The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan: How to Take Charge, Build Your Team, and Get Immediate Results
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About this ebook
Your first 100 days in a new leadership role are critical to thesuccess of your mission, your relationship with your new team, andyour career. Turnover is high among new leaders who "didn't workout" and the costs to them and their organizations are dramatic.The solution is for every new leader to have an "onboarding" plan.This updated and revised third edition of the bestseller The NewLeader's 100-Day Action Plan delivers expert guidance toprepare executives for their new leadership roles, accelerate theirresults, and reduce turnover.
With new chapters and sample action plans, the thirdedition:
- Helps you assess the internal political culture you'll befacing
- Explains why your new job doesn't start on "Day 1" but on theday you accept the offer--and how to use the valuable time before"Day 1"
- Explains the "BRAVE" approach to motivating your new teammembers by understanding their Behaviors, Relationships, Attitudes,Values, and Environment
- Includes downloadable forms to help you plan
- Provides advice for your bosses—so they'll know how tohelp you succeed
The third edition also includes a new 100-Hour Action Plan forcrisis situations, which has been adopted by the American RedCross. The new edition also explains how to use social media andother communication tools to reach and motivate yourstakeholders.
Discover the right approach for your new role and engage yournew colleagues by fully understanding the unwritten rules of thenew context. The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan helpsdeliver better results faster.
Read more from George B. Bradt
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Reviews for The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan
10 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Great information presented in a practical way. Also great resources available on their website. The first half of the book is focused on the period before starting a new position which shows the criticality of starting well!
Book preview
The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan - George B. Bradt
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: An Executive Summary of the Onboarding Process
People-Plans-Practices—P3
Tactical Capacity
Building Blocks of Tactical Capacity
The 100-Day Action Plan
Make This Book Work for You
Part I: Become the Best Candidate for the Job
Chapter 1: Position Yourself for a New Role
Know Your Leadership Potential
Build a Career Plan
Communicate Your Readiness for Leadership
Chapter 2: Sell before You Buy
Thing 1
Thing 2
Thing 3
Be On
at All Times When Being Considered for a Promotion from Within
Negotiate for Success
Negotiating Worksheet
Make a Plan
For You
For Them
Sell Before You Buy: Summary and Implications
Part II: Discover Your New Role
Chapter 3: Map and Avoid the Most Common Land Mines
The Deadly Seven
Land Mine 1: Organization
Land Mine 2: Role
Land Mine 3: Personal
Land Mine 4: Relationship
Land Mine 5: Learning
Land Mine 6: Delivery
Land Mine 7: Adjustment
Map and Avoid the Most Common Land Mines: Summary and Implications
Chapter 4: Do Your Due Diligence before You Accept the Job Offer
How to Uncover Risk
Decide What Information to Collect
Organizational Risk
The 5Cs
Role Risk
Personal Risk
Identify Potential Sources of Information
Gather and Analyze the Information
What? So What? Now What?
Due Diligence: Summary and Implications
Part III: Take Control of Your Own Start
Chapter 5: Choose the Right Approach for the Business Context and the Culture You Face
Business Environment
The 5Cs
Organizational History
Recent Business Performance
Cultural Readiness for Change
Political Advice for a New Leader: Strategies for Winning Hearts and Minds, and Dealing with Feet-Draggers and the Openly Hostile
Shocking the System
Choose the Right Approach for the Business Context and Culture You Face: Summary and Implications
Chapter 6: Embrace and Leverage the Fuzzy Front End before Day One
Create Time, Take Action
Choose the Right Day to Be Day One
Game Changing
Communication Matters in the Fuzzy Front End
Identify Your Key Stakeholders
Craft Your Message
Manage Your Office Setup
Get Your Space Right for Your Best Productivity
Everything Communicates . . . And Not Always as Intended
Address Technology and Security Issues Early On
Know What You Can Expect in Support
Manage Your Personal and Family Setup
Conduct Prestart Meetings and Phone Calls
Leverage the Fuzzy Front End to Get Real Answers
What You See as Possible Just Might Define You
Prestart Conversations Have a Cascading Impact
Do Not Miss the Importance of New or Hidden Stakeholders
If They Can Have Early Influence, It Is Better to Meet Them Now
Discover Problems Early On
Deploy an Information Gathering and Learning Plan
Learning
Expectations
Implementation of Communication
Use Your Learning to Draft Your 100-Day Plan before Day One!
