The people judge the first 100 days
performance of the newly formed government. The first 90 days of any Government
becomes critical parameter to gain confidence. Similarly when a lateral entrant
on boards an organisation at a leadership position, all the eyes will be on his
first 90 days. The initial 90 days of on-board becomes critical for the leader
and the company. The transaction is
critical to reach a breakeven point and one needs to avoid few transaction
traps such as Sticking with what you
know, Falling prey to the action imperative, setting unrealistic expectations,
Attempting to do too much, coming in with the answer, engaging in the wrong
type of learning, neglecting horizontal relationships. The transition failures
happen because new leader either misunderstand the essential demands of the
situation or lack the skill and flexibility to adapt to them. Leadership ultimately is about influence
and leverage and needs a right steps to follow for deliver with right energy. Any
changes from one profile to other has risk. Identification of the key risk and
mitigation plan will accelerate to be successful initially. The initial success
will also build confidence and acceptance in any new organization. To better on
boarding and deliver excellently, the author suggests the steps converted into
10 chapters for a smooth transaction.
1. Prepare
Yourself
2.
Accelerate Your learning
3.
Match your strategy to the situation
4.
Secure early wins
5.
Negotiate Success
6.
Achieve Alignment
7.
Build Your Team
8.
Create Coalitions
9.
Keep your balance
10.
Accelerate everyone.
Chapter – 1 : Prepare
Yourself
The key of effective delegation
remains necessary. 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
enforce them through process. While
preparing yourself one has to find ways to overcome the following challenges
with Balancing Breadth and Depth | Rethinking what you Delegate | Influence
differently |Communicate more formally | Exhibit the right presence
To overcome these barriers and succeed in a joining a new
company, one should focus on Four pillars of effective on boarding
Business Orientation | Stakeholder connection | Alignment
of expectations | Cultural Adaptation.
Reflection checks
·
What are the implications for your need to
balance breadth and depth, delegate, influence, communicate and exhibit
leadership presence?
·
How will you orient yourself to business, identify
and connect with key stakeholders, clarify expectations and adapt to the new culture?
what is the right balance between adapting to the new situation and trying to
alter it
·
What has made you successful so far in your
career? Can you succeed in your new position by relying solely on those
strengths? If not, what are the critical skills you need to develop
·
Are there aspects of your new job that are
critical to success but that you prefer not to focus on? Why? How will you
compensate for your potential blind spots?
·
How can you ensure that you make the mental leap
into the new position? From whom might you seek advice and counsel on this?
What other activities might help you do this?
Chapter -2 :
Accelerate your learning
Leaders who are on boarding into new organisation must focus
on learning and adapting to the new culture | Managing learning as an
investment process – Define your learning agenda - Identify the best sources of
insight - Adopting structured learning methods
Reflection – Checklist
·
How effectively are you at learning about new
organizations? Do you sometimes fall prey to the action imperative? To coming
in “the “answer? If so, how will you avoid doing this?
·
What is your learning agenda? Based on what you
know now, compose a list of questions to guide your early inquiries. If you
have begun to form hypotheses about what is going on, what are they, and how
will you test them?
·
Given the questions you want to answer, who is
likely to provide you with the most useful insight?
·
How might you increase the efficiency of your
learning process? What are some structured ways you might extract more insight
for your investment of time and energy?
·
What support is available to accelerate your
learning and how might you best leverage?
·
Given your answers to the previous questions,
start to create your learning plan
Chapter -3 : Match
Strategy to Situation
Use STARS Model – Start-Up | Turnaround | Accelerated Growth
| Realignment | Sustaining success to match strategy to situation.
Reflection – Checklist
·
What portfolio of STARS situations have you inherited?
Which portion of your responsibilities are in start-up, turnaround,
accelerated-growth, realignment, and sustaining success modes?
·
What are the implications for the challenges and
opportunities you are likely to confront and for the way you should approach
accelerating your transition?
·
What are the implications for your learning
agenda? Do you need to understand only the technical side of the business or is
it critical that you understand culture and politics well?
·
What is the prevailing climate in your organisation?
What psychological transformation do you need to make and how will you bring
them about?
·
How can you best lead change given the
situations you face?
·
Which of your skills and strengths are likely to
be most valuable in your new situation, and which have the potential to get you
into trouble
·
What are the implications for the team you need
to build?
Chapter -4 :
Negotiate Success
Negotiate success means proactively engaging with your new
boss to shape the game so that you have a fighting chance of achieving desired
goals.
Don’t with boss for building
positive relationships - 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
Do’s for building positive relationships – Clarify expectations
early and often | Take 100 percent responsibility for making relationship work
| Negotiate timelines for diagnosis and action planning | Aim for early wins in
areas important to boss | Pursue good marks from those who opinions your boss
respects
Conversations
framework – Situational diagnosis conversation | the expectations
conversations | the resource conversation | The style conversation | The
personal development conversation
Reflection – Checklist
·
How effectively have your built relationships
with new bosses in the past? What have you done well? Where do you need
improvement?
·
Create a plan for the situational conversation based
on what you know now, what issues will you raise with your boss in this conversation?
What do you want ot say up front? what
order do you want to raise issues?
·
Create a plan for the expectations conversation.
How will you figure out what your new boss expects you to do?
·
Create a plan for the style conversation. How
will you figure out how best to work with your boss? What mode of communication
does he prefer? How often should you interact? How much detail should you
provide? What types of issues should you consult with him about before deciding?
·
Create a plan for the resource conversation.
