The First 90 Days

by Michael D. Watkins

Thoughts: transitioning is becoming the norm for leaders. Personally I have experienced numerous transitions, from where I gained confidence and invaluable unstructured experience in handling abrupt changes. However, the dots are scattered in my knowledge graph and it is still challenging for me to articulate the methodology how I would follow for my next transition.

After reading this book, I feel empowered and dots connected. This book is very insightful and practical. Introduction chapter outlines the content and each chapter comes in details with checklists. This is a book that you stock on your desk whenever you are in a transition period and need guidance.

It is not possible to integrate all the learnings into daily operations right away, but this would unconsciously influence daily decision making gradually. Reading books on management is like reading the ones about playing Hold’em. There is no way to apply all the practices from the book on day 1, but the ideas would infiltrate into your thought process on making decisions. With more and more conscious practice, it becomes the habit and norm.

Introduction

Building your career transition competence.

In a study of 580 leaders, respondents reported an average of 18.2 years of professional work experience. The typical leader had been promoted 4.1 times, moved between business functions 1.8 times, joined a new company 3.5 times, moved between business units in the same company 1.9 times and moved geographically 2.2 times. This totals 13.5 major transitions per leader, or one every 1.3 year.

Reaching the Break-Even Point

Your goal in every transition is to get as rapidly as possible to the break-even point, which you have contributed as much value to your new organization as your have consumed from it.

When 200+ CEOs 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 break-even point, the average of their responses was 6.2 months.

Avoiding Transition Gaps

Common traps:

• Stick with what you know. New role requires to stop doing some things and to embrace new competencies.
• Falling pretty to the “action imperative”. You feel as if you need to take action, and you try too hard, too early to put your own stamp on the organization. You are too busy to learn and you make bad decisions and catalyze resistance to your initiatives.
• Setting unrealistic expectations. You don’t negotiate your mandate or establish clear, achievable objectives. You may perform well but still fail to meet the expectations of your boss and other key stakeholders.
• Attempting to do too much. You rush off in all directions, launching multiple initiatives in the hope that some will pay off. People become confused, and no critical mass of resources gets focused on key initiatives.
• Coming in with “the” answer. You come in with your mind made up, or you reach conclusions too quickly about “the” problems and “the” solutions.
• Engaging in the wrong type of learning. You spent 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 cultural insight, relationships, and information conduits you need if you’re to understand what is really going on.
• Neglecting horizontal relationships. You spent too much time focused on vertical relationships — up to the boss and down to direct reports — and not enough on peers and other stakeholders.

Creating Momentum

The objective is not to avoid vicious cycles but to create virtuous cycles. Leadership ultimately is about influences and leverage.

Understanding the Fundamental Principles

• Prepare yourself. Perhaps the biggest pitfall you face is assuming that what has made you successful to this point will continue to do so. The danger of sticking with what you know, working extremely hard at doing it, and failing miserably are very real.
• Accelerate your learning. You need to climb the learning curve as fast as you can in your new organization. You must be systematic and focused about deciding what you need to learn and how you will learn it most efficiently.
• 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. Early wins build your credibility and create momentum.
• Negotiable success. Carefully planning for a series of critical conversations about the situation, expectations, working cycles, resources, and your personal development. Crucially, it means developing and gaining consensus on your 90 day plan.
• Achieve alignment. The higher you rise in an org, 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 skills ashes necessary to realize your strategic intent.
• Build your team. You silliness 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 need 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. You must work hard to maintain your equilibrium and preserve your ability to make good judgments.
• Accelerate everyone. Help all those in your org accelerate their own transitions.

Mapping out your first 90 days

No matter how much preparation time you get, start planning what you hope to accomplish by specific milestones.

Chapter 1 Prepare Yourself

Core Promotion Challenges

Cultural Adaption

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.

Identifying Cultural Norms

• Influence. How do people get support for critical initiatives? Is it more important to have the support of a patron within the senior team, or affirmation from your peers and direct reports that your idea is a good one?
• Meetings. Are meetings filled with dialogue on hard issues, or are they simply forums for publicly ratifying agreements that have been reached in private.
• Conflict. Can people talk about difficult issues openly without fear of retribution? Or do they avoid conflict- or, even worse, push it to lower levels, where is can wreak havoc?
• 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.
• 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?