Fuzzy Front End: Summary and Implications
Chapter 7: Take Control of Day One
What Are You Going to Do on Day One?
Make Careful Choices about Your Day One Plan
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Start with Our Prototypical Agenda
Leverage Your Agenda as a Symbol of What’s Important
Choose Location, Signs, and Symbols with Care: People Will Notice
Understand the Culture
Don’t Necessarily Go to Where Your Boss Is
Leverage Your Message on Day One
Be Present
Be Mindful of the Unintended Consequences
Dress to Fit In
What Not to Do on Day One
Day One: Summary and Implications
Chapter 8: Motivate and Focus Your Team with Ongoing Communications (Including Social Media)
Where to Start and What You Need to Know
A Logical, Sequential Approach to a Communication Plan
Communication: Summary and Implications
Part IV: Implement Your 100-Day Action Plan
Chapter 9: Embed a Burning Imperative by Day 30
Creating the Burning Imperative
Don’t Hesitate to Burn Rubber on the Way to a Burning Imperative
Burning Imperative
Make It Happen
Workshop Attendance and Timing
Follow Through Consistently
Burning Imperative: Summary and Implications
Chapter 10: Exploit Key Milestones to Drive Team Performance by Day 45
Follow Through—Or Don’t Even Start
Milestones Are Checkpoints along the Way to a Defined Goal
Manage Milestone Updates with a Three-Step Process
Use Milestone Management at the Board Level
Milestones: Summary and Implications
Chapter 11: Overinvest in Early Wins to Build Team Confidence by Day 60
Don’t Wait Too Long to Build Momentum
Focus on the Results with the Most Impact
Champion the Champions
Charter the Team for the Win
Overinvest in Early Wins: Summary and Implications
Chapter 12: Secure ADEPT People in the Right Roles and Deal with Inevitable Resistance by Day 70
Don’t Wait
Don’t Let One Bad Apple Spoil the Batch
Keep People in the Right Roles
Cut the Pain Out Early (Or, at Least, as Early as Practical)
How Fast Should You Move on the Team?
A Pivotal Leadership Moment
Map Performance and Role
Secure ADEPT People in the Right Roles: Summary and Implications
Chapter 13: Evolve People, Plans, and Practices to Capitalize on Changing Circumstances
Capitalizing on Inevitable Changes
Adjust to the Inevitable Surprises
Major but Temporary Surprises
Major and Enduring
Don’t Forget Your Communication Efforts
Appendices
Appendix I: Deploy Six Basic Elements of Leadership
Appendix II: Complete a Situation Assessment to Inform Your Plan
Appendix III: Leverage These 15 Secrets to Become a Great Communicator
Appendix IV: Bring More Discipline to Your Strategic Planning Process
Appendix V: Manage People and Practices with Standardized Processes that Are Public and Visual
Appendix VI: Leading When You Were Promoted from Within or Internally Transferred
Appendix VII: Leading a Department/Team Merger, Reorganization, or Restart
Appendix VIII: The International Manager
Appendix IX: Leading through a Crisis
Appendix X: Onboarding
Appendix XI: Sample 100-Day Plans
Reference
About the Authors
Index
Copyright © 2011 by George B. Bradt, Jayme A. Check, Jorge E. Pedraza. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Bradt, George B.
The new leader’s 100-day action plan : how to take charge, build your team, and get immediate results / George B. Bradt, Jayme A. Check, Jorge E. Pedraza.—3rd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-118-09754-0 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-12147-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-12148-1 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-12149-8 (ebk)
1. Leadership—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Check, Jayme A. II. Pedraza, Jorge E. III. Title.
HD57.7.B723 2011
658.4’092—dc22
2011014935
Preface
The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan, first published in 2006, presents PrimeGenesis’s proven solutions, techniques, and suggested action items for each stage of a leader’s first 100 days in a new position. Filled with examples, case studies, and tools, the book shows leaders and their sponsors exactly how to build high-performing teams with lasting power that can deliver better results faster. As the concepts of onboarding and transition acceleration continue to take hold and mature, interest in our approach has remained strong with the first two editions of this book having sold more than 50,000 copies worldwide.