Give what you need to do, what resources are absolutely needed? With fever
resources, what would you have to forgo? If you had more resources what would
the benefits? Be sure to build the building case?
·
Create a plan for the personal development
conversation. What are your strengths and where do you need improvement t? What
kinds of assignments or projects might help you develop skills you need?
·
How might you use the five conversations
framework to accelerate the development of your team? Where are you in terms of
having the key conversations with each of your direct reports?
Chapter – 6: Secure
Early Wins
Plan your waves – Starting with Goal | Focus on Business
Priorities | Identify and support behavioural Changes
Problematic behaviour pattern – Focus | Discipline
|Innovation | Teamwork | Sence of Urgency
Overcoming Basic Principles – Focus on a few promising
Opportunities | Gen wins that matter to your bosses |Get wins in the right ways
| Take your STARS portfolio into account | Adjust for the culture | identifying
your early wins
FOGLAMP checklist – Focus | oversight | Goals | Leadership |
Abilities | Means | Process
Leading change – Planning versus learning – Awareness –
Diagnosis – vision – Plan – Support
Reflection checklist
·
Given you agreed to business goals, what do you
need to do during your transition to create momentum for achieving them?
·
How do people need to behave differently to achieve
these goals? Describe as vividly as you can the behaviours you need to
encourage and those you need to discourage
·
How do you plan to connect yourself to your new
organisation? Who are the key audiences and what message would you like to
convey to them? What are the best modes of engagement?
·
What are the most promising focal points to get
some early improvements in performance and start the process of behaviour change?
·
What projects do you need to launch and who will
lead them
·
What predictable surprises could take you off track?
Chapter – 6: Achieve
Alignment
Common Traps to avoid – Making change for change’s sake |
Not adjusting for the STARS situation |Trying to restructure your way out of
deeper problems | Creating structures that are too complex | Overestimating
your organizations capacity to absorb change
Designing organizational Architecture - Strategic Direction
| Structure | Core Processes | Skill base
Diagnosing Misalignments – Misalignments between strategic direction
and skill base | Misalignment between strategic direction and core processes |
Misalignment between structure and processes | Misalignment between structure
and skills
Getting started – Begin with strategic direction | Look at
supporting structure, processes and skills |Decide how and when you will
introduce the new strategic direction | Think through the correct sequencing |
Choose the loop
Reflection checklist
·
What are your observations about misalignments
among strategic directions, structure, process and skills? How will you dig
deeper to confirm or refine your impression?
·
What decisions about customers, capital,
capabilities and commitments do you need to make? How and when will you make
these decisions?
·
What is your current assessment of the coherence
of the organisations strategic directions? Of its adequacy? What are your
current thoughts about changing directions?
·
What are the strengths and weakness of the
organisation structure? What potential structure are you thinking about?
·
What are the core processes in your
organisation? How well they are performing? What are your priorities for
process improvement?
·
What skill gaps and underutilized resources have
you identified? What are your priorities for strengthening key skills bases?
Chapter -7 – Build
your team
Reflections:
·
What are your criteria for assessing the
performance of members of your team? How are relative weightings affected by
function, the extent of required teamwork, the stars portfolio and the
criticality of the positions?
·
How will you go about assessing your team?
·
What personnel changes do you need to make?
Which changes are urgent and which can wait? how ill you create backups and
options?
·
How will you might high priority changes? What
can you do to preserve the dignity of the people affected? What help will you
need with the team in the restructuring process, and where are you going to find?
Chapter -8 – Create
Alliances
Defining your influence Objectives – Understand the
influence landscape | win and block alliances | Map influence networks | Draw
influence diagrams
Reflections:
·
What are the critical alliances you need to
build –both within your organisations and externally to advance your agenda?
·
What agendas are other key players pursuing? Where
might they align with yours and where might they come in to 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 organisation? Who
defers to whom on key issues or concern?
·
Who is likely to support your agenda? Who is
likely to oppose you? Who is persuadable?
·
What are the motivations of pivotal people, the
situational pressure 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: Mange
Yourself
·
What are your greatest vulnerabilities in your
new role? How do you plan to compensate for them?
·
What personal disciples do you most need to
develop or enhance? How will you do this? What will success look like?
·
What can you gain more control over your local environment?
·
What can you do to ease your family transition?
What support relationships will you have to build? What are your highest priorities?
·
What are your priorities for strengthening your
advice and counsel network? to what extent do you need to focus on your internal
network ? Your external network >? In
which domain do you most need additional support – technical, cultural,
political or personal?
Chapter 10 – accelerate everyone
·
What are the most important transitions in your organisation
and how often do they occur
·
Is the organisation able to identify where and
when transitions are occurring?
·
Is there a common core transition, acceleration,
framework, language and toolkit?
·
Do leaders have the support they need, when they
need it and throughout their transitions? What could be done to provide focused
resources for on boarding and promotion transitions?
·
Are the company’s systems for recruiting and
accelerating transitions linked in appropriate way
·
Should transitions acceleration be part of your
organisation curriculum for developing high potential leaders?
·
How might the 90 day framework be used to
accelerate organisational change – for example restructuring or post
acquisition integration?
Today we use checklist for many activities, just to ensure that we have completed the activity. Fifteen
years ago, Israeli scientists published a report about patient care in ICU. It was observed that in a day, on
an average 178 individual actions are required ranging from administering a
drug to suctioning the lung. Every activity posed risks. On an average 2
errors per patient per day was recorded. With many diseases can health care accept 2 errors per day ? Can this be reduced? Can checklist become
useful …?
