Successfullly managing a transition into a new leadership role involves more than just avoiding failure. It involves doing the right things to realize the highest degree of success possible – whether you’re a senior executive taking on the reigns of an entire company, a front line manager assuming leadership for a smaller team, or a product manager assuming responsibility for a product or service portfolio. Your objective is to get to the breakeven point as quickly as possible so that you can be, and be seen as being, a net contributor to your organisation. Doing this is referred to as transition acceleration – a process that is described in Michael Watkins’ The First 90 Days.
Basic Principles of Transition Acceleration
The following are some basic principles to keep in mind as you review this material:
- There are two types of failure. The first type is one in which you fail to meet even the minimum expectations for a given role and this is the one most people concern themselves with, but the second is also important. The second type of failure is one in which you meet the minimum expectations but fail to realize your full potential in the role and it is the more common of the two;
- Failure is rarely to be blamed entirely on the flaws of the new leader. Instead, we should think of failure as being the result of a “pernicious interaction between the situation, with its opportunities and pitfalls, and the individual, with his or her strengths and vulnerabilities” (The First 90 Days, Michael Watkins, Page 4);
- There are systematic methods that can be employed to “lessen the likelihood of failure and reach the break even point faster” (Watkins, Page 4);
- The overriding goal during a transition is to “build momentum by creating virtuous cycles that build credibility and by avoiding getting caught in vicious cycles that damage credibility” (Watkins, Page 5);
- “Transitions are a crucible for leadership development and should be managed accordingly. Because they strengthen … and test … they are an indispensable development experience for every company’s high-potential leaders” (Watkins, Page 5). In fact, Watkins advocates a model where transition skills are taught to potential leaders. Too often, potential leaders are encouraged to take on new responsibilities and then either “sink or swim” in the roles; and
- Adopting a “standard framework for accelerating transitions can yield big returns for organisations” (Watkins, Page 6).
The Value for Individuals and Organisations
Understanding and adopting the principles of transition acceleration is of value to individuals and organisations for a number of reasons:
- Each year, slightly less than 25% of typical Fortune 500 managers change jobs – meaning that managers typically spend less than 4 years in a given position;
- High-potential leaders in mid-senior ranks have even shorter tenure, closer to 2.5 years per position;
- This is a necessary condition. Managers need to be moved up through the ranks to develop (and prevent losing) them;
- It’s also necessary to bring in outside talent, from time-to-time, in order to introduce new ideas and preserve vitality
- The problem is that all of these changes for the individuals involve have potentially adverse effects on the people around them!
- The second problem is that the failure rate for new talent is often 40-50%!
- Difficulty in assimilating new talent usually comes from a lack of familiarity with organisational structure, corporate culture and personnel networks, among other things.
The Ten Challenges
The following 10 items describe challenges that you must face in making your transition. “Failure to surmount any one of them, however, is enough to cause potentially crippling problems” (Watkins, Page 14) although the priority weighting of each challenge will vary depending on your new role and the type of transition being navigated. In facing these challenges, Watkins advocates planning for each in with deference to the type of transition being experienced under his STARS model (Startup, Turn Around, Realignment or Sustaining Success).
1. Promote Yourself: You need to psychologically prepare yourself for your new role. You can do this by:
- Establishing a Clear Break Point: Make the mental break from your old job. Celebrate your promotion and get your game face on.
- Hitting the Ground Running: Embrace the imperatives of the new position and give yourself a running start. Identify what you want to achieve on the first day, first week, and each month thereafter. You will need to demonstrate something before the end of 90 days in most cases.
- Assessing your Vulnerabilities: Recognize that what got you here won’t necessarily keep you here and avoid any/all temptations to work at a level below your new job. Be mindful of your problem preferences (the kinds of problems to which you normally gravitate (think Technical, Political & Cultural; also think HR, Finance, Ops, Marketing, R&D). Three tools to help compensate for vulnerabilities are: self-discipline, team-building & counsel.
- Watching Out for your Strengths: Every strength has attendant pitfalls.
- Relearning How to Learn: “Because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure. So whenever their … learning strategies go wrong, they become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the “blame” on anyone and everyone but themselves. In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it the most” (Chris Argyris, “Teaching Smart People How To Learn”, Harvard Business Review, May-June 1991).