Chapter 2 Accelerate Your Learning

The first task in making a successful transition is to accelerate your learning. Effective learning gives you the foundational insights you need as you build your plan for the next 90 days.

Planning to learn means figuring out in advance what the important questions are and how you can best answer them.

A baseline question you should always ask is: “How did we get to this point?”

Effective learning calls for figuring out what you need to learn so that you can focus your efforts.

Questions About the Past

Performance

• How has this organization performed in the past? How do people in this organization think it has performed.
• How were goals set and were they in sufficiently or overly ambitious?
• Were internal or external benchmark used?
• What measures were employed? What behaviors did they encourage or discourage?
• What happened if goals were not met?

Root Cause

• If performance has been good, why has that been the case?
• 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? Culture? Politics?

History of change

• What efforts have been made to change the organization? What happened?
• Who has been instrumental in shaping this organization?

Questions About the Present

Vision and Strategy

• What is the stated vision and strategy?
• Is the organization really pursuing that strategy? If not, why not? If so, will the strategy take the organization where it needs to go?

People

• Who is capable, who is not?
• Who is trustworthy, who is not?
• Who has influence, why?

Processes

• What are the key processes?
• Are they performing acceptably in quality, reliability and timeliness? If not, why not?

Landing Mines

• What lurking surprises could detonate and push you off track?
• What potentially damaging cultural or political missteps must you avoid?

Early Wins

• In what area can you achieve some early wins?

Questions About the Future

Challenges and Opportunities

• In what areas is the organization most likely to face stiff challenges in the coming year? What can be done now to prepare them?
• What are the most promising unexploited opportunities? What would need to happen to realize their potential?

Barriers and Resources

• What are the most formidable barriers to making needed changes? Technical? Cultural? Political?
• Are there islands of excellence or other high quality resources that you can leverage?
• What new capabilities need developers or acquired?

Culture

• Which elements of culture should preserved?
• Which elements need to change?

Identify the Best Sources of Insight

The most valuable external sources of information are likely to be the following:

• Customers. How do customers — external or internal — perceive your organization? How do you best customers assess your products or services? How about your customer service? How do they rank your company against your competitions?
• Etc

Adopting Structured Learning Methods

When you are diagnosing a new organization, start by meeting with your direct reports one-on-one. Ask them essentially the same five questions

• What are the biggest challenges the organization is facing?
• Why is the organization facing 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?

Chapter 2 Match Strategy to Situation

Using the STARS Model

STARTS are the five common business situations leaders may find themselves moving into: start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment and sustaining success. The eventual goal is the same: a successful and growing business.

In a startup, you are charged with assembling the capabilities (people, funding and technology) to get a new business, product, project or relationship off the ground.

Challenges: building the strategy, structures, and systems from scratch without a clear framework or boundaries. Recruiting and welding together a high performing team. Making do with limited resources.

Opportunities: you can do things right from the beginning. People are energized by the possibilities. There are no rigid preconceptions.

Rewarding Success

Results show: the most challenging situation was assessed to be realignment, followed by sustaining success and turnaround. Startup and accelerated growth were assessed as being significantly easier.

Chapter 4 Negotiate Success

Negotiating success means proactively engaging with your new boss to shape the game so that you have a fighting chance of achieve it desired goals.

Focusing on the Fundamentals

• Don’t stay away.
• Don’t surprise your boss.
• Don’t approach your boss only with problems.
• Don’t’ run down your checklist.
• Don’t expect your boss to change.

Fundamental Dos

• Clarify expectations early and often
• Take 100 percent responsibility for making the relationship work
• Negotiate time lines for diagnosis and action planning
• Aim for early wins in areas important to the boss
• Pursue good marks from those who’ve opinions your boss respects.

Planning for Five Conversations

• The situation diagnosis conversation.
• The expectations conversation.
• The resource conversation.
• The style conversation.
• The personal development conversation.

Planning for Five Conversations with Your team as well!

Chapter 5 Secure Early Wins

Making Waves

The goal of the first wave of change is to secure early wins.

