The First 90 Days, Updated and Expanded: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter - By Michael D. Watkins
Date read: 2017-12-09How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
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Great book for those just entering into a leadership role or current leaders taking on a new assignment or team. Lots of great methods to analyze your strengths, weaknesses, and blindspots. Highly recommended for new managers and those getting promoted to a senior leadership position, either in the same or new company.
Contents:
- WHY THE FIRST 90 DAYS ARE SO IMPORTANT
- ACCELERATE YOUR LEARNING
- STARS METHOD - CHANGE MANAGEMENT
- MANAGING YOUR NEW BOSS
- QUICK WINS
- ORG PLANNING
- ASSESSING PEOPLE
- CRAFTING INFLUENCE STRATEGIES
- CULTIVATING YOUR NETWORK
My Notes
“Transitions into new roles are the most challenging times in the professional lives of leaders.” And nearly three-quarters agreed that “success or failure during the first few months is a strong predictor of overall success or failure in the job.”
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.
Leadership ultimately is about influence and leverage. You are, after all, only one person. To be successful, you need to mobilize the energy of many others in your organization.
Transition failures happen because new leaders either misunderstand the essential demands of the situation or lack the skill and flexibility to adapt to them.
Prepare yourself. This means making a mental break from your old job and preparing to take charge in the new one.
Accelerate your learning. You need to climb the learning curve as fast as you can in your new organization.
Match your strategy to the situation.
A clear diagnosis of the situation is an essential prerequisite for developing your action plan.
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.
Negotiate success. Because no other single relationship is more important, you need to figure out how to build a productive working relationship with your new boss (or bosses) and manage her expectations.
Build your team. If you are inheriting a team, you need to evaluate, align, and mobilize its members.
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.
The fact that you’re in transition means they are too. The quicker you can get your new direct reports up to speed, the more you will help your own performance.
It’s a mistake to believe that you will be successful in your new job by continuing to do what you did in your previous job, only more so.
No matter where you land, 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.
Decision making becomes more political — less about authority, and more about influence.
To overcome these barriers and succeed in joining a new company, you should focus on four pillars of effective onboarding:
Preparing yourself for a new role calls for proactively restructuring your advice-and-counsel network.
As you move to higher levels, however, it becomes increasingly important to get good political counsel and personal advice.
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. So 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.
Effective leaders strike the right balance between doing (making things happen) and being (observing and reflecting).
Remember: simply displaying a genuine desire to learn and understand translates into increased credibility and influence.
Start by generating questions about the past, the present, and the future.
Questions About the Past Performance
Root Causes
History of Change
Questions About the Present Vision and Strategy
People
Processes
Land Mines
Early Wins -In what areas (people, relationships, processes, or products) can you achieve some early wins?
Questions About the Future Challenges and Opportunities
Barriers and Resources
Culture
When you are diagnosing a new organization, start by meeting with your direct reports one-on-one. Ask them essentially the same five questions:
Another example of a structured learning method is the use of a framework such as SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis to guide your diagnostic work.
How effective are you at learning about new organizations? Do you sometimes fall prey to the action imperative? To coming in with “the” answer? If so, how will you avoid doing this?
From the outset, leaders like Karl need to focus on answering two fundamental questions. The first question is, What kind of change am I being called upon to lead? The second question is, What kind of change leader am I?
STARS is an acronym for five common business situations leaders may find themselves moving into: start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, and sustaining success.
S - In a start-up, you are charged with assembling the capabilities (people, funding, and technology) to get a new business, product, project, or relationship off the ground. This means you can shape the organization from the outset by recruiting your team, playing a major role in defining the agenda, and building the architecture of the business 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.
T - 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. A turnaround is the classic burning platform, demanding rapid, decisive action. Turnarounds are ready-fire-aim situations: you need to make the tough calls with less than full knowledge and then adjust as you learn more. 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. Leaders are often dealing with people who are hungry for hope, vision, and direction, and that necessitates a heroic style of leadership—charging against the enemy, sword in hand.
