HarvardBusiness#p/u/13/l6wetuKbW-E
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