The second wave of change typically addresses more fundamental issues of strategy, structure, systems, and skills to reshape the organization; deeper gains in organizational performance are achieved. But you will not get there if you don’t secure early wins in the first wave.

Starting with the Goal

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.

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 goal. So make sure your plans (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.

Problematic Behavior Patterns

Lack of

Focus

• The group can’t clearly define its priorities, or it has too many priorities.
• Resources are spread too thin, leading to frequent crises and firefighting. People are rewarded for their ability to put out fires, not for devising enduring solutions

Discipline

• People exhibit great variation in their levels of performance.
• Employees don’t understand the negative consequences of inconsistency
• People make excuse when they fail to meet commitments.

Innovation

• The group uses internal benchmarks to measure performance.
• Improvements in products and processes unfold slowly and incrementally.
• Employees are rewarded for maintaining stable performance, not for pushing the boundaries.

Teamwork

• Team members compete with one another and protect turf rather than work together to achieve collective goals.

Sense of Urgency

• Team members ignore the needs of external and internal customers.
• Complacency reigns, revealed in beliefs such was “we’re the best and always have been” and “it doesn’t matter if we respond immediately; it won’t make any difference”

Adopting Basic Principles

• Focus on a few promising opportunities.
• Get wins that matter to your boss.
• Get wins in the right way.
• Take your STARS portfolio into account.
• Adjust for the culture.

Identify Your Early Wins

Understand your reputation

Leading Former Peers

• Accept the fact that relationships must change.
• Focus early on rites of passage.
• Re-enlist your (good) former peers.
• Establish your authority deftly.
• Focus on what’s good for the business.

Build Credibility

• Demanding but able to be satisfied.
• Accessible but not too familiar. It means being approachable, but in a way that preserves your authority.
• Decisive but judicious.
• Focused but flexible.
• Active without causing commotion.
• Willing to make tough calls but humane.

Launch Early Win Projects

• Keep your long-term goals in mind.
• Identify a few promising focal points.
• Launch early-win projects.
• Elevate change agents.
• Leverage the early-win projects to introduce new behaviors.

Leading Change

Planning Versus Learning

• Awareness. A critical mass of people is aware of the need for change.
• Diagnosis. You know what needs to be changed and why.
• Vision. You have a compelling vision and a solid strategy.
• Plan. You have the expertise to put together a detailed plan.
• Support. You have sufficiently powerful alliances to support implementation.

Get Started on Behavior Change

The key is to identify both the good and the bad elements of the existing culture. Elevate and praise the good elements even as you seek to change the bad ones.

Match Strategy to Situation

Avoiding Predictable Surprises

Potential areas:

• The external environment
• Customers, markets, competitors, and strategy.
• Internal capabilities.
• Organizational politics.

Chapter 6 Achieve Alignment

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 foundations for superior performance.

Avoiding Common Traps

• Making changes for change’s sake.
• Not adjusting for the STARS situation.
• Trying to restructure your way out of deeper problems. Resist doing so until you understand whether restructuring will address the root cause of the problems.
• Creating structures that are too complex. Simplify the structure to the freest degrees possible without compromising core goals.
• Overestimating your organization’s capacity to absorb change. Move quickly if you need to, but proceed incrementally if the STARS situation permits.

Design Organizational Architecture

All four elements of organizational architecture need be aligned to work together.

• 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 system used to add value through the processing of information and materials.
• Skill bases. The capabilities of key groups of people in the organization.

Diagnosing Misalignments

Common types of misalignments include the following:

• Misalignments between strategic direction and skill bases.
• Misalignments between strategic direction and core processes.

Getting Started

Here’s how:

• Begin with strategic direction. Understand your unit’s position with respect to the larger organization’s goals and your agreed-to priorities.
• Looking at supporting structure, processes, and skills.
• Decide how and when you will introduce the new strategic direction.
• Think through the correct sequencing. Different situations demand different approaches to brining organizations into alignment. In a turnaround, the right approach often is to alter the strategy (which typically is not adequate), then to bring the structure into alignment with it, then focus on supporting processes and skills. In a realignment, however, strategic direction and structure often are not the real source of the difficulties. Instead, they frequently lie in the processes and skills bases of the organization, and these are the places to focus on.
• Close the loop.

