The First 90 Days

Highlights

PREFACE FOR THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

  • “The Pillars of Executive Onboarding,” an October 2008 Talent Management article on the major focal points for onboarding: business orientation, expectations, alignment, cultural adaptation, and political connection.7 (Location 108)
  • “How Managers Become Leaders,” a June 2012 Harvard Business Review article summarizing the research I did on “the seven seismic shifts” that leaders experience as they make the very challenging transition from a senior functional role to running an entire business.10 (Location 116)

Introduction: The First 90 Days

  • 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. (Location 139)
  • transitions are also periods of acute vulnerability, because you lack established working relationships and a detailed understanding of your new role. (Location 149)
  • If you’re successful in building credibility and securing early wins, the momentum likely will propel you through the rest of your tenure. (Location 152)

Building Your Career Transition Competence

  • every successful career is a series of successful assignments, and every successful assignment is launched with a successful transition. (Location 162)
  • leaders also experience many hidden transitions. These transitions occur when there are substantial changes in leaders’ roles and responsibilities without corresponding changes in titles. (Location 163)
  • These are common occurrences, often the result of organizational shifts due to rapid growth, restructuring, and acquisition. (Location 164)
  • Hidden transitions can be particularly perilous, because leaders do not always recognize them or give them the attention they deserve. (Location 165)
  • 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. (Location 176)
  • 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. (Location 183)
  • independent research has shown that you can reduce the time by as much as 40 percent through rigorous application of the principles described in this book. (Location 190)

Avoiding Transition Traps

  • list of common traps, (Location 197)
  • 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. (Location 199)
  • 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. (Location 202)
  • 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. (Location 204)
  • 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. (Location 206)
  • 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. (Location 211)
  • 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. (Location 214)

Creating Momentum

  • 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. (Location 232)

Understanding the Fundamental Principles

  • Do the right things—the essential transition tasks listed next—and you will rapidly create momentum that will propel you to even greater successes. (Location 248)
  • 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. (Location 252)
  • You must be systematic and focused about deciding what you need to learn and how you will learn it most efficiently. (Location 254)
  • 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. (Location 260)
  • This means carefully planning for a series of critical conversations about the situation, expectations, working style, resources, and your personal development. (Location 263)
  • Achieve alignment. The higher you rise in an organization, the more you must play the role of organizational architect. (Location 265)
  • 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. (Location 268)
  • Create coalitions. Your success depends on your ability to influence people outside your direct line of control. 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. (Location 272)
  • Keep your balance. In the personal and professional tumult of a transition, you must work hard to maintain your equilibrium and preserve your ability to make good judgments. (Location 274)
  • Accelerate everyone. Finally, you need to help all those in your organization—direct reports, bosses, and peers—accelerate their own transitions. (Location 278)

Assessing Transition Risk

  • The first step is to diagnose the types of transitions you’re going through. (Location 285)
  • Your transition begins the moment you learn you are being considered for a new job (Location 295)
  • No matter what kind of transition you’re making, by roughly the three-month mark key people in the organization—your bosses, peers, and direct reports—typically expect you to be getting some traction. (Location 297)
  • Thus, you should use the 90-day period as a planning horizon. (Location 298)
  • This book is for new leaders at all levels, from first-time managers to CEOs. (Location 339)

CHAPTER 1 Prepare Yourself

  • 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. (Location 363)
  • 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. (Location 371)

Getting Promoted

Balance Breadth and Depth
  • 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. (Location 385)
Rethink What You Delegate
  • 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. (Location 389)
Influence Differently
  • Decision making becomes more political—less about authority, and more about influence. That isn’t good or bad; it’s simply inevitable. (Location 398)
  • It’s critical, then, for you to become more effective at building and sustaining alliances. (Location 405)
Communicate More Formally
  • 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. (Location 408)
Exhibit the Right Presence
  • One inescapable reality of promotion is that you attract much more attention and a higher level of scrutiny than before. You become the lead actor in a crucial public play. Private moments become fewer, and there is mounting pressure to exhibit the right kind of leadership presence at all times. (Location 416)
  • what does a leader look like at your new level in the hierarchy? (Location 419)
  • What kind of personal leadership brand do you want to have in the new role? (Location 420)

Onboarding into a New Company

  • Leaders joining new companies often are making lateral moves: they’ve been hired to do things that they’ve been successful doing elsewhere. Their difficulties lie in adjusting to new organizational contexts that have different political structures and cultures. (Location 425)
  • When surveyed, senior HR practitioners overwhelmingly assess the challenge of coming in from the outside as “much harder” than being promoted from within. (Location 475)
  • Leaders from outside the company are not familiar with informal networks of information and communication. (Location 477)
  • New people are unknown to the organization and therefore do not have the same credibility as someone who is promoted from within. (Location 479)
  • A long tradition of hiring from within makes it difficult for some organizations to accept outsiders. (Location 480)
  • 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. (Location 481)
Business Orientation
  • Getting oriented to the business means learning about the company as a whole and not only your specific parts of the business. (Location 485)
  • Focus, too, on understanding the operating model, planning and performance evaluation systems, and talent management systems, because they often powerfully influence how you can most effectively have an impact. (Location 488)
Stakeholder Connection
  • develop the right relationship wiring as soon as possible. (Location 491)
  • Often, insufficient time is devoted to lateral relationship building with peers and key constituencies outside the new leader’s immediate organization. (Location 493)
Expectations Alignment
  • 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. (Location 496)
  • Cultural Adaptation (Location 504)
    • Note: .h3
  • The most daunting challenge for leaders joining new organizations is adapting to unfamiliar cultures. (Location 505)
  • it helps to think of yourself as an anthropologist sent to study a newly discovered civilization. (Location 508)
  • 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. (Location 509)
  • Identifying Cultural Norms (Location 528)
  • Influence. How do people get support for critical initiatives? (Location 531)
  • Execution. When it comes time to get things done, which matters more—a deep understanding of processes or knowing the right people? (Location 534)
  • Conflict. Can people talk openly about difficult issues without fear of retribution? (Location 535)
  • Recognition. Does the company promote stars, rewarding those who visibly and vocally drive business initiatives? Or does it encourage team players, rewarding those who lead authoritatively but quietly and collaboratively? (Location 536)
  • Ends versus means. Are there any restrictions on how you achieve results? Does the organization have a well-defined, well-communicated set of values that is reinforced through positive and negative incentives? (Location 537)
  • Onboarding checklists (Location 551)
  • Ask your boss to identify and introduce you to the key people you should connect with early on. (Location 556)
  • If possible, meet with some stakeholders before the formal start. (Location 557)
  • Because you may not get a clean transition in job responsibilities, it is essential to discipline yourself to make the transition mentally. (Location 571)
  • Pick a specific time, such as a weekend, and use it to imagine yourself making the shift. Consciously think of letting go of the old job and embracing the new one. (Location 572)
  • One way to pinpoint your vulnerabilities is to assess your problem preferences (Location 579)
  • the kinds of problems toward which you naturally gravitate. Everyone likes to do some things more than others. (Location 580)
  • You can do a lot to compensate for your vulnerabilities. Three basic tools are self-discipline, team building, and advice and counsel. (Location 633)
  • You need to discipline yourself to devote time to critical activities that you do not enjoy and that may not come naturally. (Location 634)
  • As you move to higher levels, however, it becomes increasingly important to get good political counsel and personal advice. (Location 659)
  • However, even if your new organization doesn’t have formal transition support, you should engage with HR and your new boss about creating a 90-day transition plan. (Location 681)
  • If you have been promoted, find out whether there are competency models describing the requirements of your new role (but don’t assume they tell the whole story). (Location 682)
  • You will have to work constantly to ensure that you’re engaging with the real challenges of your new position and not retreating to your comfort zone. (Location 690)

