Your Next Move
The Leader's Guide to Navigating Major Career Transitions
By: Michael D. Watkins
Published: October 6, 2009
Format: Hardcover, 256pp
ISBN-13: 9781422147634
ISBN-10: 1422147630
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press
"Dissect the CV of any successful executive, and you'll see a series of high-stakes transitions into ever-more-challenging roles: from individual contributor all the way to general management. Through hard-won experience, the best and brightest get promoted and learn to lead others", writes leadership expert and co-founder of Genesis Advisers, Michael Watkins in his essential guide to successful career management and leadership Your Next Move: The Leader's Guide to Navigating Major Career Transitions. The author describes the many different types of career transitions and how to navigate their challenges successfully, and to avoid the pitfalls that can perhaps derail permanently a promising executive career.
Michael Watkins recognizes that every point of career transition represents an opportunity to grow and succeed as a leader, while that same move could result in irreparable career damage. The author provides valuable advice for each core challenge presented by the various career moves that range from promotion and managing former peers, to moving to a new organization or different culture, to being in charge of turnarounds of failing companies or organizations with divisions in many different states of development. Many times in the past, executives found themselves in a new role, with little or no advice or mentoring available to them. This book addresses the shortcomings of the "sink or swim" mode of career transition with actionable ideas for achieving success early and often.
Michael Watkins (photo left) understands that each different career transition contains its own unique problems, career opportunities, and leadership growth potential. The author does point out that all of the various career moves have two major core challenges in common. These are what he calls the personal adaptive challenge and the organizational-change challenge. The personal challenge for any new leader is to recognize what changes need to be made within himself or herself to adapt to the new and often very different career circumstances. The organizational challenge involves knowing what must be accomplished and creating a framework that will describe what is meant by success in that new role. Taken together, these two major core challenges, when taken into account and addressed seriously, will lead to greater success within the new executive role. After these core issues are examined, then the specific challenges of each type of career transition, can be met successfully.
For me, the power of the book is how Michael Watkins creates a powerful set of guidelines for uncovering both the pitfalls and the opportunities that exist within every career transitional move. The author points out that every position held by an executive, at any point in a career, is transitional or even multi-transitional itself. As a result, a leader can develop self awareness and address the core challenge of adapting personally to the new role, while tackling the organizational issues facing the leader in the new job. Michael Watkins goes beyond general personal development and organizational problems, and presents specific techniques for achieving success in many widely diverse career moves. By combining the factors that are common to each new position, with those issues that are unique to each one, the book presents a solid resource for any executive placed in a new and very often unfamiliar leadership role.
I highly recommend the must read career transition guide Your Next Move: The Leader's Guide to Navigating Major Career Transitions by Michael D. Watkins, to anyone seeking a better understanding of the opportunities for career acceleration, as well as avoiding the fatal missteps, that await an executive in a new position. Every move in a career path offers the chance to create short term wins, enhance long term career goals, and to establish a track record of sustained and ever increasing levels of success. At the same time, the book shares ideas for the avoidance of the pitfalls that can stall a career entirely.
Read the insightful career transformational book Your Next Move: The Leader's Guide to Navigating Major Career Transitions by Michael D. Watkins, and learn the life wisdom and real world observations shared by the author. At the same time, discover the tools that can be used effectively to become a successful leader in any new executive situation.
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