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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.
Neglecting horizontal relationships. You spend too much time focused on vertical relationships—up to the boss and down to direct reports—and not enough on peers and other stakeholders.
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.
Transition failures happen because new leaders either misunderstand the essential demands of the situation or lack the skill and flexibility to adapt to them.
Prepare yourself. This means making a mental break from your old job and preparing to take charge in the new one.
Accelerate your learning.
This means understanding its markets, products, technologies, systems, and structures, as well as its culture and politics.
Match your strategy to the situation.
A clear diagnosis of the situation is an essential prerequisite for developing your action plan.
Secure early wins. Early wins build your credibility and create momentum.
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.
Negotiate success. Because no other single relationship is more important, you need to figure out how to build a productive working relationship with your new boss (or bosses) and manage her expectations. This means carefully planning for a series of critical conversations about the situation, expectations, working style, resources, and your personal development.
Build your team. If you are inheriting a team, you need to evaluate, align, and mobilize its members.
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 and beyond.
Create coalitions. Your success depends on your ability to influence people outside your direct line of control.
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.
Keep your balance.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
What are the biggest challenges the organization is facing (or will face in the near future)?
Why is the organization facing (or going to face) these challenges?
What are the most promising unexploited opportuni...
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What would need to happen for the organization to exploit the potential o...
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If you were me, what would you focus ...
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SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis to guide your diagnostic work.
Similarly, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, and sustaining success arise at all levels, in companies large and small.
List your team members in the first column. Then assess where you stand in having the five conversations with each one. Circle the ones that are your priorities. Team member Situation Expectations
SWOT—an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats—was originally developed by a team at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in the late 1960s.
The group came up with the idea of simultaneously analyzing internal capabilities (strengths and weaknesses) and developments in the external environment (threats and opportunities) to identify strategic priorities and develop plans to address them.