CHAPTER 2 Accelerate Your Learning

  • it is essential to figure out what you need to know about your new organization and then to learn it as rapidly as you can. (Location 727)

Overcoming Learning Roadblocks

  • A related problem is a failure to plan to learn. Planning to learn means figuring out in advance what the important questions are and how you can best answer them. (Location 736)
  • A baseline question you always should ask is, “How did we get to this point?” (Location 740)
  • Effective leaders strike the right balance between doing (making things happen) and being (observing and reflecting). (Location 743)
  • the pressure to “do” almost always comes more from inside the leader than from outside forces; it reflects a lack of confidence and a consequent need to prove yourself. (Location 745)
  • Remember: simply displaying a genuine desire to learn and understand translates into increased credibility and influence. (Location 746)
  • Leaders who are onboarding into new organizations must therefore focus on learning and adapting to the new culture. (Location 757)
  • Otherwise they risk suffering the organizational equivalent of organ rejection syndrome (Location 758)

Managing Learning as an Investment Process

Defining Your Learning Agenda

  • learning during a transition is iterative: at first, your learning agenda will consist mostly of questions, but as you learn more, you will hypothesize about what is going on and why. (Location 777)
  • How should you compile your early list of guiding questions? Start by generating questions about the past, the present, and the future (Location 779)
  • Why are things done the way they are? Are the reasons something was done (for example, to meet a competitive threat) still valid? (Location 781)
Questions About the Past
  • How has this organization performed in the past? How do people in the organization think it has performed? (Location 785)
  • How were goals set? Were they insufficiently or overly ambitious? (Location 786)
  • Were internal or external benchmarks used? What measures were employed? What behaviors did they encourage and discourage? What happened if goals were not met? (Location 787)
  • If performance has been good, why has that been the case? (Location 789)
  • What have been the relative contributions of strategy, structure, systems, talent bases, culture, and politics? If performance has been poor, why has that been the case? Do the primary issues reside in the organization’s strategy? Its structure? Its technical capabilities? Its culture? Its politics? (Location 789)
  • Who has been instrumental in shaping this organization? (Location 793)
Questions About the Present
  • What is the stated vision and strategy? (Location 796)
  • Is the organization really pursuing that strategy? If not, why not? If so, will the strategy take the organization where it needs to go? (Location 796)
  • Who is capable, and who is not? Who is trustworthy, and who is not? Who has influence, and why? (Location 798)
  • In what areas (people, relationships, processes, or products) can you achieve some early wins? (Location 804)
Questions About the Future
  • what areas is the organization most likely to face stiff challenges in the coming year? What can be done now to prepare for them? What are the most promising unexploited opportunities? What would need to happen to realize their potential? (Location 808)
  • The most valuable external sources of information are likely to be the following: Customers. How do customers—external or internal—perceive your organization? (Location 833)
  • Keep an eye out for “old-timers” or natural historians—people who have been with the organization for a long time and who naturally absorb its history. (Location 853)

Adopting Structured Learning Methods

  • Instead, you should consider using a structured learning process. (Location 866)
  • Suppose you decide to meet with your direct reports one-on-one. In what order will you meet with them? (Location 872)
  • One approach is to keep to the same script in all your meetings. (Location 873)
  • 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. This approach is powerful, because the responses you get are comparable. You can line them up side by side and analyze what is consistent and inconsistent about the responses. This comparison helps you gain insight into which people are being more or less open. (Location 873)
  • When you are diagnosing a new organization, start by meeting with your direct reports one-on-one. (This (Location 877)
  • Ask them essentially the same five questions: (Location 878)
  • 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? (Location 879)
  • How people answer can also tell you a lot about your new team and its politics. (Location 885)
  • 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. (Location 887)
  • even a modest structure—a script and a sequence of interactions, such as meeting with people individually, doing some analysis, and then meeting with them together—can dramatically accelerate your ability to extract actionable insights. (Location 891)

Creating a Learning Plan

  • Your learning agenda defines what you want to learn. Your learning plan defines how you will go about learning it. (Location 944)
  • learning should be a primary focus of your plan for your first 30 days on the job (Location 947)
  • Learning Plan Template (Location 953)
    • Note: Revisit this
  • Test strategic alignment from the top down. Ask people at the top what the company’s vision and strategy are. Then (Location 965)
  • By the End of the First Month Gather your team to feed back to them your preliminary findings. You will elicit confirmation and challenges of your assessments and will learn more about the group and its dynamics. (Location 970)
  • As you start to interact with your new boss, figure out where to get some early wins, or build supportive coalitions, it will be critical for you to gain additional insights. (Location 989)
  • What are some structured ways you might extract more insight for your investment of time and energy? (Location 997)

CHAPTER 3 Match Strategy to Situation

  • 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 (Location 1020)

