The First 90 Days (59 page)

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Staying on Track

You will have to fight to keep your balance every single day. Ultimately, your success or failure will flow from all the small choices you make along the way. These choices can create momentum—for the organization and for you—or they can result in death by a thousand cuts. Your day-to-day actions during your transition establish the pattern for all that follows, not just for the organization but also for your personal efficacy and ultimately your well-being.

ACCELERATION CHECKLIST

1. What are your greatest vulnerabilities in your new job? How do you plan to compensate for them?

2. What personal disciplines do you most need to develop or enhance? How will you do that? What will success look like?

3. What can you do to gain more control over your local environment?

4. What can you do to ease your family’s transition? What support relationships will you have to build? Which are your highest priorities?

5. What are your priorities for strengthening your advice-and-counsel network? To what extent do you need to focus on your internal network? Your external network? In which domain do you most need additional support: technical, political, or personal?

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Chapter 10: Expedite Everyone

Overview

The strategies laid out in the preceding chapters should propel you on your way to reaping the rewards of a stunningly successful transition. But that doesn’t mean you are done. What about your direct reports and their direct reports? Don’t you have a stake in the success of their transitions?

In doing the research for this book, I set out to solve a mystery. Why do so few companies make it an organizational priority to accelerate the transitions of their managers? To put it another way, why wouldn’t companies try to capture the potential benefits of speeding up everyone’s transitions? Roughly 25 percent of the managers in a typical company take new jobs each year, and each person in transition affects many others. So it is surprising how few companies pay attention to accelerating transitions. A few companies (GE, for example) explicitly teach their managers how to accelerate their transitions. More common are “assimilation” programs that introduce outside hires to the strategy, businesses, and culture of the company. Although useful, such programs seldom provide guidance on systematically managing the
process
of a successful transition. The vast majority of companies do not provide any support at all.

Why is this the case? Part of the explanation lies in changes in leadership development. The flattening of hierarchies and the faster pace of business have shrunk the amount of time line managers can devote to developing and counseling their direct reports, including during critical transition periods. To compensate, professional education-and-development units have assumed increasing responsibility for leadership development. The result has been significant advances in the development of “hard” skills. But the price has been a dramatic reduction in the transfer of managerial wisdom from senior managers to their less experienced counterparts, particularly regarding

“soft” skills like how to take charge in a new role.

“Sink-or-swim” managerial culture is a second barrier. Many companies treat transitions as a way of winnowing talent—an approach I call
Darwinian leadership development
. Promising managers are dumped into the deep end of the pool to test their evolutionary fitness for advancement. The swimmers are deemed to have high potential, and the sinkers . . . sink. In some organizations, this process verges on hazing: As we have suffered, so shall ye. One senior executive said to me, without a trace of irony, “You’re not going to make this [transitioning] too easy for them, are you?” As if that were possible. In particularly dysfunctional organizations, competing factions even maneuver unwary up-and-comers into roles in which they will fail and so end up out of the running for more senior positions.

That said, there is no question that transitions are a key element of a comprehensive approach to leadership development. Recall that in McKinsey & Company’s 1998 “war for talent” survey, the types of experiences considered the “most important for development” all involved transitions. The top three were a new position with large scope,

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turning around a business, and starting a new business.

However, developing leaders does not mean sending them

into challenging situations unprepared. A fundamental flaw in the Darwinian approach to leadership development is that there are many kinds of transitions, and therefore the lessons younger managers learn may not equip them for the next level or for a new type of business situation. The result? Some high-potential people make early mistakes and drown. Others swim, but only because they end up in the right kind of position or have the right lifeguard looking out for them.

Organizations are not well served in the long run by unregulated Darwinian leadership development. It’s like the free market run amok, without the safeguards provided by rules and regulations. The best companies definitely are meritocracies. Their leaders compete to rise to the top and continually reinvigorate the enterprise. But true meritocracies start with a level playing field. People succeed because they have the right stuff and not because they get placed in situations that happen to be good matches to their skills.

The tenth and final challenge, therefore, is to
expedite everyone
by institutionalizing the transition acceleration model presented in this book. If
all
the leaders who take on new positions in your organization use these success strategies, you will not just prevent failures, you will also capture potentially massive gains from accelerating everyone. The faster everyone settles in, the faster the organization can begin to make the right moves to gain market share, cut costs, and launch more new products.