Despite the increased awareness and energy around the importance for new leaders to have a comprehensive onboarding plan, leadership turnover continues to be a big problem for organizations and for the leaders themselves. Forty percent of new leaders fail in their first 18 months.¹
In the context of these general market numbers, over the past eight years PrimeGenesis has been able to lower the failure rate for leaders it has helped around the world from 40 percent down to below 10 percent—a four-fold reduction in risk! The companies that have hired PrimeGenesis to deploy the methodologies discussed in the book have experienced higher rates of retention of senior leaders and higher rates of success on the part of those leaders’ meeting goals. The impact on budget, morale, and other employee retention has been significant. Since we finished the first edition of our book in 2005 we’ve gathered six more years of learning, stories, and methodology enhancements.
Thus, it’s appropriate to revise The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan again to make it even more valuable to you by:
Taking a BRAVE new approach to culture and context. We have added a new comprehensive approach on how to engage hearts and minds in the intended culture. Now included is explicit guidance on how to assess and manage the business and internal political context and how to use a BRAVE approach to assessing culture, which looks at Behaviors, Relationships, Attitudes, Values, and Environment.
Applying social media to onboarding. To address the changes that social media has brought to communication and leadership, we have shifted the emphasis of the communication chapter to downplay sequential, programmatic communication campaigns and present a current, dynamic, iterative, and interactive approach to conversations across a network of multiple stakeholders, and across a wide variety of media.
Incorporating more robust crisis management techniques. We have added a new appendix on a 100-Hour Action Plan for crisis situations. This iterative approach to crisis management has already been adopted and deployed by the American Red Cross and has enabled it to improve its disaster response time frame significantly by starting to do things on the second day after a disaster that it previously was not doing until the sixth day.
Providing advice for the new leader’s boss. For a whole new perspective on onboarding, we have added an appendix on onboarding a new leader, with advice for the new leader’s boss drawn from George Bradt and Mary Vonnegut’s Onboarding book (2009).²
Including sample 100-Day Action Plans. In response to clients and readers’ requests, we have added an appendix with sample 100-Day Action Plans to show what completed plans might look like.
Adding more downloadable forms. We have added new downloadable forms and updated the existing ones to reflect our updated approach—all available at www.onboardingtools.com.
Adding and updating stories, examples, hot tips, and questions. These illustrate key points and underscore new concepts.
Key Benefits
This book provides several benefits in that it:
1. Reduces the risk of failure (and increases longevity) for new leaders.
2. Provides tools for leaders moving into complex, cross-cultural roles.
3. Provides leaders with an easily deployed yet comprehensive plan for executing on a strategy.
4. Provides several proven tools, techniques, and tricks of the trade that enable leaders to monitor, measure, and keep their success on track.
5. Provides detailed plans for leaders to address essential strategic, operational, organizational, and cross-cultural concerns in their first 100 days.
6. Positions new leaders and their teams to deliver better results faster.
7. Provides a practical look at the top landmines that derail leaders in their first 18 months and supplies remedies to avoid those landmines.
8. Provides a detailed approach to communication that enables leaders to craft and deploy key messages across a network of audiences by using a comprehensive set of media.
9. Provides an onboarding framework (and team management framework) that can be consistently deployed within an organization.
10. Reduces organizations’ risk and increases retention rates in hiring or promoting new leaders.
We’re excited about this edition and hope you are, too.
¹The 40 percent failure rate came from a 1998 study by Manchester, Inc., confirmed by a Heidrick & Struggles study in 2009.
²Bradt, George, and Vonnegut, Mary, 2009. Onboarding: How to Get Your New Employees Up to Speed in Half the Time. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Acknowledgments
We did not write this book as much as discover it. To a large degree, it is the product of all the transitions that have influenced all the people who have ever influenced us. Throughout our careers, we have learned by doing, by watching, and by interacting with a whole range of bosses, coaches, peers, subordinates, partners, and clients. We end every PrimeGenesis interaction with two questions: What was particularly valuable? How can we make it even more valuable? It is amazing what you can learn by asking.
What you have in your hands was born of continuing to ask those questions.
We would need a separate book to credit the people who have had the most positive influence on us over the years. But we must acknowledge the contributions of our past and current partners in PrimeGenesis. Their fingerprints are all over this book as we all work these ideas every day.