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.

Some fundamental questions about strategic direction concern:

• Customers. Which set of customers (external/internal)? What is our value proposition ? Which markets are we going to exist? What new rackets are we going to enter, and when?
• Capital. Of the business we will remain in, which will we invest in? Which will we draw cash from?
• Capabilities. What are we good at and not good at? What existing organizational capabilities can we leverage? Which do we need to build up? Which do we need to create or acquire?
• Commitments. What critical decisions do we need to make to make about resource commitments? When? What difficult to reverse past commitments do we have to live with or try to unwind?

Assess Coherence: is there a clear logic to the choices that have been made about customers, products, technologies, plans and resource commitments?

Assess Adequacy: is the defend direction sufficient for that you unit needs to do in the next two or three years?

• Ask probing questions.
• Use a variation on the well-known SWOT method
• Probe the history of how strategic direction got defined.

Shaping Your Group’s Structure

SWOT: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Originally developed by a team at Stanford Research Institute to conduct strategic analysis. However, the order should be T -> O -> W -> S.

Assess Implementation: have the mission, vision, and strategy of your organization been pursued energetically?

Modify Strategic Direction: if you believe that your group is on the wrong path, you need to raise questions to persuade your boss and others to reexamine strategic direction.

Shaping Your Group’s Structure

Structure consists of the following elements:

• Units: how your direct reports are grouped, such as by function, product, or geographical area.
• Reporting relationships and integration mechanisms: how lines of reporting and accountability are set up to coordinate effort, and how work among units is integrated.
• Decision rights and rules: who is empowered to make what kind of decisions? What rules should be applied to align decisions with strategy.
• Performance measurement and incentive systems.

Assess Structure

• Does the grouping of team members help us achieve our mission and implement the strategy? Are the right people in the right places to work toward our core objectives?
• Do reporting relationship help align effort, is it clear who is accountable for what? Is the work of different units integrated effectively?
• Is the allocation of decision rights helping us make the best decisions to support the strategy?
• Are we measuring and rewarding the kinds of achievements that matter most to our strategic aims?

Grapple with the Tradeoffs

• The organization has silos of excellence.
• Employees’ decision-making scope is too narrow or too broad. Centralized decision making process can decide quickly but you may be forgoing the benefit of the wisdom of others who have better information to make certain of those decisions. On the other hand, people are given decision making scope but do not understand the larger implications of their choices, they may make unwise calls.
• Employees have incentives to do the wrong things. Problems arise when measurement and compensation schemes fail to reward employee for their individual or their collective efforts.
• Reporting relationships lead to compartmentalizations or diffusion of accountability. Hierarchical reporting make responsibility and accountability easier but lead to compartmentalizations and poor information sharing.

Align Core Processes

• Make the right trade offs.
• Analyze processes.
• Align processes with structure.
• Improve core processes.

Developing Your Group’s Skill Bases

• Individual expertise. Training, education, 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 depend on.
• Meta knowledge. The awareness of where to go to get critical information (external affiliations).

Identify Gaps and Resources

• Critical gaps between needed and existing skills and knowledge
• Underutilized resources.

Changing Architecture to Change Culture

The implication is that to change the culture, you need to change the architecture as well as reinforce what you’re trying to do with the right leadership. One example is changing the metrics by which you judge success and then aligning employees’ objectives and incentives with those new measures.

Chapter 7 Build Your Team

Avoiding Common Traps

• Criticizing the previous leadership.
• Keeping the existing team too long.
• Not balancing stability and change.
• Not working on organizational alignment and team development in parallel.
• Not holding on to the good people. “When you shake the tree, good people can fall out, too”
• Undertaking team building before the core is in place.
• Making implementation-dependent decisions too early.
• Trying to do it all yourself.

Assessing Your Team

Establish Your Evaluative Criteria

Evaluate people who report to you

• Competence
• Judgement
• Energy
• Focus
• Relationship
• Trust

Assessment of evaluative criteria

Assess Your People

Meet One-on-one with each member of your team as soon as possible. Replace any of them who fail to meet your threshold requirements.

