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Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001. Under his leadership the GE stock went up by 4,000 per cent, making it the most valuable company in the world. Fortune named him the ‘Manager of the Century’ in 1999

Suzy Welch is a former editor of Harvard Business Review. She is also the co-author of Jack Welch’s latest book Winning

You can e-mail Jack and Suzy Welch questions at winning@nytimes.com

(Please include your name, occupation, city and country)

I was just promoted and will now become the manager of the team I once belonged to. Any advice on how to make a successful transition?
—Name withheld, Folsom, California

Yes – start campaigning. The company’s higher-ups have just appointed you boss. Congratulations. Now comes the hard part. You need to go out and get elected by your former peers.

And this part is not just hard, it’s very hard. In fact, the transition from peer to manager is one of the most delicate and complicated organisational situations you will ever experience. For months or even years, you have been in the trenches with your co-workers as a friend, confidante, and (probably) fellow grouser. You’ve heard secrets and told a few. You know about every little feud and grudge.

You’ve sat around in airport waiting rooms and at weekend barbecues with your closest co-workers and ranked everyone else on the team. You’ve pontificated about who would go, who would stay, and generally what you would do if you ran the group.
And now you do. Surely, some of your former peers are cheering your promotion and are eager to fall in line. That will feel very good to you, but don’t let their support lead you to do something disastrous – namely, come out of the gate with guns blazing. No, keep them firmly in your holster. Why? Because just as surely as some are cheering, others are not. No matter how sure you are that you were right for the job or how popular you once were as a member of the team, some number of your former peers are uncomfortable with your promotion.

A couple may have wanted your job themselves and thought they deserved it, so they are feeling anything from hurt to bitter. Others will simply have some level of anxiety about you going from “one of us” to “one of them” – especially with what you know, not to mention your opinions (known or suspected) about certain people and how things are done. Either way, these former peers are in a hol-ding pattern right now, checking you out.

And that’s where you should be too. In a holding pattern, checking them out. Which is why you need to start campaigning – that is, winning them over. You need to create an atmosphere of stability and cohesion where sound judgments about the future can be made by everyone.

Look, the last thing you want in your new role is a revolution, or an exodus, or even low-level disgruntledness. You want people settled down and functioning. It does nothing for your career or your political standing in an organisation to launch into your new job with a period of turmoil. Much better to be known as a keeper of the peace who only leaps into action when the troops are prepared to fight for a mission they believe in.

And so campaign you must. But here’s the rub: you have to do that without compromising your new authority. You have to run for office while holding office and doing all the things an officeholder must do. And there’s your quandary, the hard part, as we said. It’s that need for you to campaign and command simultaneously. That’s what the transition from peer to manager is all about.

And getting it right is all about timing. Your kinder-gentler election drive cannot last forever. In fact, give it three months – six at most. By that time, if you haven’t won the vote of a former peer or two or three, you won’t ever. In fact, after a certain point, the softer you are, the less effective you will become, as you fight battles that do nothing but wear you down.

So save your energy and attention for bigger things, and begin the process of moving steadfast resisters out – and bringing in people who readily accept the changes that you and your new core of supporters see as necessary. Fortunately, the transition period does not last forever, and if you handle it right, with a campaign and not chaos, you’ll be in a great position to do what’s best for the organisation and yourself. Lead from strength.

What do you think about the obscenely generous severance packages being handed out to CEOs who have basically failed on the job? As a (small) stockholder and a middle manager who busts his butt for five figures, it drives me crazy.
—Name Withheld, Miami, Fla.

You’re not alone, but just make sure you aim your anger in the right direction – and that might not be at the CEOs getting the huge payouts. All they did was say, “Yes, thank you,” when offered a big package. Greedy? Maybe. But more often, they are simply the beneficiaries of a common and disturbing dynamic that starts in the boardroom. Which brings us to the real culprits here: company directors. They’re behind many severance pay debacles for one main reason. They messed up succession planning.

It has a lot to do with severance pay. Why? Because many of the ‘obscene’ payout deals that bother you so much weren’t created when the errant CEO was fired. They were designed long before, when the new CEO was hired from the outside because the board failed, over the course of several years, to develop a pool of internal talent. Now, internally promoted CEOs don’t come cheap. The typical insider tapped for the top job will get a substantial pay increase, hefty rewards tied to performance, a slew of perks and a bigger office. But the deal gets much richer when a ‘white knight’ has to be enticed to gallop in to save the company from itself. They get everything an insider gets – plus a big consolation prize even if they blow it.