We are indebted to the clients of PrimeGenesis on several levels. We are the first to admit that we have learned as much from them as they have from us. We give our clients complete confidentiality so we have masked individuals and companies’ names in the stories involving any of our clients. We are blessed to have the opportunity to work with an extremely diverse group of clients. They run the gamut from the multinational to the small, public company to private, for-profit to not-for-profit. The executives we work with come from many industries, from almost every discipline imaginable, and from many parts of the world. With every client, we have learned something new. Clients inspire, challenge, and teach us on a daily basis, and for that we are grateful. You can learn more about our list of clients on our website at www.PrimeGenesis.com.
We also thank the readers around the world whose enthusiastic embrace of the ideas in this book has kept us motivated to keep it current. We have the good fortune of having truly engaged readers who download tools and then interact with us on a daily basis from around the globe. We thank you for buying the book, passing it on, and reaching out to us to share your ideas, praise, successes, and truly insightful questions.
Finally, abounding gratitude to our editor, Richard Narramore, our agent, Jim Levine, and our friend and sometimes skipper, Philip Ruppel, who introduced us to both of them. Without these three people, this book simply would not exist and you would not have the opportunity to benefit from the perspective and ideas it contains. So you should thank them, too. You will before you’re finished.
INTRODUCTION
An Executive Summary of the Onboarding Process
Are you a veteran CEO taking the reins of your next organization? Or starting a new role as a frontline supervisor? Or are you starting to plan ahead for such a transition? Whether you are joining a new organization from the outside, getting promoted from within, hitting a restart button with your existing team, or mapping out future possibilities, The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan will help you manage your leadership transition so you can take charge, build your team, and deliver better results faster than anyone thought possible.
We’ve found that 40 percent of executives hired at the senior level are pushed out, fail or quit within 18 months. It’s expensive in terms of lost revenue. It’s expensive in terms of the individual’s hiring. It’s damaging to morale.
—Kevin Kelly, CEO of executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, discussing the firm’s internal study of 20,000 searches.¹
What do these failed leaders not know or see? What do they not do? Why can’t they deliver? In most cases, they dig their own holes by missing one or more of the crucial tasks that must be accomplished in their first 100 days. Some don’t understand the impact of their early words and actions and inadvertently send their new colleagues the wrong messages. Some focus on finding a new strategy, but fail to get buy-in and fail to build trust with their new team. Some do a lot of work and expend a lot of energy without accomplishing the one or two things that their most important stakeholders are looking for. All are unaware of some of the important steps required to achieve a successful transition. No leader wants this to happen; but it does, at an alarming rate. This won’t happen to you. Not after reading this book! Let’s start at the beginning.
Our fundamental, underlying concept is:
Leadership is about inspiring and enabling others to do their absolute best together to realize a meaningful and rewarding shared purpose.
It’s not about you. It’s about them—those following your lead. How you set the direction and priorities and what you do to inspire and enable them is important. But what is even more important is what they hear, see, believe, feel, and accomplish together as a team. Leadership is about your ability to create an environment where your team can deliver remarkable results and love doing it. Effective leadership occurs when a team’s Behaviors, Relationships, Attitudes, Values, and Environment (per the BRAVE framework) are synchronized to achieve the best results possible.
The Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu expressed this particularly well more than 2,500 years ago:
The great leader speaks little. He never speaks carelessly. He works without self-interest and leaves no trace. When all is finished, the people say, We did it ourselves.
²
With that in mind, we have designed this book as an action plan, with a timeline and the key milestones you need to reach along the way to accelerate your own and your team’s success in your first or next 100 days. These factors are distilled from insights gleaned from our own leadership experiences and from the work of our firm, PrimeGenesis, whose sole mission is to help executives moving into complex new leadership roles, as well as their teams, deliver better results faster.³ You will read our own and our clients’ stories throughout this book (masked to preserve confidentiality). We hope you will find this to be a practical handbook that helps you know what you need to know, see what you need to see, and do what you need to do for you and your team to deliver better results faster.
Over the years, we have noticed that many new leaders show up for a new role happy and smiling, but without a plan. Neither they, nor their organizations have thought things through in advance. On their first day, they are welcomed by such confidence-building remarks as: Oh, you’re here . . . we’d better find you an office.
Ouch!
Some enlightened organizations have a better process in place. If you are lucky, you will be associated with an organization that actually puts people in charge of preparing for a leader’s transition into a new role. Imagine the difference when a new leader is escorted to an office that is fully set up for her, complete with computer, passwords, phones, files, information, and a 30-day schedule of orientation and assimilation meetings.
