Leadership Transitions: The Watkins Collection (4 Items)

34 Your Next Move

grew up in marketing obviously cannot become a native

speaker of operations or R&D, but he can become flu-

ent—familiarizing himself with the central terms, tools,

and ideas employed by the various functions whose

work he must integrate with the rest of the unit. The

new unit head must know enough to be able to evaluate

and recruit the right people to lead in the functional

areas he himself is not expert in. While Bert Vandervliet

had deep experience in sales and marketing and some

exposure to manufacturing, for example, he had a lot

to learn about R&D in order to be effective.

2. From analyst to integrator. The primary responsibility of

functional leaders is to develop and manage their people

to achieve analytical depth in relatively narrow ...