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September 2 - September 8, 2020
When more than two hundred company CEOs and presidents were asked for their best estimates of the time it takes a typical midlevel leader who has been promoted or hired from the outside to reach the break-even point, the average of their responses was 6.2 months.5 Of course, there can be a great deal of variation in the time it takes to reach the break-even point. If you have inherited a disaster—the classic burning platform—you may be creating value from the moment your appointment is announced. If you have been hired from the outside into a very successful organization, it may take a year or
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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 expecta...
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Engaging in the wrong type of learning. You spend too much time focused on learning about the technical part of the business and not enough about the cultural and political dimensions of your new role. You don’t build the cultural insight, relationships, and information conduits you need if you’re to understand what is really going on.
your objective is not only to avoid vicious cycles; you need to create virtuous cycles that help you create momentum and establish an upward spiral of increasing effectiveness (see figure I-3).
The vicious cycle of transitions
The virtuous cycle of transitions
Your overriding goal in getting up to speed and taking charge is to generate momentum by creating virtuous cycles, and to avoid getting caught in vicious cycles that damage your credibility. 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.
Failure is never only about the flaws of the new leader. Indeed, all the failed leaders I studied had achieved significant successes in the past.
securing early wins—that
Prepare yourself. This means making a mental break from your old job and preparing to take charge in the new one.
You must be systematic and focused about deciding what you need to learn and how you will learn it most efficiently.
Secure early wins. Early wins build your credibility and create momentum. They create virtuous cycles that leverage the energy you put into the organization to create a pervasive sense that good things are happening. 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.
developing and gaining consensus on your 90-day plan.
Achieve alignment. The higher you rise in an organization, the more you must play the role of organizational architect. This means figuring out whether the organization’s strategic direction is sound, bringing its structure into alignment with its strategy, and developing the processes and skill bases necessary to realize your strategic intent.
Build your team. If you are inheriting a team, you need to evaluate, align, and mobilize its members. You likely also need to restructure it to better meet the demands of the situation. Your willingness to make tough early personnel calls and your capacity to select the right people for the right positions are among the most important drivers of success during your transition a...
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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.
The right advice-and-counsel network is an indispensable resource.
Accelerate everyone. Finally, you need to help all those in your organization—direct reports, bosses, and peers—accelerate their own transitions. The fact that you’re in transition means they are too. The quicker you can get your new direct reports up to speed, the more you will help your own performance. Beyond that, the potential benefits to the organization of systematically accelerating everyone’s transitions are vast.
it is critical for you to understand the types of transitions you’re experiencing and to identify which shifts you are finding most challenging.
If you’re lucky, you may get some lead time between learning you’re being considered and actually sitting in the chair.
No matter how much preparation time you get, start planning what you hope to accomplish by specific milestones. Even a few hours of preentry planning can go a long way. Begin by thinking about your first day in the new job. What do you want to do by the end of that day? Then move to the first week. Then focus on the end of the first month, the second month, and finally the three-month mark. These plans will be sketchy, but the simple act of beginning to plan will help clear your head.
Unfortunately, Julia ran into trouble early on. Her earlier success in marketing was the result of extraordinary attention to detail. Accustomed to managing with authority and making the calls, she had a high need for control and a tendency to micromanage.
Julia failed because she did not make the leap from being a strong functional performer to taking on a cross-functional, project-leadership role. She failed to grasp that the strengths that had made her successful in marketing could be liabilities in a role that required her to lead without direct authority or superior expertise. She kept doing what she knew how to do, making her feel confident and in control. The result, of course, was the opposite. By not letting go of the past and not fully embracing her new role, she squandered a big opportunity to rise in the organization.
It’s a mistake to believe that you will be successful in your new job by continuing to do what you did in your previous job, only more so.
“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...
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At the broadest level, preparing yourself means letting go of the past and embracing the imperatives of the new situation to give yourself a running start. It can be hard work, but it is essential. Often, promising managers fail in new roles because they’ve failed to prepare themselves by embracing the necessary changes in perspective.
Each time you’re promoted, 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.
This juggling act can be challenging, because what had been the fifty-thousand-foot view in your previous role may be equivalent to the world at five thousand feet, or even five hundred feet, in your new job.
The complexity and ambiguity of the issues you are dealing with increase every time you get promoted. So you’ll need to rethink what you delegate. 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.
Decision making becomes more political—less about authority, and more about influence. That isn’t good or bad; it’s simply inevitable.
The good news about moving up is that you get a broader view of the business and more latitude to shape it. The bad news is that you are farther from the front lines and more likely to receive filtered information. 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.
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.
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? How will you make it your own? These are critical considerations, worth taking the time to explore.
“We’ve succeeded by staying focused and working as a team. We know each other, we trust each other, and we’ve come a long way together. But we need to be more systematic in how we do things, or we won’t be able to capitalize on and sustain our new size.”
David, who was used to highly disciplined meetings with clear agendas and actionable decisions, found the committee members’ elliptical discussions and consensus-driven process agonizing. Particularly troubling to him was the lack of open discussion about pressing issues and the sense that decisions were being made through back channels.
Joining a new company is akin to an organ transplant—and you’re the new organ. If you’re not thoughtful in adapting to the new situation, you could end up being attacked by the organizational immune system and rejected.
identifying key stakeholders and building productive working relationships.
there is a natural but dangerous tendency for new leaders to focus on building vertical relationships early in their transitions—up to their bosses and down to their teams. Often, insufficient time is devoted to lateral relationship building with peers and key constituencies outside the new leader’s immediate organization.
be sure to check and recheck expectations once you formally join your new organization.
To adapt successfully, you need to understand what the culture is overall and how it’s manifested in the organization or unit you’re joining (because different units may have different subcultures). In doing this, it helps to think of yourself as an anthropologist sent to study a newly discovered civilization.
FIGURE 1-2 The culture pyramid
Take control of your calendar, and schedule early meetings with key stakeholders.
No matter how well you think you understand what you need to do, schedule a conversation with your boss about expectations in your first week.
Have explicit conversations about working styles with bosses and direct reports as early as possible.
ask questions about the organization’s culture.
Identify people inside the organization who could serve as culture interpreters.
After thirty days, conduct an informal 360-degree check-in with your boss and peers to gauge how adaptation is proceeding.
The bottom line: do whatever it takes to get into the transition state of mind.