Prepare for each meeting.

Create an interview template.

• What are the strengths and weakness of our existing strategy?
• What are the biggest challenge and opportunities facing us in the short term, in the medium term?
• What resources could we leverage more effectively?
• How could we improve the way the team works together?
• If you were in my position, what would your priorities be?

Look for verbal and nonverbal clues.

• Notice what the individual does not say.
• Does the person volunteer information or you have to extract?
• Does the person take responsibility For problems in his area or make excuses or subtly point fingers at others?
• How consistent are the individual’s facial expression and body language with his words?
• What topics elicit strong emotional responses?
• Outside these 11 meetings, notice how the individual relates to other team members.

Test Their Judgments

Make sure you assess judgement and not only technical competence or basic intelligence, some people of average competence have extraordinary judgment.

One way to assess judgment is to work with a person for an extended time and observe whether he is able to:

• Make sound predictions.
• Develop good strategies for avoiding problems.

One way to test people’s judgement in a domain in which feedback on their predictions will emerge quickly. Experiment with the following approach:

• Ask individual about a topic they are passionate about, politics, cooking or baseball.
• Challenge them to make predictions:
• Who do you think is going to do better in the debate?
• What doe sit take to bake a perfect soufflé?
• Press them to commit themselves and unwillingness to go out on a limb is a warning sign in itself. Then probe why they think their predictions are correct. Does the rationale make sense? Follow up to see what happens if possible.

Assess the Team as a Whole

Use these techniques for spotting problems in the team’s overall dynamics:

• Study the data.
• Systematically ask questions.
• Probe group dynamics.

Evolving Your Team

By end of first 30 days, you should be able to provisionally assign people to one of the following categories:

• Keep in place.
• Keep and develop.
• Move to another position.
• Replace (low priority)
• Replace (high priority)
• Observe for a while.

Consider Alternatives

Letting an employee go can be difficult and time consuming. You have alternatives rather than let a poor performance go. Often a poor performer will decide to move on of her own accord in response to a clear message from you. Alternatively, you can work with HR to shift the person to a more suitable position:

• Shift her role.
• Move her out of the way.
• Move here elsewhere in the organization.

Develop backups

Treat People Respectfully

Aligning Your Team

Push tools, such as goals, performance measure systems, and incentives, motivate people through authority, loyalty, fear and expectation of reward for productive work.

Pull tools, such a compelling vision, inspire people by invoking a positive and exciting image of the future.

Push Tools

• Incentives
• Reporting system
• Planning processes
• Procedures
• Mission statement

Pull Tools

• Shared vision
• Teamwork

Define Goals and Performance Metrics

Establishing and sticking to clear and explicit performance metrics. Avoid ambiguously defined goals, such as “improve sales” or “decrease product development time”. Instead define goals in terms that can be quantified. “Increase sales of product X by 15 to 30 percent over the fourth quarter of this year”.

Align Incentives

What mix of monetary and non monetary reward will you employ?

It is equally important to decide whether to base rewards more on individual or collective performance. It is important o strake the right balance. If group’s success hinges on individual achievements, you don’t need to promote teamwork and should consider an individual incentive system, vice versa. Usually, you will want to create incentives for both individual excellence and for team excellence.

Total Reward = non-monetary reward + monetary reward

Monetary award = fixed compensation + performance-based compensation

Performance based compensation = individual performance based compensation + group performance based compensation.

Articulate Your Vision

When you align your team, don’t forget about the organization’ vision. After all, it’s a key reason why you and your team come to work everyday!

An inspiring vision has the following attributes:

• It taps into sources of inspiration. It is built on a foundation of intrinsic motivations, such as teamwork and contribution to society.
• It makes people part of “the story”. Connect people to a larger narrative that provides meaning, like: a quest to recapture the organization’s past glory
• It contains evocative language.

As you work to create and communicate a spared vision, keep the following principals:

• Use consultation to gain commitment.
• Develop stories and metaphors to communicate it.
• Reinforce it.
• Develop channels for communicating it.