- Reworking your Network: Early in your career there is a premium on cultivating relationships with technical advisers. As you are progressively promoted, however, it becomes increasingly important to get good political counsel and personal advice (who can help you keep perspective & equilibrium during times of stress).
- Watching Out for People who want to Hold You Back: Negotiate clear expectations with your old boss; accept that there are going to be changes in your friendships; be careful to avoid favouritism; be firm but fair with former peers – even those who appear to seek to undermine you; prepare to move people out of your organisation if they will never accept your promotion.
2. Accelerate Your Learning: Climb the learning curve as quickly as possible. Understand markets, products, technologies, systems & structures, history, culture and politics.
- Overcoming Learning Disabilities: “When a new leader derails, failure to learn is almost always a factor” (Watkins, Page 34). Take note that effective learning involves, first, planning to learn. Avoid the compulsion to take immediate action; don’t arrive with “the answer” in hand.
- Managing Learning as an Investment Process: Investing in learning will help you develop actionable insights (knowledge that enables you to make better decisions).
- Defining your Learning Agenda: Be systematic. Define an agenda. Take time to look at the past, present & future. Plan to learn both effectively (involving what you learn) and efficiently (deriving maximum insight from the best available sources).
- Identifying the Best Sources of Insight: To make effective decisions you will need “soft” information about the organisation’s strategy, technical capabilities, culture & politics. The only way to get this is to talk to people who have critical knowledge of your situation.
- Engaging in Structured Learning: Don’t just jump in and start talking to people. Consider whom you are going to talk to, and in what order. What statements will you make and what questions will you ask? Do you intend to line up responses side-by-side to determine who is being open and who not?
- Creating a Learning Plan: This defines how you will go about learning the things you’ve identified on your learning agenda and should be a primary focus of your first 30 days on the job. Tools can include surveys, interviews, focus groups, analysis of past decisions, process analysis, plant & market tours, pilot projects.
- Learning about Culture: Your most vexing business problems will have a cultural dimension. Approach the subject by looking at symbols, norms & assumptions. Look at culture from organisational, professional & geographic perspectives and consider whether the appropriate behaviour is to adapt or alter things.
3. Match Strategy to Situation: Diagnose the situation, clarify its challenges & opportunities and develop an action plan.
- Diagnosing the Business Situation: STARS = Startup, Turn Around, Realignment, Sustaining Success.
- Understanding the History: Businesses tend to move predictably. Understanding the history will help you grasp the challenges and the opportunities of your new situation.
- Identifying Challenges & Opportunities: Each of the STARS situations will result in unique challenges & opportunities.
- Transforming Organisational Psychology: People’s attitudes & emotions will vary in predictable ways depending on which of the STARS situations is at play.
- Leading with the Right Skills: Is the situation ready-aim-fire or ready-fire-aim? Does it call for a hunter or farmer? Does it call for decisiveness or conciliation?
- Focusing your Energy: How much will you focus on learning vs doing, offense vs defense? What can you do to get some early wins? These vary by situation. In a Sustaining situation simply understanding what lead to the current success can be an early win.
- Diagnosing your Portfolio: You may find that your situation doesn’t entirely fit within one of the STARS categories.
- Rewarding Success: Performance must be awarded differently in each of the STARS situations. Evaluating success or failure in Realignment and/or Sustaining Success situations can be particularly difficult.
- Adopting 4-D Development: Consider using STARS as the basis for selecting & developing talent. Past or planned experiences in the following four dimensions can set someone up nicely for success (or failure – as in bringing in a realignment expert from outside the company).
- Managerial Functions
- Geographic Regions
- Career Crossroads
- STARS Business Situations
4. Secure Early Wins: These build credibility and create momentum. They create virtuous cycles that leverage the energy you are investing. In the first 90 days you need to identify ways to create value, improve business results and get to the breakeven point more rapidly.