Using the STARS Model

  • STARS is an acronym for five common business situations leaders may find themselves moving into: start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, and sustaining success. (Location 1024)
  • What are the defining features of the five STARS situations? (Location 1030)
  • employees of a start-up are typically much less focused on key issues than those in a turnaround, simply because the vision, strategy, structures, and systems that channel organizational energy are not yet in place. (Location 1034)
  • In a turnaround, you take on a unit or group that is recognized to be in deep trouble and work to get it back on track. (Location 1061)
  • Turnarounds are ready-fire-aim situations: (Location 1063)
  • In contrast, realignments (and sustaining-success assignments) are more ready-aim-fire situations. (Location 1064)
  • In an accelerated-growth situation, the organization has begun to hit its stride, and the hard work of scaling up has begun. (Location 1067)
  • This typically means you’re putting in the structures, processes, and systems necessary to rapidly expand the business (or project, product, or relationship). (Location 1068)
  • Start-ups, turnarounds, and accelerated-growth situations involve much resource-intensive construction work; there isn’t much existing infrastructure and capacity for you to build on. To a significant degree, you get to start fresh or, in the case of accelerated growth, to build on a strong foundation. (Location 1071)
  • In fact, the key to sustaining success often lies in continuously starting up, accelerating, and realigning parts of the business. (Location 1084)
  • A key implication is that success in transitioning depends, in no small measure, on your ability to transform the prevailing organizational psychology in predictable ways. In start-ups, the prevailing mood is often one of excited confusion, and your job is to channel that energy into productive directions, in part by deciding what not to do. In turnarounds, you may be dealing with a group of people who are close to despair; it is your job to provide them with a concrete plan for moving forward and confidence that it will improve the situation. In accelerated-growth situations, you need to help people understand that the organization needs to be more disciplined and get them to work within defined processes and systems. In realignments, you will likely have to pierce the veil of denial that is preventing people from confronting the need to reinvent the business. Finally, in sustaining-success situations, you must invent the challenge by finding ways to keep people motivated, combat complacency, and find new direction for growth—both organizational and personal. (Location 1085)

Diagnosing Your STARS Portfolio

  • But as soon as you drill down, you will almost certainly discover that you’re managing a portfolio—of products, projects, processes, plants, or people—that represents a mix of STARS situations. (Location 1103)
  • you must figure out which parts of your new organization belong in each of the five categories. (Location 1107)

Leading Change

  • getting people to acknowledge the need for change is much more a political challenge than a technical one. (Location 1145)
  • a deep understanding of the culture and politics is a prerequisite for leadership success—and even survival. (Location 1146)

Managing Yourself

  • It is hard to measure results in a realignment when success means that nothing much happens; it’s the dog that doesn’t bark. (Location 1235)

CHAPTER 4 Negotiate Success

  • “I want you to judge me on my results, not on how I get them.” (Location 1302)
  • 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. (Location 1303)
  • Negotiating success means proactively engaging with your new boss to shape the game so that you have a fighting chance of achieving desired goals. (Location 1306)
  • Lack of oversight can be a blessing if you get what you need to succeed. Or it can be a curse if you get enough rope to hang yourself. (Location 1311)
  • What you need from a boss also varies among the STARS business situations. In start-ups, you need resources and perhaps protection from higher-level interference. (Location 1313)
  • In a sustaining-success situation, you may need help to learn about the business and avoid early mistakes that threaten the core assets. (Location 1316)

Focusing on the Fundamentals

  • How do you build a productive relationship with a new boss? (Location 1325)
  • Let’s start with the don’ts. (Location 1325)
  • Don’t stay away. If you have a boss who doesn’t reach out to you, or with whom you have uncomfortable interactions, you will have to reach out yourself. (Location 1326)
  • Don’t approach your boss only with problems. That said, you don’t want to be perceived as bringing nothing but problems for your boss to solve. (Location 1332)
  • It can be dangerous to say, “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.” Far better is, “Don’t just bring me problems, bring me plans for how we can begin to address them.”) (Location 1337)
  • Don’t run down your checklist. There is a tendency, even for senior leaders, to use meetings with a boss as an opportunity to run through your checklist of what you’ve been doing. (Location 1338)
  • Don’t expect your boss to change. You and your new boss may have very different working styles. You may communicate in different ways, motivate in different ways, and prefer different levels of detail in overseeing your direct reports. But it’s your responsibility to adapt to your boss’s style; you need to adapt your approach to work with your boss’s preferences. (Location 1342)
  • There are some fundamental do’s as well. (Location 1345)
  • Clarify expectations early and often. (Location 1346)
  • Take 100 percent responsibility for making the relationship work. This is the flip side of “Don’t stay away.” Don’t expect your boss to reach out or to offer you the time and support you need. (Location 1351)
  • Negotiate time lines for diagnosis and action planning. Don’t let yourself get caught up immediately in firefighting or be pressured to make calls before you’re ready. (Location 1353)
  • Pursue good marks from those whose opinions your boss respects. (Location 1360)

Planning for Five Conversations

  • In fact, it’s valuable to include plans for five specific conversations with your new boss about transition-related subjects in your 90-day plan. (Location 1368)
  • These are not subjects to be dealt with in separate meetings but are intertwined threads of dialogue. (Location 1369)
  • The situational diagnosis conversation. In this conversation, you seek to understand how your new boss sees the STARS portfolio you have inherited. (Location 1370)
  • The resource conversation. This conversation is essentially a negotiation for critical resources. What do you need to be successful? What do you need your boss to do? (Location 1378)
  • The style conversation. This conversation is about how you and your new boss can best interact on an ongoing basis. (Location 1381)
  • What forms of communication does he prefer, and for what? Face-to-face? Voice, electronic? How often? What kinds of decisions does he want to be consulted on, and when can you make the call on your own? How do your styles differ, and what are the implications for the ways you should interact? (Location 1382)
  • The personal development conversation. Once you’re a few months into your new role, you can begin to discuss how you’re doing and what your developmental priorities should be. Where are you doing well? In what areas do you need to improve or do things differently? (Location 1385)

Planning the Situation Conversation

  • If you and your boss do not define your new situation in the same way, you will not receive the support you need. Thus, your first discussion should center on clearly defining your new situation using the STARS model as a shared language. (Location 1414)
  • Start-up Help getting needed resources quickly Clear, measurable goals Guidance at strategic breakpoints Help staying focused (Location 1425)
  • Accelerated growth Same as start-up, plus Support for getting investment to fuel growth at the right rate in the right ways Help making the case for new systems and structures (Location 1430)
  • Sustaining success Same as start-up, plus Constant reality testing: Is this a sustaining-success situation, or is it a realignment? Support for playing good defense and avoiding mistakes that damage the business Help finding ways to take the business to a new level (Location 1434)

Planning the Expectations Conversation

  • You need to agree on short- and medium-term goals and on timing. (Location 1440)
  • Critically, you need to agree on how your boss will measure progress. (Location 1441)
  • Aim for Early Wins in Areas Important to Your Boss (Location 1448)
  • If there are parts of the organization—products, facilities, people—about which your new boss is proprietary, it is essential to identify them as soon as possible. (Location 1453)
  • Whether you and your boss agree on expectations, try to bias yourself somewhat toward underpromising achievements and overdelivering results. (Location 1465)
  • Try, for example, asking the same questions in different ways to gain more insight. Work at reading between the lines accurately and developing good hypotheses about what your boss is likely to want. Try to put yourself in his shoes and understand how his boss will evaluate him. Figure out how you fit into the larger picture. Above all, don’t let key issues remain ambiguous. (Location 1472)
  • Going back for more too often is a sure way to lose credibility. (Location 1492)

