You Have a New Boss, Which Means You Have No History.

You were inherited, and at your level, that’s a challenge to establish your reputation and value.

You Need to Start Interviewing for the Job You Already Have

The day they announced your new boss, your target audience changed, and you started interviewing for your own job.

But that’s OK, because what makes for good business makes for good career management.

Because They Don’t Know You

Your new boss doesn’t know you. The leaders who knew your work are gone, and your reputation left with them.

Your audience, your customer, has changed. The reputation you built now has to be understood and embraced by a new customer.

This can feel very personal.

When your audience changes, that changes everything.

And we often forget, because nothing we can see has changed. Same office, same title, same team, same results. The only thing that changed is who decides.

And the Higher Your Level, the Faster Your New Boss Must Decide on You

Once you’re at the VP, partner, or other senior level, your unique value is already well established. Or at least it should be. And the time people spend making decisions about you gets shrunk into a matter of moments.

Nowhere is this more relevant than when you get a new boss. They have an agenda they must meet, under increased pressure and tighter timing. They need to know, fast, whom they can count on and whether you can help them achieve the goal.

So Go Back to the Basics: Who Is Your Who?

It all gets back to the first lesson I learned at P&G: Who is your who?

Four words. And the answer had to be specific. An actual person, drawn clearly enough that everyone on the team could picture them.

In business, it always means going back to understanding your audience, whether it’s your customer, your team members, or your new management.

A Real-Life Example: Victoria Got a Radically Different Boss

I had this happen to a client about two years ago. I’ll call her Victoria.

Luckily, we had already worked together on her executive brand, articulating her unique value in her company and in her industry. But this was a radically different boss than her previous one, used to moving fast and brought in to disrupt and accelerate the organization, and it threw her.

We Went Back to the Basics

What was the new person’s biggest goal? What were their three biggest challenges? What did we know about their wants and needs?

We Didn’t Change Her Brand

We didn’t change her unique value or story. We made sure to tell it in a more relevant way for her new audience.

By quickly understanding their needs and focusing her story through their lens, she and her new boss established common ground and built a strong working relationship. Together, they were able to deliver the new, higher goals demanded of the business unit. And that enabled her boss to become yet another loyal advocate.

Don’t Forget, You Already Know How to Do This

You understand customers for the business every day. This week, you’re doing it for yourself.

You were inherited. Now get seen and chosen all over again.

What’s Your Executive Edge?

At this level, the game has changed.

A new boss sees you from the outside, with no history, so start by seeing what they see.

You’ve earned your seat in the consideration set. So has everyone else. Every finalist is excellent. The obvious choice comes down to one nuanced thing. Your executive edge. The specific, memorable reason why you, and not someone equally qualified, should be chosen.

When your edge is dull, scattered, or undeployed, you lose roles you should be winning. Not because you are less capable. Because someone else’s value was more clearly positioned.

After nearly four decades and more than a thousand executives, I built a diagnostic for accomplished Vice Presidents ready to become Senior VP, EVP, C-suite, partners, and board members. I call it the Executive Edge Audit.

12 questions, 10 minutes. You see your edge from the outside, the way the people deciding your future see it: where it’s strong, where it’s dull, where it’s missing, where it’s leaking value you’ve already earned.

You’ll hold an honest read of where you stand, what it’s costing you, and what becomes possible from here: the roles that change the trajectory of your career and life.

Take the Executive Edge Audit here

Branding Changes Everything®

Because clarity changes everything.