- Avoiding Common Traps: These include:
- Failing to Focus
- Not Taking the Business Situation Into Account
- Not Adjusting to the Culture
- Failing to Get Wins that Matter to your Boss
- Letting the Ends Justify the Means
- Making Waves (of Change): d
- Transition
- Immersion
- Reshaping
- Consolidation
- Establishing Long-Term Goals: The actions you take to secure early wins should do double-duty. They should help you build credibility and lay a foundation for achieving your longer term goals. They should be consistent with your A-List priorities and support any new patterns of behaviour you want to instil in the organisation. In thinking about your long-term goals, think about what your legacy needs to be. What do you want your next promotion letter to state? Your A-List goals should:
- Follow Naturally from Core Problems
- Be Neither Too General nor Too Specific
- Offer Clear Direction while Allowing for Flexibility (as you learn more)
- Securing Early Wins: Knowing your goals will help you think about the early wins you want to secure. You should focus on building credibility in the first 30 days and then developing performance improvements between 30 and 90 days (and beyond). Identifying problematic behaviours can be a good 30 day win; resolving it can be a good 60-90 day win. Some areas to consider include focus, discipline, innovation, teamwork, urgency. Focus on building credibility and looking for teachable moments:
- New leaders are seen to be credible when they are:
- Demanding but able to be satisfied
- Accessible but not too familiar
- Decisive but not judicious
- Focused but flexible
- Active without causing commotion
- Willing to make tough calls but humane
- Teachable Moments are those actions that clearly display what you are all about and that model the kinds of behaviour that you want to encourage. They should:
- Keep your long term goals in mind
- Identify a few promising focal points
- Concentrate on the most promising focal points
- Launch pilot projects
- Elevate change agents
- Leverage the pilot projects to introduce new behaviours
- WATCH OUT FOR TICKING TIME BOMBS! These can be found anywhere, including in areas such as Internal Capabilities, External Environment, Customers, Markets, Competition & Strategy.
- New leaders are seen to be credible when they are:
- Leading Change: Think about Planned Change vs Collective Learning. Planned change requires Awareness, Diagnosis, Vision, Plan & Support. Collective learning is more subversive … and involves influencing individuals to come around to change on their own (e.g. by exposing an employee to a new approach). Simply blowing things up and starting over is rarely the right answer.
- Matching Strategy to Situation: Your approach will depend on the STARS situation that you are in. Always keep in mind that you are trying to create virtuous cycles that reinforce wanted behaviour and support your A-List goals. Modest early improvements are what define early wins.
5. Negotiate Success: Figure out how to build a productive working relationship with your new boss and manage his/her expectations. Plan for a series of critical conversations around the situation, expectations, style, resources and your personal development. Develop and gain consensus on your 90 day plan. Shape the game so that you have a fighting chance of achieving desired goals. This is important – even if you are going to be reporting to the same person as before!
- Focus on the Fundamentals:
- Don’t Trash the Past
- 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 Try to Change the Boss
- Do Take 100% Responsibility for Making the Relationship Work
- Do Clarify Mutual Expectations Early & Often
- Do Negotiate Timelines for Diagnosis & Action Planning
- Do Aim for Early Wins in Areas Important to the Boss
- Do Pursue Good Marks from Those Whose Opinions Your Boss Respects
- Plan for the Five Conversations: These are not specific discussions but, rather, woven into other conversations:
- Situational Diagnosis: It is essential to grasp how your boss sees the situation;
- Expectations: It is essential to understand and negotiate expectations – short & medium & long term. What’s untouchable and/or sensitive? Underpromise & overdeliver! Clarify, clarify, clarify. Ask questions in different ways. Place great emphasis on communication and metrics if working remotely.
- Style: What are the expectations? How do your styles differ and what are the implications for how, and how often, you should interact? A good idea might be to talk to peers about what they find works (and doesn’t). Tackle style differences head on. Style differences can be perceived as disrespect or incompetence.
- Resources: What will you need to be successful? What will your boss need to do to provide it? Are you trying to change the rules of the game somehow? If so, you may need more resources. Some tips:
- Focus on Underlying Interests
- Look for Mutually Beneficial Exchanges
- Link Resources to Results
- Personal Development: How will the job contribute to your personal development? What hard skills do you need to develop? What soft skills? Keep in mind that soft skills become more important the higher you rise! Training can help, but developmental assignments can be of even greater value in developing tehse soft skills.
- Put it all Together in a 90-Day Plan: Your earlier conversations should focus more on situational diagnosis, expectations & style. Conversations around resources & personal development will typically come later. Together these should help you formulate a written 90 day plan (even if it’s just bullet points).
