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Your goal in every transition is to get as rapidly as possible to the break-even point.
This is the point at which you have contributed as much value to your new organization as you have consumed from it.
as they learn and begin to take action, they begin to create value.
early opportunities to build supportive alliances.
create virtuous cycles that help you create momentum and establish an upward spiral of increasing effectiveness (see figure I-3).
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.
Prepare yourself. This means making a mental break from your old job and preparing to take charge in the new one.
Accelerate your learning. You need to climb the learning curve as fast as you can in your new organization. This means understanding its markets, products, technologies, systems, and structures, as well as its culture and politics.
Match your strategy to the situation. Different types of situations require you to make significant adjustments in how you plan for and execute your transition.
Secure early wins.
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
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.
Achieve alignment. The higher you rise in an organization, the more you must play the role of organizational architect.
bringing its structure into alignment with its strategy,
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
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.
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Keep your balance. In the personal and professional tumult of a transition, you must work hard to maintain your equilibrium
Accelerate everyone. Finally, you need to help all those in your organization—direct reports, bosses, and peers—accelerate their own transitions.
Use that time to begin educating yourself about your organization.
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.
Communicate More Formally 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
using electronic communication to broadcast your messages to the widest possible audiences. Your direct reports should play a greater role in communicating your vision
to remember when you’re evaluating the leadership skills of the team members you’ve inherited.
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.
you should focus on four pillars of effective onboarding: business orientation, stakeholder connection, alignment of expectations, and cultural adaptation.
Getting oriented to the business means learning about the company as a whole and not only your specific parts of the business.
Focus, too, on understanding the operating model, planning and performance evaluation systems, and talent management systems,
Often, insufficient time is devoted to lateral relationship building with peers and key constituencies outside the new leader’s immediate organization.
No matter how well you think you understand what you’re expected to do, be sure to check and recheck expectations once you formally join your new organization.
Onboarding checklists
do whatever it takes to get into the transition state of mind.
You can do a lot to compensate for your vulnerabilities. Three basic tools are self-discipline, team building, and advice and counsel.
PREPARE YOURSELF—CHECKLIST
effectively is almost always a factor. Early in your transition you inevitably feel as if you are drinking from a fire hose. There is so much to absorb that it’s difficult to know where to focus. Amid the torrent of information coming your way, it’s easy to miss important signals. Or you might focus too much on the technical side of the business—products, customers, technologies, and strategies—and shortchange critical learning about culture and politics.
Remember: simply displaying a genuine desire to learn and understand translates into increased credibility and influence.
will realize returns in the form of actionable insights. An actionable insight is knowledge that enables you to make better decisions earlier and so helps you quickly reach the break-even point in personal value creation.
Ask them essentially the same five questions: 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 opportunities for growth? What would need to happen for the organization to exploit the potential of these opportunities? If you were me, what would you focus attention on?
Questiokns for robert
Creating a Learning Plan Your learning agenda defines what you want to learn. Your learning plan defines how you will go about learning it. It translates learning goals into specific sets of actions—
Learning Plan Template
Ask people at the top what the company’s vision and strategy are. Then see how far down into the organizational hierarchy those beliefs penetrate.
Analyze a couple of key processes. Convene representatives of the responsible groups to map out and evaluate the processes you selected. You will learn about productivity, quality, and reliability.
Heads of biz units
Meet with key integrators. You will learn how things work at interfaces among functional areas. What problems do they perceive that others do not? Seek out the natural historians.
Chief engineers
Meet with your boss again to discuss your observations.
Meet w erin
focus on answering two fundamental questions. The first question is, What kind of change am I being called upon to lead? Only by answering this question will you know how to match your strategy to the situation. The second question is, What kind of change leader am I? Here the answer has implications for how you should adjust your leadership style.
successfully depends greatly on the ability to embrace the following pillars of self-management: enhancing self-awareness, exercising personal discipline, and building complementary teams.
it’s wise to negotiate success. It’s well worth investing time in this critical relationship up front, because your new boss sets your benchmarks, interprets your actions for other key players, and controls access to resources you need.
That said, you don’t want to be perceived as bringing nothing but problems for your boss to solve. You also need to have plans for how you will proceed. This emphatically does not mean that you must fashion full-blown solutions: the outlay of time and effort to generate solutions can easily lure you down the rocky road to surprising your boss. The key here is to give some thought to how to address the problem—even if it is only gathering more information—and to your role and the help you will need.
what your boss needs or wants to hear. You should assume she wants to focus on the most important things you’re trying to do and how she can help. Don’t go in without at most three things you really need to share or on which you need action.