Planning the Style Conversation

  • The first step is to diagnose your new boss’s working style and figure out how it jibes with your own. (Location 1517)
  • What sorts of decisions does she want you to make on your own but tell her about? Are you free, for example, to make key personnel decisions? When does she want to be consulted before you decide? (Location 1532)
  • Assume that the job of building a positive relationship with your new boss is 100 percent your responsibility. (Location 1538)
  • When serious style differences arise, it’s best to address them directly. Otherwise, you run the risk that your boss will interpret a style difference as disrespect or even incompetence on your part. (Location 1544)
  • One proven strategy is to focus your early conversations on goals and results instead of how you achieve them. (Location 1547)

Planning the Personal Development Conversation

  • Finally, when your relationship with your boss has matured a bit (roughly the 90-day mark is a good rule of thumb), begin to discuss how you’re doing. (Location 1556)
  • Whenever you are at a point in your career when success demands a different set of skills and attitudes, discipline yourself to be open to learning from others who have gone before you. (Location 1564)
  • The higher you rise, the more important the key soft skills of cultural and political diagnosis, negotiation, coalition building, and conflict management will become. (Location 1566)
  • 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. (Location 1597)
  • Your review meeting with your boss should focus on the situation and expectations conversations, with an eye to reaching consensus about the situation, clarification of expectations, and buy-in to your plan for the next 30 days. (Location 1598)
  • At the 60-day mark, your review meeting should focus on assessing your progress toward the goals of your plan for the previous 30 days. You should also discuss what you plan to achieve in the next 30 days (that is, by the end of 90 days). (Location 1601)

CHAPTER 5 Secure Early Wins

  • A seminal study of executives in transition found that they plan and implement change in distinct waves, as illustrated in figure 5-1.2 Following an early period of focused learning, these leaders begin an early wave of changes. The pace then slows to allow consolidation and deeper learning about the organization, and to allow people to catch their breath. Armed with more insight, these executives then implement deeper waves of change. A final, less extreme wave focuses on fine-tuning to maximize performance. By this point, most of these leaders are ready to move on. (Location 1689)

Plan Your Waves

  • Each wave should consist of distinct phases: learning, designing the changes, building support, implementing the changes, and observing results. (Location 1701)
  • Unending change is also a surefire recipe for burning out your people. (Location 1703)
  • The goal of the first wave of change is to secure early wins. (Location 1704)
  • The new leader tailors early initiatives to build personal credibility, establish key relationships, and identify and harvest low-hanging fruit—the highest-potential opportunities for short-term improvements in organizational performance. (Location 1704)
  • But be careful not to fall into the low-hanging fruit trap. This trap catches leaders when they expend most of their energy seeking early wins that don’t contribute to achieving their longer-term business objectives. (Location 1711)
  • As you strive to create momentum, therefore, keep in mind that your early wins must do double duty: they must help you build momentum in the short term and lay a foundation for achieving your longer-term business goals. (Location 1715)
  • be sure that your plans for securing early wins, to the greatest extent possible, (1) are consistent with your agreed-to goals—what your bosses and key stakeholders expect you to achieve—and (2) help you introduce the new patterns of behavior you need to achieve those goals. (Location 1716)
  • Your agreed-to goals are the destination, but the behavior of people in your organization is a key part of how you do (or don’t) get there. (Location 1724)
  • People exhibit great variation in their levels of performance. (Location 1738)
  • People make excuses when they fail to meet commitments. (Location 1739)
  • People are rewarded for creating fiefdoms. (Location 1745)
  • Think of it as risk management: pursue enough focal points to have a good shot at getting a significant success, but not so many that your efforts get diffused. (Location 1755)
  • Be sure you understand what is and is not viewed as a win, especially if you’re onboarding into the organization. (Location 1770)

Identifying Your Early Wins

Understand Your Reputation
  • The implication is that you need to figure out what role people are expecting you to play and then make an explicit decision about whether you will reinforce these expectations or confound them. (Location 1781)
  • Close personal relationships are rarely compatible with effective supervisory ones. (Location 1789)
  • Your credibility, or lack of it, will depend on how people would answer the following questions about you: Do you have the insight and steadiness to make tough decisions? Do you have values that they relate to, admire, and want to emulate? Do you have the right kind of energy? Do you demand high levels of performance from yourself and others? (Location 1802)
  • Your early actions, good and bad, will shape perceptions. (Location 1806)
  • So how do you build personal credibility? In part, it’s about marketing yourself effectively, much akin to building equity in a brand. (Location 1808)
  • You want people to associate you with attractive capabilities, attitudes, and values. (Location 1809)
  • Demanding but able to be satisfied. (Location 1811)
  • Accessible but not too familiar. (Location 1813)
  • Decisive but judicious. (Location 1814)
  • Early in your transition, you want to project decisiveness but defer some decisions until you know enough to make the right calls. (Location 1816)
  • Focused but flexible. (Location 1817)
  • Active without causing commotion. (Location 1820)
  • Willing to make tough calls but humane. (Location 1822)
  • Effective new leaders do what needs to be done, but they do it in ways that preserve people’s dignity and that others perceive as fair. (Location 1823)
  • What messages do you want to get across about who you are and what you represent as a leader? What are the best ways to convey those messages? Identify your key audiences—direct reports, other employees, key outside constituencies—and craft a few messages tailored to each. (Location 1827)
  • Think about modes of engagement, too. How will you introduce yourself? Should your first meetings with direct reports be one-on-one or in a group? (Location 1831)
  • As you make progress in getting connected, identify and act as quickly as you can to remove minor but persistent irritants. Focus on strained external relationships, and begin to repair them. Cut out redundant meetings, shorten excessively long ones, or improve problems with physical work spaces. (Location 1834)
  • An early, visible focus on learning signals to the organization that you understand it has a unique history and dynamics. (Location 1839)
  • To nudge your mythology in a positive direction, look for and leverage teachable moments. These are actions—such as the way Elena dealt with recalcitrant supervisors—that clearly display what you’re about; they also model the kinds of behavior you want to encourage. (Location 1847)
  • Identify three or four key areas, at most, where you will seek to achieve rapid improvement. Use the early wins evaluation tool in table 5-2 to gauge the potential. (Location 1856)
  • To set the stage for securing early wins, make sure your learning agenda specifically addresses how you will identify promising opportunities for improvement. (Location 1886)
  • Then translate your goals into specific projects to secure early wins, using the following guidelines: (Location 1887)
  • Keep your long-term goals in mind. Your actions should, to the greatest extent possible, serve your agreed-to business goals and supporting objectives for behavior change. (Location 1888)
  • Identify a few promising focal points. Focal points are areas or processes (such as the customer service processes for Elena) in which improvement can dramatically strengthen the organization’s overall operational or financial performance. (Location 1890)
  • Elevate change agents. Identify the people in your new unit, at all levels, who have the insight, drive, and incentives to advance your agenda. Promote them or appoint them to lead key projects, as Elena did. (Location 1895)
  • Leverage the early-win projects to introduce new behaviors. Your early-win projects should serve as models of how you want your organization, unit, or group to function in the future. (Location 1897)
  • FOGLAMP is an acronym for focus, oversight, goals, leadership, abilities, means, and process. This tool can help you cut through the haze and plan your critical projects. Complete the table for each early-win project you set up. (Location 1903)
  • Focus: What is the focus for this project? For example, what goal or early win do you want to achieve? Oversight: How will you oversee this project? Who else should participate in oversight to help you get buy-in for implementing results? Goals: What are the goals and the intermediate milestones, and time frames for achieving them? Leadership: Who will lead the project? What training, if any, do they need in order to be successful? Abilities: What mix of skills and representation needs to be included? Who needs to be included because of their skills? Because they represent key constituencies? Means: What additional resources, such as facilitation, does the team need to be successful? Process: Are there change models or structured processes you want the team to use? If so, how will they become familiar with the approach? (Location 1907)

