The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter
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The book built on some foundational ideas developed in Right from the Start; for example the importance of accelerating learning, securing early wins, and creating alliances.
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But the implications are clear: every successful career is a series of successful assignments, and every successful assignment is launched with a successful transition.
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The most dangerous transition can be the one you don’t recognize is happening.
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This is the point at which you have contributed as much value to your new organization as you have consumed from it.
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You fail to see that success in the new role requires you to stop doing some things and to embrace new competencies.
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Leadership ultimately is about influence and leverage. You are, after all, only one person. To be successful, you need to mobilize the energy of many others in your organization.
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Indeed, all the failed leaders I studied had achieved significant successes in the past.
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Transition failures happen because new leaders either misunderstand the essential demands of the situation or lack the skill and flexibility to adapt to them.
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Prepare yourself.
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Accelerate your learning.
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Match your strategy to the situation.
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Secure early wins.
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Negotiate success.
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Crucially, it means developing and gaining consensus on your 90-day plan.
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Achieve alignment.
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Build your team.
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Create coalitions.
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You therefore should start right away to identify those whose support is essential for your success, and to figure out how to line them up on your side.
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Keep your balance.
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Accelerate everyone.
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Promotion and onboarding into new companies are the most frequent shifts.
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Julia failed because she did not make the leap from being a strong functional performer to taking on a cross-functional, project-leadership role.
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No matter where you land, the keys to effective delegation remain much the same: you build a team of competent people whom you trust, you establish goals and metrics to monitor their progress, you translate higher-level goals into specific responsibilities for your direct reports, and you reinforce them through process.
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Decision making becomes more political—less about authority, and more about influence. That isn’t good or bad; it’s simply inevitable.
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To avoid this, you need to establish new communication channels to stay connected with what is happening where the action
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business orientation, stakeholder connection, alignment of expectations, and cultural adaptation.
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Remember: you don’t want to be meeting your neighbors for the first time in the middle of the night when your house is burning down.
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It isn’t that you’ve been actively misled; rather, it’s because recruiting is like romance, and employment is like marriage.
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What is culture? It’s a set of consistent patterns people follow for communicating, thinking, and acting, all grounded in their shared assumptions and values.
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These elements of culture include things like how people get support for important initiatives, how they win recognition for their accomplishments,
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The bottom line: do whatever it takes to get into the transition state of mind.
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Fill in each cell by assessing your intrinsic interest in solving problems in the domain in question.
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Technical problems encompass strategies, markets, technologies, and processes.
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Political problems concern power and politics in the organization.
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Three basic tools are self-discipline, team building, and advice and counsel.
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Put bluntly, you can decide to learn and adapt, or you can become brittle and fail.
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It is easy to backslide into habits that are both comfortable and dangerous.
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Planning to learn
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Effective leaders strike the right balance between doing (making things happen) and being (observing and reflecting).
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Leaders who are onboarding into new organizations must therefore focus on learning and adapting to the new culture.
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To maximize your return on investment in learning, you must effectively and efficiently extract actionable insights from the mass of information available to you.
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Start by generating questions about the past, the present, and the future (see boxes, “Questions About the Past,” “Questions About the Present,” and “Questions About the Future”).
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what areas (people, relationships, processes, or products) can you achieve some early wins?
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One approach is to keep to the same script in all your meetings. You might start with brief opening remarks about yourself and your approach, followed by questions about the other person (background, family, and interests) and then a standard set of questions about the business.
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Once you have distilled these early discussions into a set of observations, questions, and insights, convene your direct reports as a group, feed them back your impressions and questions, and invite discussion. You will learn about both substance and team dynamics and will simultaneously demonstrate how quickly you have begun to identify key issues.
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The heart of your learning plan is a cyclical learning process in which you collect information, analyze and distill it, and develop and test hypotheses, thus progressively deepening your understanding of your new organization.
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Assume that the job of building a positive relationship with your new boss is 100 percent your responsibility.
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Your key outputs at the end of the first 30 days will be a diagnosis of the situation, an identification of key priorities, and a plan for how you will spend the next 30 days.
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By the end of the first few months, you want your boss, your peers, and your subordinates to feel that something new, something good, is happening.
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The implication: when you’re deciding where to seek early wins, you may have to forgo some of the low-hanging fruit and reach higher in the tree.
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