A - In an accelerated-growth situation, the organization has begun to hit its stride, and the hard work of scaling up has begun. This typically means you’re putting in the structures, processes, and systems necessary to rapidly expand the business (or project, product, or relationship). 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.
R - In a realignment, your challenge is to revitalize a unit, product, process, or project that has been drifting into danger. The clouds are gathering on the horizon, but the storm has not yet broken—and many people may not even see the clouds. The biggest challenge often is to create a sense of urgency. In realignments, you will likely have to pierce the veil of denial that is preventing people from confronting the need to reinvent the business. Realignments demand from leaders something more akin to stewardship or servant leadership—a more diplomatic and less ego-driven approach that entails building consensus for the need for change.
S - In a sustaining-success situation, you are shouldering responsibility for preserving the vitality of a successful organization and taking it to the next level. This emphatically does not mean that the organization can rest on its laurels. Rather, it means you need to understand, at a deep level, what has made the business successful and position it to meet the inevitable challenges so that it will continue to grow and prosper. 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.
Negotiating success means proactively engaging with your new boss to shape the game so that you have a fighting chance of achieving desired goals.
Shape the game by negotiating with your boss to establish realistic expectations, reach consensus, and secure sufficient resources.
“Don’t just bring me problems, bring me plans for how we can begin to address them.”
Include plans for five specific conversations with your new boss about transition-related subjects in your 90-day plan:
Your early conversations should focus on situational diagnosis, expectations, and style. As you learn more, you will be ready to negotiate for resources, revisiting your diagnosis of the situation and resetting expectations as necessary.
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.
Focus on making successive waves of change. Each wave should consist of distinct phases: learning, designing the changes, building support, implementing the changes, and observing results.
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.
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.
Focus on a few promising opportunities. Identify the most promising opportunities and then focus relentlessly on translating them into wins.
Get wins that matter to your boss.
Get wins in the right ways.
An early win that is accomplished in a way that exemplifies the behavior you hope to instill in your new organization is a double win.
Take your STARS portfolio into account.
Adjust for the culture.
New leaders are perceived as more credible when they display these characteristics:
To design (or redesign) your organization, start by thinking of it as an open system.
The “open” part refers to the reality that organizations are open to (that is, those elements they influence and are influenced by). This reality comprises (1) key players in the external environment, including customers, distributors, suppliers, competitors, governments, NGOs, investors, and the media, and (2) the internal environment: climate, morale, and culture. So leaders’ architectural choices must position the organization to respond to, as well as shape, the realities of the external and internal environments.
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).
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.
Many new leaders stumble when it comes to building their teams. These are some of the characteristic traps into which you can fall:
Test people’s judgment in a domain in which feedback on their predictions will emerge quickly.
Experiment with the following approach. Ask individuals about a topic they’re passionate about outside work.
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?”
Press them to commit themselves; 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? If possible, follow up to see what happens.
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.
Framing means carefully crafting your persuasive arguments on a person-by-person basis.
Choice-shaping is about influencing how people perceive their alternatives. Think hard about how to make it hard to say no.
Social influence is the impact of the opinions of others and the rules of the societies in which they live. The knowledge that a highly respected person already supports an initiative alters others’ assessments of its attractiveness. So convincing opinion leaders to make commitments of support and to mobilize their own networks can have a powerful leveraging effect.
Incrementalism refers to the notion that people can move in desired directions step-by-step when they wouldn’t go in a single leap. Mapping out a pathway from A to B is highly effective, because each small step taken creates a new psychological reference point for people in deciding whether to take the next one.
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. Once there is agreement on the problem, you can shift to defining the options and then the criteria that will be used to evaluate them.
Sequencing means being strategic about the order in which you seek to influence people to build momentum in desired directions.6 If you approach the right people first, you can set in motion a virtuous cycle of alliance building.
Action-forcing events get people to stop deferring decisions, delaying, and avoiding commitment of scarce resources.
Regular meetings to review progress, and tough questioning of those who fail to reach agreed-to goals, increase the psychological pressure to follow through.
You need to cultivate three types of advisers: technical advisers, cultural interpreters, and political counselors
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.