Leading Your Team

Lead Decision Making

Extremes

Unilateral decision making: lead makes the call, w/o consultation or with limited consultation with personal advisers. Risks associated are you may miss critical information and insights and get only lukewarm support for implementation.

Unanimous consent: Suffer from decision diffusion. They go on and on, never reaching closure.

Midway

Consult-and-decide: solicit information and advice form direct reports but reserves the right to make the final call.

Build consensus: seeks information and analysis and seeks buy-in from the group for any decision. The goal is not full consensus but sufficient consensus.

How to figure out which decision making process to use:

• If the decision is likely to be highly divisive — creating winners and losers, you usually are better off using consult-and decide and taking the heat.
• If the decision requires energetic support form implementation from people whose performance you cannot adequately observe and control, then you usually are better off using a build-consensus process.
• If your team members are inexperienced, you usually are better off relying more on consult-and-decide until you’ve taken the measure of the team and developed their capabilities.
• If you are put in charge of a group with whom you need to establish your authority, you are better off relying on consult-and-decide to make some key early decisions. You can relax and rely more on building consensus once people see that you have the steadiness and insight to make touch call.

Decision making also depends on STARS. In startups and turnarounds, consult-and-decide often irks well. To be effective in realignment and sustaining-success situations, in contrast, leaders often need to deal with strong, intact teams and confront cultural and political issues. Build-consensus approach is normally better.

Adjust for Virtual Teams

• Bring the team together early if at all possible.
• Establish clear norms about communication.
• Clearly define team support roles.
• Create a rhythm for team interaction.
• Don’t forget to celebrate success.

Chapter 8 Create Alliances

Focus on building support for early-win objectives. This means figuring out whom you must influence, pinpointing who is likely to support (and who is likely to resist) your key initiatives, and persuading swing votes.

Defining Your Influence Objectives

The first step is to be clear about why you need the support of others. What you need to secure early wins. Start by thinking about the alliances you need to build in order to secure your early wins. Consider creating an alliance-building plan of each of your early-win projects.

Understanding the Influence Landscape

Armed with clarify on why you need to influence people, next step is to identify who will be most important for your success.

Win and Block Alliances

Winning alliances: the set of people who collectively have the power to support you agenda.

Blocking alliances: who collectively have the power to say no. Who might block your agenda?

Map Influence Networks

Who influences whom on the issues of concern to you.

• This will become obvious as you get to know the organization.
• Another strategy is to get your boss to connect you to key stakeholders. Request a list of the key people outside your group whom he thinks you should get to know. Then set up early meetings with them.

Try to identify the sources of power that give particular people influence in the organization:

• Expertise
• Control of information
• Connections to others
• Access to resources, such as budges and rewards
• Personal loyalty

You will also begin to recognize the power coalitions: groups of people who explicitly or implicitly cooperate over the long term to pursue certain goals or protect certain privileges.

Identify Supporters, Opponents, and Persuadable

To identify your potential supporters, look for the following:

• People who share your vision for the future. Look for others who have pushed for similar changes in the past.
• People who have been quietly working for a change on a small scale. Such as an engineer who has found an innovative way to significantly reduce waste.
• People new to the company who have not yet become acculturated to its mode of operation.

Identify people with whom you could build alliances of convenience: whom you disagree in many areas, but with whom you align on the specific issue o concern.

True adversaries will oppose you no matter what you do, for example

• Comfort with status quo
• Fear of looking incompetent
• Threads to core values
• Threads to their power
• Negative consequences for their allies

Don’t assume that people are adversaries. When you meet resistance, probe fo rate reasons behind it before labeling people as implacably opposed. Understanding resisters’ motives many equip you to counter their arguments. Keep in mind that success in winning over adversaries can have a powerful symbolic impact.

There are also people whom you have good relationships and agree on many issues but not aligned with your specific agenda. See if you can do this by explaining what you need to do and why.

Don’t forget the persuadable — those people in the organization who are indifferent or undecided or uncommitted about your plans.

Understanding Pivotal People

After analyzing the influence networks in your organization, next step is to focus on the pivotal people.

