An article in Monday’s New York Times about Katie Couric and the woes at CBS News got me to thinking. What Katie Couric did is exactly what many other successful people do—make a job shift away from what they excel at. And, like Couric, the change isn’t always what they thought it would be.

Regardless of what you think of Ms. Katie (a recent poll shows 51% of us like her, 29% do not, and 20% of us are ambivalent), she was wildly successful by all standards at the Today Show.

So why after all her success in that morning slot does she shift to hosting a nightly newscast?

Was it the challenge?

Well, Couric has been a reporter pretty much her whole life (she comes by it honestly—her father was a newspaper reporter).  And the Today Show is a news show—but not a hard news show. You’d never see Dan Rather or Brian Williams help someone make cupcakes or dishing up a soufflé.

So maybe Couric wanted more of a challenge. She was at the top of her game, but she was offered a high-profile, hard-news opportunity, and she took it.

The problem? Both she and CBS are now facing problems they did not foresee. And part of the problem is that what made her so successful on a morning (soft-news) show is not what makes people successful on an evening (hard-news) show.

Couric has encountered a common problem: Her new job requires a very different skill set than what gave her success for fifteen years. Even with her reporter’s background, it’s a whole new league.  In fact, Some are questioning whether or not she’ll complete the whole five years of her contract.

Being good at ‘A’ doesn’t mean you’ll be good at ‘B’

I’ve seen this same dilemma in many other workplaces, too. People who are stellar performers in one venue get the opportunity to step up to another role in the organization.  They take it – and they don’t do so well. They’re no longer stellar. Sometimes they even flop.

As Parker Palmer writes, listen for the voice of your vocation.

Most of us can do many types of work, but be careful when making changes. Companies have a bad habit of firing people who, once promoted, don’t perform as well as they did before. Rather than reassign the person to a more applicable job where success is practically assured, they just let him or her go.

DUMB.

It’s your career.
Be careful what you—and what you let other people—do with it.

PS. When receiving a promotion, don’t be ashamed or embarassed to get training on what it takes to be successful at the new position. 

Different levels in an organization require very different kinds of thinking.  Learn the new job as if you were sponging it up like an entry level worker.

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Filed in Work, Business, Opinion, Motivation, Workplace