The First 90 Days,¶

From book of Watkins, Michael.

Accelerate your learning¶

The first task in making a successful transition is to accelerate your learning:

1. Adapt to roadblocks: learn about the organization’s culture and politics to socialize and customize your approach.
2. Managing Learning as an Investment Process: select actionable insights (knowledge that enables you to make better decisions earlier and so helps you quickly reach the break-even point in personal value creation) from all the learning.
3. Define your learning agenda: Start by generating questions about the past, the present, and the future. See template: Organization learning template
4. Identifying the Best Sources of Insight: listen to key people both inside and outside the organization. Interview: customer, staff… See template: Organization learning - template

New organization diagnostic:¶

One to one meeting with reportes. Ask 5 questions:

• What are the biggest challenges the organization is facing (or will face in the near future)?
• Why is the organization facing (or going to face) these challenges?
• What are the most promising unexploited opportunities for growth?
• What would need to happen for the organization to exploit the potential of these opportunities?
• If you were me, what would you focus attention on?

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?

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 insights?

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 it?

Given your answers to the previous questions, start to create your learning plan.

Match strategy to situation¶

To take charge successfully, you must have a clear understanding of the situation you are facing and the implications for what you need to do and how you need to do it.

Two fundamental questions:

1. What kind of change am I being called upon to lead?

   • Only by answering this question will you know how to match your strategy to the situation.

2. What kind of change leader am I?

   • the answer has implications for how you should adjust your leadership style.

The STARS Model defines a framework of situation assessment.

You’re unlikely to encounter a pure of a STARS situation. At a high level your situation may fit into one of these categories. But as soon as you drill down, you will almost certainly discover that you’re managing a portfolio—of products, projects, processes, or people—that represents a mix of STARS situations.

Identify the elements (process, product, project, perhaps even complete businesses) in your new responsibilities fall into the various STARS situations . You do not need to have something in every category. Everything may be in turnaround, or it may be a mix of two or three types. Then use the third column to estimate the percentage of your effort that should be allocated to each category in the next 90 days. See template:

In turnarounds, leaders must move people out of a state of despair. Early win may come from raising people’s awareness of the need for change, by providing facts and figures.

Negotiating success¶

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

How do you build a productive relationship with a new boss?¶

• Don’t stay away. If you have a boss who doesn’t reach out to you, or with whom you have uncomfortable interactions, you will have to reach out yourself.
• Get on your boss’s calendar regularly.
• Be sure your boss is aware of the issues you face and that you are aware of her expectations, especially whether and how they’re shifting.
• Don’t surprise your boss. It’s no fun bringing your boss bad news. However, most bosses consider it a far greater sin not to report emerging problems early enough. Worst of all is for your boss to learn about a problem from someone else.
• Don’t approach your boss only with problems. Ask your reports: “Don’t just bring me problems, bring me plans for how we can begin to address them.”
• Don’t run down your checklist to your boss. Use only three things you need to work on and need help.
• Don't expect your boss to change. it’s your responsibility to adapt to your boss’s style; you need to adapt your approach to work with your boss’s preferences.

Clarify expectations early and often.¶

Begin managing expectations from the moment you consider taking a new role. Focus on expectations during the interview process. You are in trouble if your boss expects you to fix things fast when you know the business has serious structural problems. It’s wise to get bad news on the table early and to lower unrealistic expectations. Then check in regularly to make sure your boss’s expectations have not shifted. Revisiting expectations is especially important if you’re onboarding from the outside and don’t have a deep understanding of the culture and politics.

Take 100 percent responsibility for making the relationship work.¶

This is the flip side of “Don’t stay away.” Don’t expect your boss to reach out or to offer you the time and support you need. It’s best to begin by assuming that it’s on your shoulders to make the relationship work. If your boss meets you partway, it will be a welcome surprise.

Negotiate time lines for diagnosis and action planning.¶

• Don't start firefighting
• Diagnose the new organization and come up with an action plan.
• Aim for early wins in areas important to the boss. What are his priorities and goals, and how do your actions fit into this picture?
• focus on three important things to your boss and discuss what you’re doing about them every time you interact. In that way, your boss will feel ownership of your success.

Pursue good marks from those whose opinions your boss respects.¶

• Simply be alert to the multiple channels through which information and opinion about you will reach your boss.

Plan for five conversations within the 90 days.¶

• The situational diagnostic conversation to assess the STARS as seen by the boss. Build the stars map before meeting, have a clear learning plan and work effort % per element, bullet list how the boss can help

• The expectation conversation. Assess expectations, short and medium terms. What will constitute success? Critically, how will your performance be measured? When?

  • Closely align your expectations with your shared assessment of the situation.
  • Aim for Early Wins in Areas Important to Your Boss.
  • Know the things own by your boss that are untouchables.
  • Underpromise and Overdeliver to get credibility.
  • don’t let key issues remain ambiguous. Ambiguity about goals and expectations is dangerous.

• The resource conversation. What do you need to be successful? What do you need your boss to do? Key here is to focus your boss on the benefits and costs of what you can accomplish with different amounts of resources.

  • you must have agreement with your boss on your STARS portfolio and associated goals and expectations.
  • back them up with as much hard data as you can get, and prepare to explain exactly why you see certain resources as essential.
  • Better to push hard then to bleed deeply

• Apply the Technics of effective negotiation

  • Focus on underlying interests. understand the agendas of your boss and any others from whom you need to secure resources.
  • Look for mutually beneficial exchanges. Seek resources that both support your boss’s resource owner agenda and advance your own.
  • Link resource to results.

• The style conversation is about how you and your new boss can best interact on an ongoing basis.

  • What forms of communication does he prefer, and for what? Face-to-face? Voice, electronic?
  • How often?
  • What kinds of decisions does he want to be consulted on, and when can you make the call on your own?
  • How do your styles differ, and what are the implications for the ways you should interact?
  • understand what it takes to build a productive working relationship.
  • Scope Out the Dimensions of Your decision box. This is the confort zone of the boss to take decisions. What sorts of decisions does she want you to make on your own but tell her about? Are you free, for example, to make key personnel decisions? When does she want to be consulted before you decide?
  • Adapt to boss style. If there is a problem on style difference, asses if you can change, or address the issue with a meeting. One proven strategy is to focus your early conversations on goals and results instead of how you achieve them.

• The personal development conversation. Once you’re a few months into your new role, you can begin to discuss how you’re doing and what your developmental priorities should be.

  • Where are you doing well?
  • In what areas do you need to improve or do things differently?
  • Are there projects or special assignments you could undertake (without sacrificing focus)?

• 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? What kinds of guidance and support do you give them?

Secure early win¶

Executives plan and implement change in distinct waves: early learning, transition (with early wins), immersion, reshaping, consolidation. Your early wins should advance longer-term goals. Each wave should consist of distinct phases: learning, designing the changes, building support, implementing the changes, and observing results.

• What do you need to do during your transition to create momentum for achieving them?

  • new leader tailors early initiatives to build personal credibility, establish key relationships, and identify and harvest low-hanging fruit—the highest-potential opportunities for short-term improvements in organizational performance.
  • Focus on business priorities.

• How do people need to behave differently to achieve these goals?

  • Identify and support behavioral changes See template: Problematic behavior patterns
  • Describe as vividly as you can the behaviors you need to encourage and those you need to discourage.

• How do you plan to connect yourself to your new organization?

  • Who are your key audiences, and what messages 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 behavior change?

• What projects do you need to launch, and who will lead them?
• What predictable surprises could take you off track?