Unit 6: Becoming successful

Success in high-performance contexts is not the arrival of talent but the deliberate management of a transition — from doing the work well to enabling others to do it, and from being noticed to being chosen. Occupational and organisational psychology treats "becoming successful" as a set of learnable behaviours (goal-setting, self-regulation, social capital and impression management) rather than fixed traits, drawing on theories developed from the 1970s onward.

Governing principles this unit rests on:

• Transition, not promotion, is the unit of change: advancement forces a redefinition of role, identity and success criteria; the old competencies that earned promotion often stop being the ones that sustain it.
• Self-regulation drives performance: goals, feedback and monitoring (Locke & Latham's goal-setting theory) convert intention into achievement.
• Social capital is instrumental: relationships (networks, mentors, sponsors) provide information, influence and opportunity that individual effort cannot.
• Perception is managed, not left to chance: visibility, reputation and being credited for contribution are active projects, not by-products.
• Success is iterative: plans are hypotheses to be tested, reviewed and revised against evidence.

II. Stepping Up

From individual contributor to person-in-charge

The first structural change on the path to success is assuming responsibility for outcomes delivered through other people rather than by yourself.

A. Moving into leadership

Leadership is influence toward a shared goal; moving into it means shifting the source of your value from personal output to collective direction.

• The identity shift: you stop being measured on tasks completed and start being measured on what your group achieves — a change many resist because it feels like "not doing real work."
• Transformational vs transactional (Bass, 1985):
  1. Transactional: influence through exchange — clarifying tasks, rewarding compliance, correcting deviation. Effective for stability and routine delivery.
  2. Transformational: influence through vision, inspiration, intellectual stimulation and individualised consideration. Raises followers' aspirations above self-interest and drives change.
• Followership is a precondition: authority is granted formally, but legitimacy is earned by demonstrating competence and integrity early.
• Letting go of expertise: the trap is over-controlling because you can still do each task better; leadership requires tolerating others' slower or different route to the goal.

B. Succeeding as a manager

Where leadership sets direction, management delivers it through planning, organising and controlling resources; success means producing consistent results through a team.

• Core managerial functions: planning (setting objectives), organising (allocating people and resources), leading (motivating), and controlling (monitoring against targets).
• Delegation as multiplier: assign the task and the authority to complete it, retaining accountability for the outcome. Under-delegation caps output at your personal capacity.
• Situational adjustment (Hersey & Blanchard): vary style by follower readiness — directing for low-competence/low-confidence staff, delegating for high-competence/high-confidence staff.
• Managing performance: set specific measurable expectations, give timely feedback, and address underperformance early rather than tolerating it.
• The player-manager tension:
  1. Doing: immediate, tangible, comfortable — but does not scale.
  2. Enabling: invisible in the short term, compounding in the long term — the actual job.

III. Building Social Capital

Relationships as a performance resource

Advancement depends heavily on who knows your work and who invests in your development; both are cultivated deliberately.

A. Networking

Networking is the systematic building and maintaining of relationships that exchange information, support and opportunity.

• Three functional types (Ibarra & Hunter):
  1. Operational: people you need to get the current job done — colleagues, suppliers, internal functions.
  2. Personal: peers outside work who aid development, perspective and referral.
  3. Strategic: senior and cross-functional contacts who shape your future direction and access.
• Weak ties carry new information (Granovetter, 1973): distant acquaintances bridge into networks you cannot see, so novel opportunities usually arrive through weak rather than strong ties.
• Reciprocity rule: networks sustain on giving before asking — offer information, introductions or help so that requests draw on stored goodwill.
• Quality over volume: a small set of trusted, well-maintained relationships outperforms a large roster of dormant contacts.
• Common failure: treating networking as episodic (only when job-hunting) rather than continuous; the time to build a network is before you need it.

B. Working with a mentor

A mentor is an experienced person who guides your development through advice, feedback and perspective; the relationship accelerates learning that trial-and-error would deliver slowly.

• Two support functions (Kram, 1985):
  1. Career functions: sponsorship, exposure, coaching, protection — advancing your standing.
  2. Psychosocial functions: role-modelling, acceptance, counselling — building confidence and identity.
• Mentor vs sponsor: a mentor talks with you about how to progress; a sponsor talks about you in rooms you are not in, using their capital to advocate. Career progress often needs both.
• The mentee owns the relationship: come with specific questions and updates on advice acted upon; a mentor's time is repaid by visible use of their input.
• Choosing well: seek someone whose judgement you respect and who has navigated the path you want, not merely the most senior person available.
• Reverse and peer mentoring: juniors can mentor seniors on new domains (technology, culture), and peers can mentor each other — mentoring is not strictly top-down.

IV. Advancing Deliberately

Steering and securing the next step

Success is not automatic accumulation; it requires periodically testing your direction against reality and actively pursuing the advancement you want.

A. Reviewing your plans

Reviewing your plans is the disciplined comparison of intended goals against actual progress and changed circumstances, followed by revision.

• Plans as hypotheses: a career plan encodes assumptions about your goals, the market and yourself; review tests whether those assumptions still hold.
• Structured cadence: schedule review (e.g., quarterly, annually) rather than reacting only to crises, so drift is caught early.
• Feedback loop: goal-setting theory works only with feedback on progress; without measurement you cannot tell effort from achievement.
• What a review interrogates:
  • Relevance: does the goal still match what you now want?
  • Progress: are milestones being hit, and if not, why?
  • Environment: have market, organisation or role changed the payoff?
• Sunk-cost discipline: be willing to abandon a plan that no longer serves you; persistence with a dead goal is not resilience.

Worked example — a review in practice:

Original goal : "Lead a team within 2 years"  (set Jan 2024)
Review point  : Jan 2026
Evidence      : promoted to supervisor; no direct reports yet
Environment   : reorganisation created a team-lead vacancy
Decision      : goal still relevant; revise timeline to 6 months
Action        : signal interest to sponsor; request stretch project

The review keeps the goal but resets the timeline and next action against fresh evidence.

B. Achieving promotion

Achieving promotion is securing formal advancement in role and authority; it combines demonstrable performance with visibility and advocacy.

• Performance is necessary but insufficient: doing the current job well earns you the right to be considered, not the promotion itself.
• Operate at the next level first: decision-makers promote people already behaving as if they hold the higher role, reducing perceived risk.
• Managing visibility:
  1. Contribution: the actual value you deliver.
  2. Attribution: whether that value is seen and credited to you.
     Both are required; unseen contribution rarely converts to promotion.
• Sponsorship converts readiness into offers: a senior advocate who names you when opportunities are allocated is often the deciding factor.
• Make the intention explicit: state your ambition to your manager and mentor so effort can be directed toward the specific criteria that matter.
• Handle rejection strategically: treat a "not yet" as data — request the specific gap, close it visibly, and reapply, rather than disengaging.

Bringing the strands together: the six behaviours interlock. Moving into leadership and succeeding as a manager change what you do; networking and working with a mentor change who supports and sees you; reviewing your plans and achieving promotion change how deliberately you steer. Each reinforces the others — a mentor sharpens a plan review, a network surfaces a promotion opportunity, and demonstrated leadership gives a sponsor something worth advocating for.