Start by assessing their intrinsic motivators. Take the time to figure out what makes the pivotal people tick. You also need to assess situational pressures: the driving and restraining forces acting on them because of the situation they’re in.

Crafting Influence Strategy

Armed with deeper insight into the people you need to influence, you can think about how to apply classic influence techniques.

• Consultation promotes buy-in, and good consultation means engaging in active listening. This signals that you’re paying attention and taking the conversation seriously. The power of active listening as a persuasive technique is vastly underrated.
• Framing means carefully crafting your persuasive arguments on a person-by-person basis. Aristotles’ rhetorical categories of logos, ethos, and pathos.

— — Logos: making logical arguments — using data, facts and reasoned rationales to build your case for change.

— — Echos: elevating the principles that should be applied and the values that must be upheld in making decisions.

— — Pathos: making powerful emotional connections with your audience.

— — Choice -shaping: influencing how people perceive their alternatives. Think har about how to make it hard to say no.

— — Social influence: the impact of the opinions of others and the rules of the societies in which they live. The knowledge of highly respected person already supports an initiative alter others’ assessments of its attractiveness. Research suggests that people prefer to operate in these ways: (looks like taken from Influence..)

• Remain consistent with strongly held values and beliefs.
• Remain consistent with their prior commitments and decisions.
• Repay obligations.
• Preserve their reputations.

— — Incrementalism: people can move in desired directions step-by-step when they wouldn’t go in a single leap.

— — Sequencing: being strategic about the order in which you seek to influence people to build momentum in desired directions.

— — Action-forcing evens: when you success requires the coordinated action of many people, delay by a single individual can have a cascade effect, giving others an execute not to proceed. 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.

Checklist

• What are the critical alliances you need to build, externally and internally, to advance your agenda?
• What agendas are other key players pursuing? Where might they align with yours, and where might they come into conflict?
• Are there opportunities to build long-term, broad-based alliances with others? Where might you be able to leverage shorter-term agreements to pursue specific objectives?
• How does influence work in the organization? Who defers to whom on key issues of concern?
• Who is likely to support your agenda? Who is likely to oppose you? Who is persuadable?
• What re the motivations of pivotal people, the situational pressures acting on them, and their perceptions of their choices?
• What are the elements of an effective influence strategy? How should you frame your arguments? Might influence tools such as incrementalism, sequencing, and action-forcing events help?

Chapter 9 Manage Yourself

Taking Stock

A good place to start is to take stock of how you’re feeling about how things are going in your transition right now.

Guidance 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?
• Confidence?
• In control of your success?

What Has Bothered You So Far?

• With whom have you failed to connect? Why?
• Of the meetings you’ve attended, which has been the most troubling? Why?
• Of all that you’ve seen or heard, what has disturbed your most? Why?

What Has Gone Well or Poorly?

• What interactions would you handle differently if you could? Which exceed your expectations? Why?
• Which of your decisions have turned out particularly well? Not so well, why?
• What missed opportunities do you regret most? Was a better result blocked primarily by you, or by something beyond your control?

Some potential syndromes:

• Undefended boundaries. If you fail to establish solid boundaries defining what you are willing and not willing to do, the people around you will take whatever you have to give.
• Brittleness. The uncertainty inherent in transitions can exacerbate rigidity and defensiveness, esp. in new leaders with high need for control.
• Isolation. To be effective, you must be connected to the people who make action happen and to the subterranean flow of information. It’s surprisingly easy for new leaders to end up isolated, and isolation can creep up on you.
• Work avoidance. You will have to make touch calls early in your new job. Work avoidance: the tendency to avoid taking the bull by the horns, which results in touch problems becoming even tougher.Understand the Three Pillars of Self-Management

Understand the Three Pillars of Self-Management

Pillar 1: adopt 90 day strategies

Pillar 2: develop personal disciplines

Personal disciplines are the regular routines you enforce on yourself ruthlessly.

