The First 90 Days (27 page)

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don’t) get there. Put another way, if you are to achieve your A-item priorities by the end of your era, you may have to address dysfunctional patterns of behavior.

Start by identifying the unwanted behaviors. For example, Elena Lee wanted to reduce the fear and disempowerment in her organization. Then work out, as Elena did, a clear vision of how you would like people to behave by the end of your tenure in the job, and plan how your actions in pursuit of early wins will advance the process of behavior change.

What behaviors do people in your organization consistently display that undermine the potential for high performance?

Take a look at
table 4-1
, which lists some common but problematic behavior patterns, and then summarize your thoughts about the behaviors you would like to change.

Table 4-1: Problematic Behavior Patterns

Lack of . . .

Symptoms

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 excuses 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 envelope.

Teamwork

Team members compete with one another and protect turf rather

than working together to achieve collective goals.

People are rewarded for creating fiefdoms.

Sense of urgency

Team members ignore the needs of external and internal

customers.

Complacency reigns, revealed in beliefs such as “We’re the best

and always have been” and “It doesn’t matter if we respond

immediately; it won’t make any difference.”

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Securing Early Wins

Armed with an understanding of your A-item priorities and objectives for behavior change, you can proceed to create detailed plans for how you will secure early wins during your first 90 days and beyond. You should think about what you need to do in two phases: building credibility in the first 30 days and deciding where you will focus your energy to achieve early performance improvements in the following 60 days.

Building Credibility

In your first few weeks in your new job, you cannot hope to have a measurable impact on performance, but you can score small victories and signal that things are changing. Your objective at this early stage is to build personal credibility.

Because your earliest actions will have a disproportionate influence on how you are perceived, think through how you will get “connected” to your new organization. What messages do you want to get across about who you are and what you represent? What are the best ways to convey those messages?

Identify your key audiences—direct reports, other employees, key outside constituencies—and craft a few messages tailored to each. These need not be about what you plan to do; that’s premature. They should focus instead on who you are, the values and goals you represent, your style, and how you plan to conduct business.

Think about modes of engagement too.
How
will you introduce yourself? Should your first meetings with direct reports be one-on-one or in a group? Will these meetings be informal get-to-know-you sessions or will they immediately focus on business issues and assessment? What other channels, such as e-mail and video, will you use to introduce yourself more widely? Will you have early meetings at other locations where your organization has facilities?

As you make progress in getting connected, identify and act as quickly as you can to remove minor but persistent irritants in your new organization. Focus on strained external relationships and begin to repair them. Cut out redundant meetings, shorten excessively long ones, or improve physical-space problems. All this helps you to build personal credibility early on.

When you arrive, people will rapidly begin to assess you and your capabilities. Your credibility, or lack of it, will depend on how people in the organization would answer the following questions about you: Do you have the insight and steadiness to make tough decisions?

Do you have values that they relate to, admire, and want to emulate?

Do you have the right kind of energy?

Do you demand high levels of performance from yourself and others?

For better or worse, they will begin to form opinions based on little data. Your early actions, good and bad, will shape perceptions. Once opinion about you has begun to harden, it is difficult to change. And the opinion-forming process happens remarkably quickly.

So how do you build personal credibility? In part it is about marketing yourself effectively, much akin to building equity in a brand. You want people to associate you with attractive capabilities, attitudes, and values. There’s no single right answer for how to do this. In general, though, new leaders are perceived as more credible when they are
demanding but able to be satisfied.
Effective leaders press people to make realistic commitments and then hold them to those promises. But if you are never satisfied, you’ll sap people’s motivation.

accessible but not too familiar.
Being accessible does not mean making yourself available indiscriminately. It means being approachable, but in a way that preserves your authority.

decisive but judicious.
New leaders communicate their capacity to take charge without jumping too quickly into decisions that they are not ready to handle. Early in your transition, you want to project This document was created by an unregistered ChmMagic, please go to http://www.bisenter.com to register it. Thanks

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decisiveness but defer important decisions until you know enough to make them.

focused but flexible.
Avoid setting up a vicious cycle and alienating others by coming across as rigid and unwilling to consider multiple solutions to a problem. Effective new leaders establish authority by zeroing in on issues but consulting others and encouraging input.

active without causing commotion.
There’s a fine line between building momentum and overwhelming your group or unit. Make things happen, but avoid pushing people to the point of burnout.

willing to make tough calls but humane.
You may have to make tough calls right away, including letting marginal performers go. Effective new leaders do what needs to be done, but they do it in ways that preserve peoples’ dignity and that others perceive as fair.

Leveraging “Teachable Moments”

Your actions during your first few weeks in the organization will have symbolic resonance. To illustrate this, consider the experience of Lara Moore, who took over an underperforming unit at a major financial services company. Based on her early diagnosis, Lara knew the unit suffered from a severe case of bureaucratic sclerosis. This problem was symbolized by the floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets that her predecessor had maintained, documenting all his transactions and decisions, however trivial. One of Lara’s first acts was to have all these cabinets removed, as people in the office looked on in amazement.

Early actions often get transformed into stories, which can define you as hero or villain. Do you take the time to informally introduce yourself to the support staff or do you focus only on your boss, peers, and direct reports?

Something as simple as this can help to brand you as “accessible” or “remote.” How you introduce yourself to the organization, how you treat support staff, how you deal with small irritants—all of these pieces of behavior can become the kernels of stories that circulate widely.

To nudge the mythology in a positive direction, look for and leverage
teachable moments
. These are actions—such as the way that Elena Lee dealt with recalcitrant supervisors—that clearly display what you are about; they also model the kinds of behavior you want to encourage. They need not be dramatic statements or confrontations. It can be as simple, and as hard, as asking the penetrating question that crystallizes your group’s understanding of some key problem they are confronting.

Securing Tangible Results

Building personal credibility and developing some key relationships helps you get some immediate wins. Soon, however, you should be identifying opportunities to get some quick, tangible performance improvement in the business. The best candidates are problems that you can tackle reasonably quickly with modest expenditure and that will yield visible operational and financial gains. Examples include bottlenecks that restrict productivity and incentive programs that undermine performance by causing conflict.