Leading Change

  • Once you’ve identified the most important problems or issues you need to address, the next step is to decide whether to engage in planned change or collective learning.5 (Location 1926)
  • Awareness. A critical mass of people is aware of the need for change. (Location 1929)
  • Diagnosis. You know what needs to be changed and why. (Location 1930)
  • Vision. You have a compelling vision and a solid strategy. (Location 1931)
  • If any of these five conditions is not met, however, the pure planning approach to change can get you into trouble. If you’re in a realignment, for example, and people are (Location 1935)
  • You may therefore need to build awareness of the need for change. (Location 1937)
  • Rather than mount a frontal assault on the organization’s defenses, you should engage in something akin to guerrilla warfare, slowly chipping away at people’s resistance and raising their awareness of the need for change. (Location 1941)
  • The key, then, is to figure out which parts of the change process can be best addressed through planning, and which are better dealt with through collective learning. (Location 1946)
  • Another reason for predictable surprises is that different parts of the organization have different pieces of the puzzle, but no one puts them together. Every organization has its information silos. If you don’t put processes in place to make sure critical information is surfaced and integrated, then you’re putting yourself at risk of being predictably surprised. (Location 1981)
  • Internal capabilities. Are there potential problems with your unit’s processes, skills, and capabilities that could precipitate a crisis? (Location 1990)

CHAPTER 6 Achieve Alignment

  • Hannah knew that the people issues couldn’t be dealt with until the structure was put right. So she kept coming back to her boss. She did an in-depth diagnosis and brought to his attention instances in which incentive misalignments had unnecessarily stoked conflict. (Location 2016)
  • The focus of marketing and sales was returned to customer segments, leaving operations and R&D organized by product line, and a shared-services organization was created to provide finance, HR, IT, and supply chain support. (Location 2020)
  • The higher you climb in organizations, the more you take on the role of organizational architect, creating and aligning the key elements of the organizational system: the strategic direction, structure, core processes, and skill bases that provide the foundation for superior performance. (Location 2023)
  • In the first few months you can’t hope to do much more than conduct a solid diagnosis and perhaps get started on the most pressing alignment issues. But it’s important to get a handle on what needs to be done so that you can focus some of your early-win projects appropriately and lay the foundation for a subsequent, deeper wave of change. (Location 2028)
  • Even if, like Hannah, you lack the authority to unilaterally alter the architecture of your new organization, you should focus on assessing organizational alignment. Look at how your piece of the puzzle fits (or doesn’t fit) into the bigger picture. (Location 2030)
  • a thorough understanding of organizational systems can help you build credibility with people higher in the organization—and (Location 2033)

Avoiding Common Traps

  • Making changes for change’s sake. (Location 2037)
  • Often, leaders feel self-imposed pressure to put their stamp on the organization and seek to make changes before they really understand the business; it’s ready, shoot, aim. Once again, the action imperative creates a sure recipe for disaster. (Location 2039)
  • Not adjusting for the STARS situation. (Location 2041)
  • There is no one best way to lead change. (Location 2041)
  • So it’s essential not to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to change but rather to understand the best ways to proceed in the various STARS situations. (Location 2043)
  • Trying to restructure your way out of deeper problems. (Location 2045)
  • Overhauling your organization’s structure when the real issues lie in the processes, skill bases, and culture can amount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. (Location 2045)
  • Creating structures that are too complex. (Location 2048)
  • Strive, where possible, for clear lines of accountability. Simplify the structure to the greatest degree possible without compromising core goals. (Location 2051)
  • Overestimating your organization’s capacity to absorb change. (Location 2052)
  • Move quickly if you need to—for example, in a turnaround. But proceed incrementally if the STARS situation permits—for (Location 2054)

Designing Organizational Architecture

  • The “systems” part highlights the fact that organizational architectures consist of distinct, interacting elements: strategic direction, structure, core processes, and skill bases. (Location 2070)
  • The implication is that you can work on individual elements—for example, change the strategy, alter the structure, streamline a process, or hire people with a different skill set—but you shouldn’t do so without thinking through the impact on the other elements. Specifically all four elements of organizational architecture need be aligned to work together.1 (Location 2071)
  • Strategic direction. The organization’s mission, vision, and strategy Structure. How people are organized in units and how their work is coordinated, measured, and incentivized Core processes. The systems used to add value through the processing of information and materials Skill bases. The capabilities of key groups of people in the organization (Location 2075)
Diagnosing Misalignments
  • Misalignments between strategic direction and core processes. (Location 2088)
  • Imagine that you lead a marketing group whose mission is to focus on meeting the needs of a new customer segment. If your team has not established an effective way to compile and analyze information about those customers, your group’s systems fail to support the direction. There is a mismatch between strategic direction and core processes. (Location 2088)
  • Misalignments between structure and processes. (Location 2091)
  • Misalignments between structure and skills. (Location 2095)
Getting Started
  • Aligning an organization is like preparing for a long sailing trip. First, you need to be clear on whether your destination (the mission and goals) and your route (the strategy) are the right ones. Then you can figure out which boat you need (the structure), how to outfit it (the processes), and which mix of crew members is best (the skill bases). Throughout the journey, you keep an eye out for reefs that are not on the charts. (Location 2099)
  • Begin with strategic direction. Take a hard look at how your unit is positioned with respect to the larger organization’s goals and your agreed-to priorities. (Location 2105)
  • Look at supporting structure, processes, and skills. Look at whether your group’s existing structure, processes, and skill bases support the strategic direction—either the existing one (if you decide not to change it) or the one you envision. (Location 2107)
  • Decide how and when you will introduce the new strategic direction. Armed with a deeper understanding of your group’s current capabilities, chart a path for shifting direction (if such a shift is necessary). (Location 2111)
  • Think through the correct sequencing. Different situations demand different approaches to bringing organizations into alignment. (Location 2114)