• Plan to plan. Devote time daily and weekly to a plan-work-evaluate cycle.
• Focus on the important. Devote time each day to the most important work that needs to be done. It’s easy for the urgent to crowd out the important.
• Judiciously Defer commitment. Whenever anybody asks you to do something, say, “Sounds interesting. Let me think about it and get back to you.” Never say yes on the spot. If you’re being pressed, say, “Well, if you need an answer now, I’ll have to say no. But if you can wait, I’ll give it more thought.”
• Go to the Balcony. When you find yourself getting too caught up in emotional escalation in difficult situations, dis-line yourself to stand back, talk stock from fifty thousand feet, and then make productive interventions. It can be tough to do this, esp. when the stakes are high and you’r emotionally involved. But with discipline and practice, it is a skill that can be cultivated.
• Check in with Yourself. Discipline yourself to engage in structured reflection about your situation. Discipline yourself to engage in structured reflection about your situation.
• Recognize when to quit. If you find yourself going over the top of your stress curve more than occasionally, you must discipline yourself to know when to quit.

Pillar 3: build your support systems

• Assert Control Locally. Even if you have more pressing worries, move quickly to get your new office set up, develop routines, clarify expectations with your assistant, and so on.
• Stabilize the Home Front. It’s a fundamental rule of warfare to avoid fighting on too many fronts. Some guidelines that an help smooth your facility’s transition:
• Analyze your family’s existing support system.
• Get your spouse back on track.
• Time the family move carefully.
• Preserve the familiar.
• Invest in cultural familiarization.
• Tap into your company’s relocation service, if it has one, as on as possible.
• Build Your Advice-and-Counsel Network. As a starting point, you need to cultivate three types of advisers: technical advisers, cultural interpreters, and political counselors.

Chapter 10 Accelerate Everyone

10 design principles to build the right solution for your business to accelerate transitions.

Identify the Critical Transitions

Understand transition frequencies in order to assess the costs and benefits of providing support at different levels and to efficiently allocate resources. Beyond knowing transitions frequencies, it’s valuable to know what the mix is of onboarding, in boarding (moves between unites), promotion, and lateral moves. Then you need to focus on critical transitions. What are the most important transitions going on in your company?

Identify Set-Up-to-Fail Dynamics

Avoid common traps like staying in your comfort zone or trying to do too much too fast through implementation of acceleration systems based on the principles discussed in this book.

Diagnose Existing Transition Support

• Identify and assess the status of your company’s existing acceleration support frameworks and tools.
• Examine the approaches your organization culture try users to deliver transition support at all levels of the leadership pipeline.
• Assess the overall coherence of your organization’s approach to supporting different types of transition.
• Identify the key stakeholders.
• Assess the adequacy of your company’s HR information.

Adopt a Common Core Model

The foundation of an acceleration system is a unified, company wide framework, language, and took it for talking about and planning transitions. Talk the same words:

• The STARS portfolio challenges they had inherited.
• Their technical , cultural, and political learning and the key elements of their learning plan.
• Their progress in the five conversations — situation, expectations, style, resources and progress — with their bosses and direct reports.
• Their agreed-upon priorities and plans fo where they will secure early wins.
• The alliances they need to build.

Deliver Support Just in Time

New leaders begin their transitions with intensive diagnostic work. In tandem, they can identify opportunities to secure early wins and begin to drive the process of change.

Early on: support for accelerating learning (technical, cultural and political) is key;

As understanding grows, focus of support should shift to helping him define strategic direction, lay the foundation for success, secure early wins, and so on.

Critically, leaders need to be offered transition support in digestible blocks.

Use Structured Processes

The paradox of transition acceleration is that leaders in transition often feel too busy to learn and plan their transitions. Transition support should not be designed as a free-flowing process in which the leader set t eh pace. It is better to create a series of caucused events.

Match Support to Transition Type

There are often good reasons to provide new leaders with additional resources for dealing with two common types of transitions:

• Promotion.
• Onboarding.

Match Transition Support to Leader Level

If often makes sense to provide executives with transition coaching. But it doesn’t typically make economic sense to provide it to leaders at lower levels.

Clarify Roles and Align Incentives

Transition support is a team sport. For any given new leaders, there are many people who potentially can impact the success of the transition, including bosses, peers, direct reports, HR generalists, coaches and mentors.

Integrate with Other Talent Management Systems

A necessary first step is to have recruiting and onboarding under the same organizational impression and align their goals and incentives.