Lessons Learned from Anne Mulcahy: Managing a Seamless Transition
One of the dilemmas some of my clients and readers face is letting go and moving forward. Whether it is a project that went awry, a negative performance review, the experience of working with a mismatched manager, a lay-off or your teams’ lack of confidence in your ability to deliver, letting go of these career shocks represents a transition that must be managed effectively to advance our careers.
Tagged the “Accidental CEO“, Anne Mulcahy, former Xerox CEO, admits she was not groomed for the CEO seat. At the Most Powerful Women Summit, Anne acknowledges she came in the wrong way so it was important to learn from that and go out the right way. Studying Anne’s smooth handover to Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox since July 2009, not only proves that she did just that but also provides many practical tips to help you manage your transition:
1. Accept that you cannot change the past but you can control the future. Rather than dwelling on the past and how she landed in the CEO seat, Anne focused on the future and on what was required to create that future.
2. So how do you create a vision? Gather information, put a stake in the ground that defines your vision and then most importantly take action. Anne learned her most valuable lessons in leadership at the family dinner table. Her father “knew exactly how to extract independent thinking and creative ideas” and he expected his family members to articulate a position and defend it. Ultimately the debate did not end there, as they were then encouraged to turn their words into action.
3. Surround yourself with a fearless team who will push you forward. Once in the CEO seat, Anne surrounded herself with a team of smart people, brave enough to help her turnaround Xerox.
4. Use career shocks to motivate yourself and others by your actions: Anne discovered “there’s nothing like a crisis to help you focus. In many ways, it actually helps you lead and inspires others to rise to the challenge”.
5. Remove constraints and create the appropriate structure to support your next step. As they reached the end of the transition process, Mulcahy and Burns, talked about their struggles with roles and responsibilities, they realized the current organizational chart was not conducive to their path forward, so they stopped worrying about it and focused on how to effect their vision of Xerox’s next chapter.
6. Be patient, seamless transitions do not happen over night, it takes time to get it right. This transition was in the works for two years, and as Anne shared a transition “should be gradual and thoughtful, with lots of sharing of information and knowledge and perspective, so that it’s almost a non-event when it happens.”
What do you need to let go off to move forward? If you have let go, what helped you to let go and what have you realized since doing so?
Stay tuned, later on this week I will talk about Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox, I haven’t figured out the title yet but it will touch on the power of preparation and planning.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Xerox Corporation
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