Andrea Jung, the former CEO of Avon Products, encountered an unusually wide range of leadership challenges and opportunities during her long tenure as Avon’s CEO. Combined with her great skill at avoiding missteps for most of her career—and the one major mistake she did make—Andrea Jung’s career is instructive to study.
Based on that study, here are the five career mistakes that every leader should strive to avoid:
1. Creating a situational brand
You may feel as if you have to shape your management style to fit your culture or to act in a certain way to get ahead in your organization. You conform to the situation rather than act authentically. The benefit of fitting in is more than offset by being perceived as inauthentic. Instead, follow Andrea’s example and be yourself. Ask 25 people who knew Andrea, and they will tell you the same thing: she was inclusive, polite, charismatic, and loved Chanel suits and Manolo Blahnik shoes, and was never seen without her signature pearl choker and her custom-blended President’s Red lipstick. She was always very careful to maintain that brand of high style and high inclusiveness, even in the last difficult years of her Avon tenure. Her authenticity was consistent and powerful, inspiring loyalty and productivity.
2. Being deaf to the water cooler buzz about ourselves
Most of us aren’t self-aware. Unfortunately, if you dismiss or deny what people are saying about you, you’re oblivious to the traits that can hold you back from being promoted and can often derail your career. Under stress, you may become the micromanager, the know-it-all, the conflict avoider, the lone wolf. When Andrea first joined Avon, she was seen as aloof and not as warm and fuzzy as the culture dictated. After digging a bit for the straight talk, she confronted this perception head-on by opening up more to colleagues about personal matters, such as being a mother and juggling work-life balance just like everyone else.
3. Declining high-visibility projects or “job auditions”
One of the positive messages from Lean In is that women need to raise their hands when big opportunities come along. Andrea’s success would not have been possible if she had looked at the Avon job and said to herself, “I’m too young, I don’t have any CEO experience, and I’ve never run a business before.” She grabbed the opportunity and ran with it. Furthermore, when she first met with Avon in the early ‘90s, she wasn’t offered a full-time job but was given a consulting assignment that was essentially an audition. She completed the project ahead of schedule and with a boldness that did not escape the notice of the CEO and the Board.
4. Being too functionally narrow
Today organizations want it all – they want deep expertise and individuals who can integrate diverse functions to drive optimal performance. Andrea was a brilliant marketer but lacked operations and execution expertise; her lack of sufficient knowledge about and interest
in these areas led to her downfall. Get those cross-functional experiences early. Once you become too senior in an organization, you’ll find this task more difficult.
5. Failing to reinvent yourself
As Marshall Goldsmith said, what got you here won’t get you there. In these stress-filled, fast-changingtimes, leaders are reluctant to take risks. Yet change mandates agility; if you can’t reinvent yourself, you may find that your strategy or policies no longer work. When Andrea was confronted with a sales decline and too many management layers, she “fired” herself on a Friday and came back the next Monday tougher and leaner. She maintained her personal brand but took a new, more viable approach to running the business. Firing yourself requires tremendous insight and courage, but being able to adapt to new challenges often demands looking at the business with a new vision.
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