This book gives you a thoughtful and reasoned look at the upward transitions process. It does an excellent job of outlining the needs and potential problems at each career stage. The advice is usable by three groups of potential readers.
You should buy this book if you are a senior manager, human resources executive, or board member in a company of any size who wants to understand the dynamics of leadership development/succession planning in a large company. The book outlines several transitions and the changes in skills and attitudes that are needed at each one, along with relevant pitfalls.
You should buy this book if you are a manager on an upward career trajectory and you want to learn what's ahead and what skills and attitudes you need to develop as well as what possible problems lie in wait. The chapter that describes your next transition will outline what you will have to do and what you will have to do better.
You should buy this book if you supervise other managers and you want some insight into analyzing performance issues and helping your people develop.
What are the negatives?
This book is written for people in big companies. With the exception of a couple of pages early in the book, managers in small to mid-sized businesses will need to figure out how this applies to them. This is not a big issue because of the range of material covered and the clarity of the presentation, but it still will be irritating to some readers.
The big company whose shadow falls across this book is General Electric. That's not a bad thing in itself. GE does a marvelous job of leadership development. What you have to watch for, though, are unstated assumptions that other companies have the same culture and values as GE, or even that values matter as much everywhere else.
For example, the authors state that "formal training for first line managers is fairly common." That's not true in the majority of US companies today.
The authors state that "managers who aren't cut out for this role should be put on an individual contributor track." But in many companies there is no individual contributor "track." Only managing others leads you to higher status and higher pay.
While there is a lot of good material handling the various transitions, you won't find much on deciding who should be promoted in the first place. But that's the only significant gap I see in this excellent book. Judging who to promote is a key decision and a key component of the success of the promotion.
The bottom line is that this is an excellent book, filled with material that can be used by people in many different situations.
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