And indeed, that last part is usually why the deal gets sealed; without back-end protection, no one would touch most of these risky positions. Not all severance messes are related to outsider CEOs, of course. Sometimes insider CEOs fail and get sent on their way with more money than they appear to deserve. That can be galling too, but the dynamic we’re talking about is different. It starts when a board needs a new CEO and looking inward, reali-ses, “Oops, we forgot to plan for that.” They then contact a headhunter, whose lust for a successful placement is second only to the board’s level of panic. The dynamic is complete when a seemingly perfect candidate is located – usually in a wonderful, secure job that he or she has no intention of leaving. Unless, of course, the deal is right.

Case in point is what happened at Hewlett-Packard. Back in 1999, when the board decided to change its CEO, the lack of internal candidates launched headhunters into a national search. Soon enough, they found Carleton S Fiorina, successfully toiling away at Lucent Technologies. She was hired amid great fanfare, pried away from her comfortable position with an offer she couldn’t refuse.

But as everyone knows, Fiorina’s six-year tenure at HP was fraught with board dissension. So much so you would think that when she was fired, her farewell gift would be modest. At about US$40mn, it wasn’t. It sparked widespread hue and cry, much of it aimed at Fiorina. But what about HP’s board? Without doubt, they negotiated the severance payout — and they did so as Fiorina was walking in the door with trumpets blaring, not as it was slamming behind her with a clunk. So to get back to your question of what we think of obscene severance packages – look, we think they’re terrible. But they’re not solely the fault of the CEOs carrying them to the bank. In many cases, they were recruited to risky job situations on terms set by the hiring party.

But too bad they had to be bought in the first place. Too bad boards didn’t spend enough energy developing internal candidates. They really have only one job more important than that: coaching and supporting the current CEO.

We’re with you on this one. We can’t blame you for wanting to scream. The big severance packages awarded to failed CEOs make you question the whole capitalistic system. But should you ever rea-lly decide to let it rip, just make sure that if the CEO was an outside recruit, you aim your invective where it belongs – not at the easy target, but the right one.

After a successful and satisfying career as an engineer and manager, I am getting to the point where my grandchildren are turning to me for advice about educational and career paths for themselves. If you were in my shoes, what would you tell them?
—Name withheld, Milwaukee

Whenever we get this question, a strong image comes to mind. It’s of a friend of ours who was encouraged by parents back in the 1970s to become a doctor. At the time, getting a medical degree was like winning the lottery, but with a lot more respect attached. So our friend went along with the plan. Her parents cheered; she soldiered on.

Fast forward to the present. Our friend is taking photographs for a living – joyfully, we might add. She ditched her 20-year career as a neurologist at age 45 with the words, “Life is too short to spend every day doing something you don’t love.”

That’s what we would advise you to tell your grandchildren. Now, we realise that every era has its ‘next big thing’. In the 1970s, college kids were pressed to study geology, to capitalise on the growing number of opportunities in oil and gas exploration. In the ‘80s, investment banking and consulting were the goldmines of the future, and in the ‘90s, the collective mantra was, “Go Internet, Young Man.”

All in all, not bad stuff. The oil and gas industries continue to flourish. Investment banking and consulting continue to expand, making a lot of people fortunes. And the Internet, after enduring a period of bust, is strong and getting stronger.

Today, all arrows point toward the biotech, nanotech and information technology industries, and the convergence between them. That’s where the growth and greatest excitement will likely be over the next decades. But that information only matters if your grandchildren happen to like science or technology so much that they just can’t learn enough about either — or both.

If they don’t, they should follow our friend’s well earned counsel. The only career worth pursuing is the one that turns your crank. So by all means, mention the ‘next big thing’ to your grandkids, but tell them with more gusto that they should do what they love. Tell them to grab onto the career that engages their brain and heart and soul and gives them meaning. Tell them that eventually, the money will come, and if it doesn’t, in time, they will find themselves rich with something money can’t buy. And that, obviously, would be happiness.