- Develop Yourself as Boss: Think about how to apply all of this stuff in the management of your direct reports, if you have any. And seek to learn from bad bosses as well as good.
6. Achieve Alignment: The higher you rise, the more you have to play the role of organisational architect … determining whether the organisation’s strategy is sound, bringing its structure into alignment with its strategy and developing systems & skill bases necessary to realize strategic intent. Awareness of this is important because even if you’re not among the senior ranks you may have opportunity to provide input that you won’t want to miss.
- Designing Organisational Architecture: Think about this in terms of the five elements (Strategy, Structure, Systems, Skills & Culture).
- Identifying Misalignments: These relate to the five elements. Some common ones to look at:
- Skills & Strategy
- Systems & Strategy
- Structure & Systems
- Avoiding Common Traps: d
- Trying to restructure yourself out of deeper problems;
- Creating structures that are too complex;
- Automating problem processes;
- Making changes for change’s sake;
- Overestimating your group’s capacity to absorb strategic shifts.
- Getting Started: Start with Strategy. Decide, realistically, when & how you will introduce the new Strategy. Look at Structure, Systems & Skills and reshaping them simultaneously. As you look at these things, you will gain insights as to the group’s Culture, which comes next.
- Crafting Strategy: Four broad categories: Customers, Culture, Capital & Commitments. Look at the Coherence, Adequacy and Adoption of the past, the present & the proposed future.
- Modifying Strategy: What is your STARS situation? What might the unintended results of your proposed strategy be? What other initiatives might it interrupt?
- Shaping your Group’s Structure: Structure consists of the following elements: Units, Decision Rights, Performance Measurement & Reward Systems, Reporting Relationships & Information Sharing Mechanisms. Some common trade-offs:
- The team’s knowledge base is too narrow (or too broad);
- Employee’s decision making is too narrow (or too broad);
- Employees are inappropriately rewarded;
- Reporting relationships lead to compartmentalization or diffusion of accountability.
- Aligning Key Systems: These are the processes that enable your group to transform inputs into commercially viable products or services. Are you trying to drive flawless execution or innovation? Processes that support one can impede the other. Look at four aspects: Productivity, Timeliness, Reliability, Quality. Do not try to change more than a few processes at a time!
- Developing your Group’s Skill Base: Look at four types of knowledge: Individual Expertise, Relational Knowledge, Embedded Knowledge and Meta Knowledge. Identify critical gaps and underutilized resources. What distinguishes the stars on the team?
- Understanding your Group’s Culture: These are the norms and values that shape behviours, attitudes & expectations. Diagnose & address problems early. Who do employees see as having Power? What actions & outcomes do they see as having Value? You won’t be able to change culture in 90 days, but identifying problems is a good start. Some steps you might take:
- Change performance measures & incentives;
- Set up pilot projects;
- Bring in new people;
- Promote collective learning;
- Engage in collective visioning.
7. Build Your Team: If managing a team, evaluate team-members and team-structure. Making early, tough calls that involve selecting the right people for the right positions are important drivers for your success. You need to be both systematic and strategic in this.
- Avoiding Common Traps: Some of these include:
- Keeping the existing team too long;
- Not repairing the airplane;
- Not working organisational alignment and team restructuring issues in parrallel;
- Not holding on to the good people;
- Undertaking team-building before the core team is in place;
- Making implementation-dependant decisions too early;
- Trying to do it all yourself.
- Assessing your Existing Team: You need a solid criteria for doing this. Consider measuring: Competence, Judgement, Energy, Focus, Relationships & Trust. (Note: These are good items to include in a self-review process for anyone seeking to advance their careers!) Prepare well for each subordinate meeting, ask probing questions and watch for non-verbal clues. Ask them to make a prediction about something they care about outside of work to get a sense for their judgement. Look at key people then look at the team as a whole.
- Restructuring your Team: For each individual, look at the following options:
- Keep in place;
- Keep & develop;
- Move to another position;
- Continue to observe;
- Replace (low priority) (move vs terminate);
- Replace (high priority) (move vs terminate).
