The First 90 Days (28 page)

Identify two or three key areas, at most, where you will seek to achieve rapid improvement. If you take on too many initiatives, you risk losing focus. But don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Think about risk management: Build a promising portfolio of early-win initiatives so that big successes in one will balance disappointments in others. Then focus relentlessly on getting results.

To set the stage for securing early wins, your learning agenda should specifically address how you will identify promising opportunities for improvement. To translate your goals into specific initiatives to secure early wins, work through the following guidelines:

Keep your long-term goals in mind.
The actions that you take to secure early wins should, to the greatest extent possible, serve your A-item priorities and long-term goals for behavior change.

Identify a few promising focal points.
Focal points are areas or processes (such as the customer service processes for Elena Lee) where improvement can dramatically strengthen the organization’s overall operational or financial performance. Other examples of focal points might include a mutual fund company’s process for reporting to the Securities and Exchange Commission or a pharmaceutical company’s handoff from research to marketing.

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Concentrate on the most promising focal points.
Mastering a few focal points you identify will reduce the time and energy needed to achieve tangible results. Improving performance early in these areas will win you freedom and space to pursue more extensive changes.

Launch pilot projects.
Design promising pilot initiatives, targeted at your chosen focal points, that you can undertake right away. Successful early projects set your overall plan in motion, energize your people, and yield real improvements. This is what Elena Lee did first to begin to improve customer service in her new organization.

Elevate change agents.
Identify the people in your new unit, at all levels, who have the insight, drive, and incentives to advance your agenda. Promote them, as Elena Lee did, to positions of increasing responsibility. Then send a message to everyone else by rewarding them lavishly for success.

Leverage the pilot projects to introduce new behaviors.
Your early pilot projects, like Elena Lee’s, should serve as models of how you want your organization, unit, or group to function in the future.

Use the checklist in the accompanying box to help plan pilot projects with maximum impact.

Pilot Project Checklist

For each pilot project you set up to secure early wins, use this checklist to be sure you are setting high standards for the kinds of behavior you want to encourage.

What is the right mix of people, in terms of knowledge, skills, and personal chemistry?

Who has the credibility, the project management skills, and the creativity to lead the project?

What are achievable “stretch” goals?

What are achievable deadlines?

What coaching or framework will you provide to guide team problem solving and decision making?

What other resources are necessary for success?

How will you hold people accountable for achieving superior results?

How will you reward success?

Avoiding Predictable Surprises

All your efforts to secure early wins could come to naught if you don’t pay attention to identifying ticking time bombs and preventing them from exploding in your face. If they do explode, your focus will instantly shift to continuous firefighting, and your hopes for systematically getting established and building momentum will fly out the window.

Some bolts from the blue really do come out of the blue. When this happens, you simply have to gird your loins and mount the best crisis response that you can. But far more often new leaders are taken off track by what my colleague Max Bazerman and I call “predictable surprises.” These are situations in which people have all the information

[4]

necessary to identify the problem and take corrective action but fail to do so.

This often happens because the new leader simply doesn’t look in the right places or ask the right questions. As discussed in
chapter 1
, we have preferences about the types of problems we like to work on and those we prefer to avoid or don’t feel competent to address. If you are a marketing person and are taking on leadership of a new product launch team, it would not be surprising if you focused more on the marketing aspects than on the manufacturing ramp-up. But you will also have to discipline yourself either to dig into areas in which you are not fully comfortable or to find trustworthy people with the necessary expertise to do so.

Another reason for predictable surprises is that different parts of the organization have different pieces of the puzzle,

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but no one puts them together. Every organization has its information silos. If you don’t put processes in place to make sure that critical information is surfaced and integrated, then you are putting yourself at risk of being predictably surprised.

Use the following set of questions to identify areas where potential problems may be lurking:
External environment.
Could trends in public opinion, government action, or economic conditions precipitate major problems for your unit? Examples: A change in government policy that favors competitors or unfavorably influences your prices or costs; a major shift in public opinion about the health or safety implications of using your product; an emerging economic crisis in a developing country.

Customers, markets, competitors, and strategy.
Are there developments in the competitive situation confronting your organization that could pose major challenges? Examples: A study suggesting that your product is inferior to that of a competitor; a new competitor that is offering a lower-cost substitute; a price war.

Internal capabilities.
Are there potential problems with your unit’s processes, skills, and capabilities that could precipitate a crisis? Examples: An unexpected loss of key personnel; major quality problems at a key plant; a product recall.

Organizational politics.
Are you in danger of unwittingly stepping on a political land mine? Examples: Certain people in your unit are “untouchable,” but you don’t know it; you fail to recognize that a key peer is subtly undermining you.

[4]See Michael Watkins and Max Bazerman, “Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming,”

Harvard Business Review,
March 2003.