Defining Strategic Direction

  • Strategic direction encompasses mission, vision, and strategy. Mission is about what will be achieved, vision is about why people should feel motivated to perform at a high level, and strategy is about how resources should be allocated and decisions made to accomplish the mission. (Location 2122)
  • Mission is about what will be achieved, vision is about why people should feel motivated to perform at a high level, and strategy is about how resources should be allocated and decisions made to accomplish the mission. (Location 2123)
  • Focus on customers, capital, capabilities, and commitments: (Location 2126)
  • Capabilities. What are we good at and not good at? What existing organizational capabilities (for example, a strong new-product development organization) can we leverage? Which do we need to build up? Which do we need to create or acquire? (Location 2131)
  • Commitments. What critical decisions do we need to make about resource commitments? (Location 2133)
  • SWOT is arguably the most useful (and certainly the most misunderstood) framework for conducting strategic analysis. (Location 2160)
  • Unfortunately, the developers named their method SWOT, with the implication that the analysis should be carried out in that order—first, internal strengths and weaknesses, and then external opportunities and threats. (Location 2165)
  • The correct approach is to start with the environment and then analyze the organization. The first step is to assess the organization’s external environment, looking for emerging threats and potential opportunities. Naturally this assessment must be conducted by people who are grounded in the reality of the organization and knowledgeable about its environment. (Location 2170)

Shaping Your Group’s Structure

  • What is structure exactly? Most simply, your group’s structure is the way it organizes people and technology to support the mission, vision, and strategy. (Location 2202)
  • Effective leaders seek to align the interests of individual decision makers with the interests of the group as a whole. This is why placing more emphasis on group incentives is effective in some organizations: they focus everyone’s attention on the ability to work together. (Location 2232)
  • Problems arise when measurement and compensation schemes fail to reward employees for either their individual or their collective efforts. (Location 2234)

Aligning Core Processes

  • Your first challenge is to identify those processes and then to decide which of them are most important to your strategy. (Location 2258)
  • To evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of each core process, you should examine four aspects: Productivity. Does the process efficiently transform knowledge, materials, and labor into value? Timeliness. Does the process deliver the desired value in a timely manner? Reliability. Is the process sufficiently reliable, or does it break down too often? Quality. Does the process deliver value in a way that consistently meets required quality standards? (Location 2282)

Developing Your Group’s Skill Bases

  • Do your direct reports have the skills and knowledge they need to perform your group’s core processes superbly—and thus to support the strategy you have identified? If not, the entire architecture of your group could be compromised. A skill base comprises these four types of knowledge: Individual expertise. Gained through training, education, and experience Relational knowledge. An understanding of how to work together to integrate individual knowledge to achieve specified goals Embedded knowledge. The core technologies on which your group’s performance depends, such as customer databases or R&D technologies Metaknowledge. The awareness of where to go to get critical information—for example, through external affiliations such as research institutions and technology partners (Location 2307)
  • To identify skill and knowledge gaps, first revisit your mission and strategy and the core processes you identified. Ask yourself what mix of the four types of knowledge is needed to support your group’s core processes. Treat this as a visioning exercise in which you imagine the ideal knowledge mix. Then assess your group’s existing skills, knowledge, and technologies. What gaps do you see? Which of them can be repaired quickly, and which will take more time? (Location 2318)

Changing Architecture to Change Culture

  • Keep in mind that culture is not something you can change directly. It is powerfully influenced by the four elements of organizational architecture, as well as by leadership behaviors. The (Location 2326)

CHAPTER 7 Build Your Team

Avoiding Common Traps

  • Criticizing the previous leadership. There is nothing to be gained by criticizing the people who led the organization before you arrived. This (Location 2369)
  • concentrate on assessing current behavior and results and on making the changes necessary to support improved performance. (Location 2372)
  • Not balancing stability and change. Building a team you’ve inherited is like repairing a leaky ship in mid-ocean. You will not reach your destination if you ignore the necessary repairs, but you do not want to try to change too much too fast and sink the ship. (Location 2381)
  • avoid explicit team-building activities until the team you want is largely in place. (Location 2395)
  • Assessing Your Team (Location 2409)
  • be conscious of the criteria you will explicitly or implicitly use to evaluate people who report to you. Consider these six criteria: (Location 2416)
  • Competence. (Location 2418)
  • Judgment. (Location 2419)
  • Energy. (Location 2420)
  • Focus. (Location 2421)
  • Relationships. (Location 2422)
  • Trust. (Location 2424)
  • (For more on the transition to enterprise leadership and its challenges, see Michael Watkins, “How Managers Become Leaders,” Harvard Business Review, June 2012.) (Location 2454)
  • A good template includes function-specific key performance indicators (KPIs), what the KPIs should and should not show, key questions to ask, and warning signs. To develop each template, talk to experienced enterprise leaders about what they look for in these functions. (Location 2457)
  • One way to assess judgment is to work with a person for an extended time and observe whether he is able to (1) make sound predictions and (2) develop good strategies for avoiding problems. (Location 2504)
  • Both abilities draw on an individual’s mental models, or ways of identifying the essential features and dynamics of emerging situations and translating those insights into effective action. This is what expert judgment is all about. (Location 2505)
  • there are ways you can accelerate this process. (Location 2508)
  • Ask individuals about a topic they’re passionate about outside work. It could be politics or cooking or baseball; it doesn’t matter. Challenge them to make predictions: “Who do you think is going to do better in the debate?” “What does it take to bake a perfect soufflé?” “Which team will win the game tonight?” Press them to commit themselves; unwillingness to go out on a limb is a warning sign in itself. (Location 2509)

Evolving Your Team

  • By the end of roughly the first 30 days, you should be able to provisionally assign people to one of the following categories: (Location 2529)
  • Keep in place. The person is performing well in her current job. (Location 2531)
  • Often, a poor performer will decide to move on of her own accord in response to a clear message from you. (Location 2546)
  • Alternatively, you can work with human resources to shift the person to a more suitable position: (Location 2546)
  • Shift her role. Move her to a position on the team that better suits her skills. This is unlikely to be a permanent solution for a problem performer, but it can help you work through the short-term problem of keeping the organization running while you look for the right person to fill the slot. (Location 2548)
  • Move her elsewhere in the organization. Help the person find a suitable position in the larger organization. (Location 2553)
  • To keep your team functioning while you build the best possible long-term configuration, you may need to keep an underperformer on the job while searching for a replacement. (Location 2557)
  • During every phase of the team-evolution process, take pains to treat everyone with respect. (Location 2562)

