The First 90 Days (36 page)

This document was created by an unregistered ChmMagic, please go to http://www.bisenter.com to register it. Thanks.

Putting It All Together: Your 90-Day Plan

No matter what type of situation you are entering, it can be useful to put together a 90-day plan and to get buy-in from your boss. Usually, you will be able to devise a plan after a couple of weeks in the new job, when you have begun to connect with the organization and to get the lay of the land.

Your 90-day plan should be written, even if it just consists of bullet points. It should specify priorities and goals as well as milestones. Critically, you should share it with your boss and seek buy-in for it. It should serve as a “contract”

between the two of you about how you are going to spend your time, spelling out both what you will do and what you will not do.

To begin to develop your plan, divide the 90 days into three blocks of 30 days. At the end of each block, you will have a review meeting with your boss. (Naturally, you are likely to interact more often than that.) You should typically devote the first block of 30 days to learning and building personal credibility. Like Michael Chen, you should negotiate for this early learning period and then try to hold your boss to that agreement. Then you can proceed to develop a learning agenda and learning plan for yourself. Set weekly goals for yourself and establish a personal discipline of weekly evaluation and planning.

Your key outputs at the end of the first 30 days will be a diagnosis of the situation, identification of key priorities, and a plan for how you will spend the next 30 days. This plan should address where and how you will begin to seek some early wins. Your review meeting with your boss should focus on the situation and expectations conversations, with an eye to reaching consensus about the situation, clarification of expectations, and buy-in to your plan for the next 30

days. Continue the weekly discipline of evaluation and planning.

At the 60-day mark, your review meeting should focus on assessing your progress toward the goals of your plan for the previous 30 days. You should also discuss what you plan to achieve in the next 30 days (that is, by the end of 90

days). Depending on the situation and your level in the organization, your goals at this juncture might include identifying the resources necessary to pursue major initiatives, fleshing out your initial assessments of strategy and structure, and presenting some early assessments of your team.

This document was created by an unregistered ChmMagic, please go to http://www.bisenter.com to register it. Thanks

.

Developing Yourself as a Boss

Finally, you won’t merely
have
a new boss; you are likely to
be
a new boss as well. You will almost certainly have new subordinates. Just as you need to develop a productive relationship with your new boss, so too they need to work effectively with you. In the past, have you done a good job of helping subordinates make their own transitions? What might you do differently this time?

Think about how to apply all the advice in this chapter to working with your own direct reports. The golden rule of transitions is to transition others as you would wish to be transitioned yourself (see “
The Golden Rule of Transitions
”).

The same five-conversation framework can help to build productive relationships with the people who report to you.

Introduce the framework to them right away and schedule a first conversation with each of them to talk about the situation and about your expectations. Get them to do some pre-work before the meeting—for example, reading

chapter 3
on matching strategy to situation. See how fast you can accelerate their transitions.

The Golden Rule of Transitions

Think about how you would like new bosses to help you transition into new roles. Ideally, what kinds of guidance and support would they give you? Now think about how you deal with new direct reports. What kinds of guidance and support do you give them? Now juxtapose these assessments. Do you transition others as you would wish to be transitioned yourself? If there is a big inconsistency between how you would prefer to be dealt with as a new direct report and how you deal with new direct reports, then you are part of the problem.

Helping direct reports to accelerate their transitions is about more than being a good manager and contributing to others’ development. The faster your direct reports get up to speed, the better able they will be to help you reach your goals.

Finally, seek to learn from bad bosses as well as good ones. You will inevitably experience a less-than-stellar boss at some point in your career. A surprising number of managers remark that “I’ve learned more from my bad bosses than my good ones.” Bad bosses forced them to think about the negative impact of a bad boss. If you find yourself suffering under a bad boss, take the time to figure out his or her faults and what good bosses do differently, and then apply those insights to yourself.

ACCELERATION CHECKLIST

1. How effectively have you built relationships with new bosses in the past? What have you done well? In what areas do you need improvement?

2. Create a plan for the situational diagnosis conversation. Based on what you know now, what issues will you raise with your boss in this conversation? What do you want to say up front? In what order do you want to raise issues?

3. Create a plan for the expectations conversation. How will you figure out what your new boss expects you to do?

4. Create a plan for the style conversation. How will you figure out how your boss prefers to interact with you? What mode of communication (e-mail, voicemail, face-to-face) does he or she prefer?

How often should you interact? How much detail should you provide? What types of issues should you consult with him or her about before deciding?

5. Create a plan for the resources conversation. Given what you need to do, what resources are absolutely needed? With fewer resources, what would you have to forgo? If you had more resources, what would the benefits be? Be sure to build the business case!