Don't slip when climbing the corporate ladder

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

Jan Tomlinson is a promotion master.

She’s had so many promotions during her 30-year plus career at insurance company Chubb it’s hard to remember them all. “Maybe, about 11 or 12,” she says.

Don’t be jealous of her quite yet. Even promotion pros like Tomlinson face problems when it comes to moving up the ladder.

Yes, believe it or not, promotions can be a harrowing experience. It’s not all the glory people make it out to be.

Many managers find job promotions to be among the most challenging life event, above grieving, divorce and raising teenagers, according to a study by DDI, a human resource consulting firm that polled 800 leaders. Promotions presented them with a host of problems, says the co-author of the report Matt Paese, everything from being thrown into a political quagmire to loss of tactical control over day-to-day operations. 

What the heck is going on? Promotions were supposed to be the high point of a person’s career, the big payoff for all the hard work. Well, it’s still that, but we sometimes allow the problems associated with promotions to send us off the deep end.

Human nature is often the main culprit. We’re not sure we can handle the new assignment, and the people around us are often jealous because they didn’t get tapped for the big job.

“One of the most difficult challenges for new leaders is they have to gain their stripes and credibility,” says Mitchell Kusy, co authors of “Manager's Desktop Consultant: Just-in-Time Solutions to the Top People Problems That Keep You Up at Night”. And talk about politics. The higher you move up the ranks, he adds, the more you’ll have to deal with sticky political issues.

For Chubb’s Tomlinson, whose exact title now is executive vice president for international field operations, the biggest issue over the years has been getting everyone on her team on board when she moved up the chain of command.

In one particular instance when she became a manager in the underwriting department, she was promoted because of her managerial ability as opposed to her technical knowledge of the business. “There was a gentleman, an excellent property underwriter, who had more years of experience than I had. He really felt I couldn’t run the department because I didn’t understand property as well as he did.”

Instead of wallowing in the lack of acceptance from this individual, Tomlinson decided to do everything she could to become more knowledgeable in the business she was overseeing. Doing this, she felt, would make her more effective in her job and it would help her garner credibility and trust among the people she now managed.

“I had to be able to talk the language so I took advantage of training programs just to get that working knowledge. They were programs a much more junior person than myself would have taken”, but she swallowed her pride and learned everything she could.

She also invited the reluctant employee into various high-level meetings with clients asking him to provide his expertise. “I had him showcase his talent and ability,” she explained. “He saw that I respected what he did.”

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