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December 22, 2019 - January 1, 2020
The president of the United States gets 100 days to prove himself; you get 90. The actions you take during your first few months in a new role will largely determine whether you succeed or fail.
If you have inherited a disaster—the classic burning platform—you may be creating value from the moment your appointment is announced.
This book provides a blueprint for dramatically condensing the time it takes you to reach the break-even point, regardless of your level in your organization.
Sticking with what you know. You believe you will be successful in the new role by doing the same things you did in your previous role, only more so. You fail to see that success in the new role requires you to stop doing some things and to embrace new competencies.
Falling prey to the “action imperative.” You feel as if you need to take action, and you try too hard, too early to put your own stamp on the organization. You are too busy to learn, and you make bad decisions and catalyze resistance to your initiatives.
Setting unrealistic expectations. You don’t negotiate your mandate or establish clear, achievable objectives. You may perform well but still fail to meet the expectations of your boss and other key stakeholders. Attempting to do too much. You rush off in all directions, launching multiple initiatives in the hope that some will pay off. People become confused, and no critical mass of resources gets focused on key initiatives. Coming in with “the” answer. You come in with your mind made up, or you reach conclusions too quickly about “the” problems and “the” solutions. You alienate people who
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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.
The root causes of transition failure always lie in a pernicious interaction between the new role, with its opportunities and pitfalls, and the individual, with his strengths and vulnerabilities.
Transition failures happen because new leaders either misunderstand the essential demands of the situation or lack the skill and flexibility to adapt to them.
A clear diagnosis of the situation is an essential prerequisite for developing your action plan.
In the first few weeks, you need to identify opportunities to build personal credibility. In the first 90 days, you need to identify ways to create value and improve business results that will help you get to the break-even point more rapidly.
Supportive alliances, both internal and external, are necessary if you are to achieve your goals. 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.
Julia failed because she did not make the leap from being a strong functional performer to taking on a cross-functional, project-leadership role.
“They put me in the job because of my skills and accomplishments,” the reasoning goes. “So that must be what they expect me to do here.” This thinking is destructive, because doing what you know how to do (and avoiding what you don’t) can appear to work, at least for a while. You can exist in a state of denial, believing that because you’re being efficient, you’re being effective. You may keep believing this until the moment the walls come crashing down around you.
your horizon broadens to encompass a wider set of issues and decisions. So you need to gain and sustain a high-level perspective in your new role.
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.
If you’re leading an organization of five people, it may make sense to delegate specific tasks such as drafting a piece of marketing material or selling to a particular customer. In an organization of fifty people, your focus may shift from tasks to projects and processes.
Paradoxically, when you get promoted, positional authority often becomes less important for pushing agendas forward.
Decision making becomes more political—less about authority, and more about influence. That isn’t good or bad; it’s simply inevitable.
There are two major reasons this is so. First, the issues you’re dealing with become much more complex and ambiguous when you move up a level—and your ability to identify “right” answers based solely on data and analysis declines correspondingly. Decisions are shaped more by others’ expert judgments and who trusts whom, as well as by networks of mutual support. Second, at a higher level of the organization, the other players are more capable and have stronger egos. Remember, you were promoted because you are able and driven; the same is true for everyone around you. So it shouldn’t come as a
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To avoid this, you need to establish new communication channels to stay connected with what is happening where the action is. You might maintain regular, direct contact with select customers, for instance, or meet regularly with groups of frontline employees, all without undermining the integrity of the chain of command.
You also need to establish new channels for communicating your strategic intent and vision across the organization—convening town-hall–type meetings rather than individual or small-group sessions, or using electronic communication to broadcast your messages to the widest possible audiences.
“All the world’s a stage,” as William Shakespeare put it in the play As You Like It, “and all the men and women merely players.”
That’s why it’s important to get an early fix on what “leadership presence” means in your new role: what does a leader look like at your new level in the hierarchy? How does he act? What kind of personal leadership brand do you want to have in the new role?
Leaders from outside the company are not familiar with informal networks of information and communication.
To overcome these barriers and succeed in joining a new company, you should focus on four pillars of effective onboarding: business orientation, stakeholder connection, alignment of expectations, and cultural adaptation.
As David learned, newly hired leaders can easily come to believe that they have more latitude to make changes than is actually the case. If they act on these sorts of incorrect assumptions, they easily can trigger unnecessary resistance and even derail themselves.
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.
The culture in any organization is generally multilayered, as illustrated in figure 1-2. At the top of the culture pyramid are the surface elements—the symbols, shared languages, and other things most visible to outsiders. Obvious symbols include organizational logos, the way people dress, and the way office space is organized and allocated.
Likewise, every organization typically has a shared language—a lo...
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Beneath the surface layer of symbols and language lies a deeper, less visible set of organizational norms and accepted patterns of behavior. These elements of culture include things like how people get support for important initiatives, how they win recognition for their accomplishments, and how they view meetings—are they seen as forums for discussion or rubber-stamp sessions?
underlying all cultures are the fundamental assumptions that everyone has about the way the world works—the shared values that infuse and reinforce all the other elements in the pyramid.
The following domains are areas in which cultural norms may vary significantly from company to company.
Influence.
Meetings.
Execution.
Conflict.
Recognition.
Ends versus means.
Three basic tools are self-discipline, team building, and advice and counsel.
Though clearly a strength, her attention to detail had a downside, especially in tandem with a high need for control: the result was a tendency to micromanage people in the areas she knew best. This behavior demoralized people who wanted to make their own contributions without intrusive oversight.
As you move to higher levels, however, it becomes increasingly important to get good political counsel and personal advice. Political counselors help you understand the politics of the organization, an understanding that is especially important when you plan to implement change.
Are there aspects of your new job that are critical to success but that you prefer not to focus on? Why? How will you compensate for your potential blind spots?
The first task in making a successful transition is to accelerate your learning. Effective learning gives you the foundational insights you need as you build your plan for the next 90 days.
Planning to learn means figuring out in advance what the important questions are and how you can best answer them. Few new leaders take the time to think systematically about their learning priorities. Fewer still explicitly create a learning plan when entering a new role.
Armed with insight into the organization’s history, you may indeed decide that things need to change. Or you may find there is a good reason to leave it exactly where it is.
The primary symptom is a nearly compulsive need to take action. Effective leaders strike the right balance between doing (making things happen) and being (observing and reflecting).
Remember: simply displaying a genuine desire to learn and understand translates into increased credibility and influence.
Perhaps most destructive of all, some new leaders arrive, as Chris did at Phoenix, with “the” answer. They have already made up their minds about what the organization’s problems are and how to solve them.