- Aligning Goals, Incentives & Measures: Break your larger goals down into smaller chunks and then look at how team-members & systems can best support those goals. Look at *push-incentives* vs *pull-incentives*, *extrinsic* vs *intrinsic* and *monetary* vs *non-monetary*. Avoid ambiguous goals & measures.
- Establishing New Team Processes: Look at existing processes, including: participant’s roles, team meetings, decision making and leadership style (yours and your predecessor, if any) and target processes for change. Consider explaining to team-members any changes you are introducing.
8. Create Coalitions: Your success will depend on your ability to influence people outside of your direct line of control. Internal & external alliances will be necessary to achieve this. You should immediately take steps to identify those whose support will be essential for your success and take steps to line them up on your side.
- Mapping the Influence Landscape: Some ideas:
- Look at the *key interfaces* between your group and other groups;
- Ask your boss to connect you to ~10 people outside of your group;
- Look at *informal networks of influence* too;
- Identify the *sources of power* that give people influence within the organisation;
- Pick out the *key players*, *opinion leaders* & *power coalitions*;
- Consider drawing out an influence map.
- Identify Supporters, Opponents & Convincables: Oppononents may exist for various reasons, including:
- Comfort with the status quo;
- Fear of looking incompetent;
- Threat to values;
- Threat to power;
- Negative consequences for key allies.
- Using the Tools of Persuasion: Several tools exist. Among them:
- Incentives: This is the most common approach and typically involves some combination of bribery & threats;
- Compelling Arguments: are those that align to others’ core values. Think about things like loyalty, commitment, integrity, contribution & individual worth when developing these;
- Action Forcing Events: are those that push for a decision on a matter of interest, but you will want to make sure that the forces are strongly in your favour before enacting these;
- Entanglement: This can involve getting people to make a series of smaller commitments instead of a single, larger one. Or it could involve setting the pins up to favour your strategy in the future (e.g. providing a shared experience or data). It might also involve using behaviour change to drive attitude change.
9. Keep Your Balance: Transitions are difficult. You will have to work exceptionally hard to maintain both personal and professional equilibrium and make good judgements all the while. Loss of perspective, isolation and bad decisions are a great risk during this period. Developing an advice & counsel network can be a great resource to help defray these risks, now and during ongoing operations.
- Taking Stock: The “lone warrior” model of leadership is heroic suicide. What does your overall support system look like?
- Avoiding Vicious Cycles: These can include:
- Riding off in all directions (and the resulting firefighting);
- Undefended boundaries (clear descriptions of what you do / don’t do);
- Brittleness (and rigidity);
- Isolation;
- Biased Judgement (over-commitment, confirmation bias, self-serving illusions, over-confidence);
- Work Avoidance;
- Going Over the Top (when Stress starts to become negative).
- The Three Pillars of Self-Efficacy: These are:
- Pillar 1: Adopting Success Strategies
- Pillar 2: Enforcing Personal Disciplines
- Plan to Plan
- Judiciously Defer Commitment
- Set Aside Time for the Hard Work
- Go to the Balcony
- Focus on Process
- Check in with Yourself (Self-Reflection)
- Pillar 3: Building Your Support Systems
- Assert Control Locally
- Stabilize the Home Front
- Your Family’s Support System
- Your Spouse’s Profession
- Timing of Events & Activities
- Preservation of the Familiar
- Cultural Familiarization
- Corporate Support Services
- Build Your Advice & Counsel Network (internal & external)
- Technical Advisers
- Cultural Interpreters
- Political Counsellors
10. Expedite Everyone: You need to help everyone in your organisation – reports, bosses and peers – to accelerate their own transitions. Institutionalizing the Transition Acceleration model is an important step – particularly if you’re a senior executive with several layers below you. Steps to do this include:
- Creating a Common Language
- Working with your Team
- Bringing in People from the Outside
- Developing High-Potential Leaders
- Strengthening Succession Planning
- Accelerating Post-Merger Integration
- Employing Performance-Support Tools
Conclusions
The book itself, and the above synopsis, reads a bit like a catalogue of all the things you might do to succeed in your new role and that’s a good thing. Too many books focus too narrowly to effectively provide newly transitioned managers with a framework for success. By reviewing the above materials and developing your personal 90 Day Plan you should be able to improve your chances of success in the new role very considerably.
The Mashy PM 