Better . . . but still not good enough. Even if the company has done this for you, if you have waited until this moment to start, you are already behind, and you have stacked the odds against yourself. Paradoxically, the best way to accelerate a transition into a new leadership role is to pause long enough to think through and put a plan in place—and then get a head start on implementing it.
We started PrimeGenesis in 2002 having noticed the difference between leaders who have a plan, hit the ground running, and make an impact on their first day, and leaders who wait until Day One to start planning. Since then, we have created and deployed a set of tools and techniques that help executives quickly and effectively transition into new leadership roles. Our work with executives has helped them and their teams deliver better results faster and reduce their failure rate from 40 percent to less than 10 percent at organizations that include American Express, Cadbury, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft, Kimberly-Clark, LexisNexis, MillerCoors, MTV Networks, Novo-Nordisk, Pearson, Playtex, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and UBS, as well as numerous not-for-profit organizations.
The core principles and techniques we deploy to make our impact on senior leaders are the ones described in this book. The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan is the plan we help executives develop and deliver. The tools work for leaders transitioning into new roles at any level. Keep in mind that in today’s world, the next 100 days are not going to be anything like the last 100 days. Thus, we are all new leaders all the time and must treat the next 100 days as though they were the first 100 days of the rest of our careers. They are.
The three main ideas are:
1. Get a head start. Day One is a critical pivot point for people joining from outside the company. The same is true for the formal announcement of someone getting promoted or transferred from within. In both situations, you can accelerate progress by getting a head start and hitting the ground running. Preparation breeds confidence and a little early momentum goes a long way.
2. Manage the message. Everything communicates. People read things into everything you say and do, and everything you don’t say and don’t do. You’re far better off choosing and guiding what others see and hear, and when they see and hear it, rather than letting happenstance or others make those choices for you.
3. Build the team. The first 100 days is the best time to put in place the basic building blocks of a high-performing team. You will fail if you try to do everything yourself, without the support and buy-in of your team. As a team leader, your own success is inextricably linked to the success of the team as a whole.
These three core ideas are built on the frameworks of highly effective teams and organizations that we have developed and to which we’ll refer throughout the book (see Figure I.1). It’s helpful to explain them up front. First, the headlines:
FIGURE I.1 Core Frameworks
High-performing teams and organizations are built of people, plans, and practices aligned around a shared purpose.
Tactical capacity bridges the gap between strategy and execution, ensuring that a good strategy doesn’t fail because of bad execution.
Five building blocks underpin a team’s tactical capacity: communication, Burning Imperative, milestones, early wins, and roles.
People-Plans-Practices—P³
An organization or team’s performance is based on aligning its people, plans, and practices around a shared purpose. This involves getting ADEPT⁴ people in the right roles with the right support, getting clarity around the strategies and action steps included in plans, and getting practices in place that enable people to work together in a systematic and effective way. The heart of this is the organization’s purpose. For that to be genuinely shared, it must be meaningful, clearly understood, and rewarding for each of the people contributing to make its aspiration real.
Tactical Capacity
Tactical capacity is a team’s ability to work under difficult, changing conditions and to translate strategies into tactical actions decisively, rapidly, and effectively. It is the essential bridge between strategy and execution. In contrast to other work groups that move slowly, with lots of direction and most decision making coming from the leader, high-performing teams with strong tactical capacity empower each member, communicating effectively with the team and the leader (you), to come up with critical solutions to the inevitable problems that arise on an ongoing basis and to implement them quickly. The goal is high-quality responsiveness and it takes a truly cohesive BRAVE teamwork to make it happen. High-performing teams build on strategy and plans with ADEPT people and practices to implement ever-evolving and acutely responsive actions that work.
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
—Attributed to Charles Darwin
You have seen this yourself. You have been on teams with members who operate in disconnected silos, incapable of acting without specific direction from above. They may know the strategy. They may have the resources they need, but any variation or change paralyzes them. FEMA actually had run the drill on a major hurricane in New Orleans months before Katrina hit. But the plan collapsed with the first puff of wind because no one could react flexibly and insightfully to a situation that was different from what they had expected.
In contrast, a great example of tactical capacity at work was the way NASA team members came together during the Apollo 13 crisis. Right from Houston, we’ve had a problem,
the team reacted flexibly and fluidly to a dramatic and unwelcome new reality—a crippling explosion en route, in space. The team went beyond its standard operating