Aligning Your Team

  • To achieve your agreed-to priorities and secure early wins, you need to define how each team member can best support those key goals. (Location 2567)
  • This process calls for breaking down large goals into their components and working with your team to assign responsibility for each element. (Location 2568)
  • a blend of push and pull tools works best to align and motivate a team. (Location 2570)
  • Push tools, such as goals, performance measurement systems, and incentives, motivate people through authority, loyalty, fear, and expectation of reward for productive work. (Location 2571)
  • Pull tools, such as a compelling vision, inspire people by invoking a positive and exciting image of the future. (Location 2572)
  • On the push side, establishing—and sticking to—clear and explicit performance metrics is the best way to encourage accountability. (Location 2582)
  • Usually, you will want to create incentives for both individual excellence (when your direct reports undertake independent tasks) and for team excellence (when they undertake interdependent tasks). (Location 2595)

The Incentive Equation

  • Total reward = nonmonetary reward + monetary reward (Location 2601)
  • As you work to create and communicate a shared vision, keep the following principles in mind: Use consultation to gain commitment. Be clear on which elements of your vision are nonnegotiable, but beyond these, be flexible enough to consider the ideas of others and allow them to have input and to influence the shared vision. In that way, they share ownership. Off-site meetings are often a powerful way to create and generate commitment to a shared vision, as long as you take care to ensure they are well designed. (See box, “Off-Site Planning Checklist.”) (Location 2645)
  • Stories and metaphors are potent ways to communicate the essence of a vision. (Location 2650)

Leading Your Team

  • Teams vary strikingly in how they handle meetings, make decisions, resolve conflicts, and divide responsibilities and tasks. You will probably want to introduce new ways of doing things, but take care not to plunge into this task precipitously. First, familiarize yourself thoroughly with how your team worked before your arrival and how effective its processes were. In that way, you can preserve what worked well and change what did not. (Location 2679)
  • How can you quickly get a handle on your team’s existing processes? (Location 2684)
  • Team meetings. How often did your team meet? Who participated? Who set the agendas for meetings? (Location 2688)
  • Leadership style. What leadership style did your predecessor prefer? That is, how did he prefer to learn, communicate, motivate, and handle decisions? (Location 2690)
  • Setting up clear and effective processes will help your team coalesce and secure some early wins as a group. (Location 2697)
  • One common team dysfunction—and a great opportunity to send a message that change is coming—concerns who participates in core team meetings. (Location 2699)
  • Decision making is another fertile area for potential improvement. Few leaders do a great job of leading team decision making. (Location 2705)
  • In part, this is because different types of decisions call for different decision-making processes, but most team leaders stick with one approach. (Location 2706)
  • The key is to have a framework for understanding and communicating why different decisions will be approached in different ways. (Location 2709)
  • the decision-making processes that most leaders use: consult-and-decide and build consensus. (Location 2717)
  • When a leader solicits information and advice from direct reports—individually, as a group, or both—but reserves the right to make the final call, she is using a consult-and-decide approach. (Location 2717)
  • In the build-consensus process, the leader both seeks information and analysis and seeks buy-in from the group for any decision. The goal is not full consensus but sufficient consensus. (Location 2720)
  • When should you choose one process over the other? The answer is emphatically not “If I am under time pressure, I will use consult-and-decide.” Why? (Location 2723)
  • the decision requires energetic support for implementation from people whose performance you cannot adequately observe and control, then you usually are better off using a build-consensus process. (Location 2731)
  • If your team members are inexperienced, then you usually are better off relying more on consult-and-decide until you’ve taken the measure of the team and developed their capabilities. (Location 2733)
  • Even if people do not agree with the final decision, they often will support it if they feel (1) that their views and interests have been heard and taken seriously and (2) that you have given them a plausible rationale for why you made the call you did. (Location 2748)
  • You will know you’ve been successful in building your team when you reach the break-even point—when the energy the team creates is greater than the energy you need to put into it. (Location 2777)

CHAPTER 8 Create Alliances

  • You may have little or no relationship capital at the outset, especially if you’re onboarding into a new organization. So you will need to invest energy in building new networks. Start early. Discipline yourself to invest in building up “relationship bank accounts” with people you anticipate needing to work with later. Think hard about whether there are people you haven’t met who are likely to be critical to your success. (Location 2817)

Defining Your Influence Objectives

Understanding the Influence Landscape

  • Next, for each of your early-win initiatives, ask yourself which decision makers are essential for things to move forward. Together, these people are your winning alliances—the set of people who collectively have the power to support your agenda. (Location 2858)
  • (In the spirit of the golden rule of transitions, consider proactively doing the same thing when you have new direct reports coming on board: create priority relationship lists for them, and help them make contact.) (Location 2879)
  • As you learn more, try to identify the sources of power that give particular people influence in the organization. Here are examples: Expertise Control of information Connections to others Access to resources, such as budgets and rewards Personal loyalty (Location 2883)
  • To identify your potential supporters, look for the following: People who share your vision for the future. If you see a need for change, look for others who have pushed for similar changes in the past. (Location 2906)
  • But be careful not to assume that people are adversaries. When you meet resistance, probe for the reasons behind it before labeling people as implacably opposed. (Location 2924)
  • You also need to assess situational pressures: the driving and restraining forces acting on them because of the situation they’re in. Driving forces push people in the direction you want them to go, and restraining forces are situational reasons they would say no. (Location 2953)
  • There is a lot of good social psychology research showing that we overestimate the impact of personality and underestimate the impact of situational pressures in reaching conclusions about the reasons people act the way they do.4 (Location 2955)

Crafting Influence Strategies

  • Armed with deeper insight into the people you need to influence, you can think about how to apply classic influence techniques such as consultation, framing, choice-shaping, social influence, incrementalism, sequencing, and action-forcing events. (Location 2985)
  • Consultation promotes buy-in, and good consultation means engaging in active listening. You pose questions and encourage people to voice their real concerns, and then you summarize and feed back what you’ve heard. (Location 2987)
  • The power of active listening as a persuasive technique is vastly underrated. It can not only promote acceptance of difficult decisions but also channel people’s thinking and frame choices. Because the questions leaders ask and the ways they summarize responses have a powerful effect on people’s perceptions, active listening and framing are a potent persuasive technique. (Location 2989)
  • Framing means carefully crafting your persuasive arguments on a person-by-person basis. (Location 2992)
  • The art of effective communication is to repeat and elaborate core themes without sounding like a parrot. (Location 3007)
  • Likewise, research suggests that people prefer to operate in these ways: (Location 3033)
  • Remain consistent with their prior commitments and decisions. Failure to honor commitments tends to incur social sanctions, and inconsistency is a signal of unreliability. (Location 3036)
  • Repay obligations. Reciprocity is a strong social norm, and people are vulnerable to appeals for support that invoke past favors they’ve received. (Location 3039)
  • The implication is that you need to avoid, to the extent possible, asking others to make choices that are inconsistent with their values and prior commitments, decrease their status, threaten their reputations, or risk evoking the disapproval of respected others. (Location 3042)
  • Incrementalism refers to the notion that people can move in desired directions step-by-step when they wouldn’t go in a single leap. (Location 3045)
  • Getting people involved in shared diagnosis of organizational problems is a form of incrementalism: involvement in the diagnosis makes it difficult for people to deny the need for tough decisions. (Location 3050)
  • delay by a single individual can have a cascade effect, giving others an excuse not to proceed. You must therefore eliminate inaction as an option. (Location 3068)
  • You do this by setting up action-forcing events—events that induce people to make commitments or take actions. Meetings, review sessions, teleconferences, and deadlines can all help create and sustain momentum: regular meetings to review progress, and tough questioning of those who fail to reach agreed-to goals, increase the psychological pressure to follow through. (Location 3070)

CHAPTER 9 Manage Yourself

  • Guidelines for Structured Reflection How Do You Feel So Far? On a scale of high to low, do you feel: Excited? If not, why not? What can you do about it? Confident? If not, why not? What can you do about it? (Location 3118)
  • It’s common for leaders to go into a valley three to six months after taking a new role. (Location 3133)
  • If you cannot establish boundaries for yourself, you cannot expect others to do it for you. (Location 3141)
  • Or perhaps you decide that your way of accomplishing a particular goal is the only way. As a result, your rigidity disempowers people who have equally valid ideas about how to achieve the same goal. (Location 3145)
  • Isolation. To be effective, you must be connected to the people who make action happen and to the subterranean flow of information. (Location 3147)
  • It happens because you don’t take the time to make the right connections, perhaps by relying overmuch on a few people or on official information. (Location 3148)
  • Not all stress is bad. In fact, there is a well-documented relationship between stress and performance known as the Yerkes-Dodson curve, illustrated in figure 9-1.2 (Location 3157)
  • Understanding the Three Pillars of Self-Management (Location 3168)
  • If (Location 3169)
  • The first pillar is adoption of the success strategies presented in the previous eight chapters. The second pillar is creation and enforcement of some personal disciplines. The third pillar is formation of support systems, at work and at home, that help you maintain your balance. (Location 3170)
  • Plan to Plan. Do you devote time daily and weekly to a plan-work-evaluate cycle? If not, or if you do so irregularly, you need to be more disciplined about planning. (Location 3204)
  • At the end of each day, spend ten minutes evaluating how well you met your goals and then planning for the next day. Do the same thing at the end of each week. Get into the habit of doing this. Even if you fall behind, you will be more in control. (Location 3205)
  • Focus on the Important. Do you devote time each day to the most important work that needs to be done? (Location 3207)
  • Judiciously Defer Commitment. Do you make commitments on the spur of the moment and later regret them? Do you blithely agree to do things in the seemingly remote future, only to kick yourself when the day arrives and your schedule is full? If you do, you must learn to defer commitment. Whenever anybody asks you to do something, say, “Sounds interesting. Let me think about it and get back to you.” (Location 3212)
  • Work hard at recognizing when you’re at the point of diminishing returns, and take a break of whatever sort refreshes you. (Location 3231)
  • The third pillar of self-management is solidifying your personal support systems. This means asserting control in your local environment, stabilizing the home front, and building a solid advice-and-counsel network. (Location 3233)
  • As a starting point, you need to cultivate three types of advisers: technical advisers, cultural interpreters, and political counselors (see table 9-2 (Location 3267)
  • Now take a step back. Will your existing network provide the support you need in your new role? Don’t assume that people who have been helpful in the past will continue to be helpful in your new situation. You will encounter different problems, and former advisers may not be able to help you in your new role. (Location 3289)
  • Internal advisers who are trustworthy, whose personal agendas don’t conflict with yours, and who offer straight and accurate advice. (Location 3307)
  • Representatives of key constituencies who can help you understand their perspectives. You do not want to restrict yourself to one or two points of view. (Location 3308)
  • You will have to fight to manage yourself every single day. (Location 3311)

CHAPTER 10 Accelerate Everyone

  • Every failed transition—whether outright derailment or less dramatic underperformance—exacts costs from the organization as well. (Location 3327)
  • they should manage leadership-transition acceleration as they would any critical business process—by putting in place the right framework, tools, and systems to accelerate everyone. (Location 3360)
  • how should companies approach the design of acceleration systems? Following are ten design principles—guidelines you can apply to build the right solution for your business. (Location 3361)

Identify the Critical Transitions

Identify Set-Up-to-Fail Dynamics

  • However, there also are systematic mistakes that organizations make when putting leaders into new roles that need to be addressed in the design of acceleration systems.3 (Location 3405)

Diagnose Existing Transition Support

  • Reasons for transition failures (Location 3419)
  • Leaders are not given enough information, or conflicting information, about what they need to do to be successful. (Location 3422)
  • Leaders are selected without enough attention being given to whether they’re best suited for the challenges of the situation—for example, putting a person who is great at turnarounds in a sustaining-success or realignment situation. (Location 3424)
  • Leaders are not provided with adequate support during transitions, perhaps because the culture misguidedly reinforces a sink-or-swim approach to leadership development. (Location 3427)
  • People are promoted only because they’re good at their current jobs. (Location 3431)
  • Leaders are required to do their old jobs and their new ones. (Location 3433)
  • Newly hired leaders are expected to figure out the culture on their own and make unnecessary early mistakes. (Location 3437)

Adopt a Common Core Model

Deliver Support Just in Time

  • Acceleration systems should therefore be designed to help new leaders get the maximum possible benefit from whatever preentry time is available to them. This means supporting new leaders’ learning processes by providing them with key documents and tools that help them plan their early diagnostic activities, as well as helping them connect with key stakeholders as early as possible. (Location 3476)

Use Structured Processes

  • transition processes also need to have action-forcing events. (Location 3484)
  • These include preset coaching meetings at each stage of the process or scheduled cohort events that take leaders out of the fray to engage in reflection and create or refine their 90-day plans. (Location 3485)

Match Support to Transition Type

Match Transition Support to Leader Level

Clarify Roles and Align Incentives

Integrate with Other Talent Management Systems