The First 90 Days (64 page)

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Conclusion: Beyond Sink or Swim

The goal of this book is to move you— and your organization—beyond the sink-or-swim approach to managing transitions. If you apply the strategies laid out in the previous ten chapters systematically, you will dramatically accelerate your ability to move into new roles and reach the breakeven point. The people who work for you likewise stand to benefit greatly if you help them to be more methodical in their approaches to transition acceleration. And the faster they get up to speed, the more they can help you achieve your goals.

My goal in highlighting the ten key transition challenges, and in presenting techniques for surmounting them, is to help you develop your situational awareness and augment your toolbox. Having spent a lot of time focusing on the trees, then, it is appropriate to step back and take a look at the forest as a whole.

At the beginning of the book, I laid out five core propositions concerning transitions and what it takes to be effective in meeting them. Let us conclude by taking a fresh look at them:

1.
The root causes of transition failure always lie in a pernicious interaction between the situation,
with its opportunities and pitfalls, and the individual, with his or her strengths and vulnerabilities.

Your success or failure rests, to no small degree, on your ability to diagnose your situation, identify its characteristic challenges and opportunities, and fashion promising action plans. If you don’t understand the demands of the situation, you will underperform or even fail outright.

Coupled with an understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses, thorough situational diagnosis will help you pinpoint vulnerabilities so you can take preventive actions.

2.
There are systematic methods that leaders can employ to both lessen the likelihood of failure and
reach the breakeven point faster.
The difference between transitioning into a lower-level management position and becoming CEO is more a matter of degree than of kind. Of course, senior managers must address issues (such as organizational alignment, building a top team, and managing external constituencies) that are outside the purview of lower-level managers. But most of the basic imperatives—promote yourself, match strategy to your situation, accelerate your learning, secure early wins, create coalitions—apply at all levels, as do the fundamental tools and planning guidelines. The overarching imperative, in all transitions, is to find ways to create value sooner and so reach the breakeven point more quickly. The value of putting together a 90-day plan is great regardless of your level.

3.
The overriding goal in a transition is to build momentum by creating virtuous cycles that build
credibility and by avoiding getting caught in vicious cycles that damage credibility.
Leadership is ultimately about leverage. Effective leaders leverage themselves—their ideas, energy, relationships, and influence—to create new patterns in organizations. The leader is just one person, and one person can accomplish very little alone. The ability to leverage oneself rests in turn on perceptions of personal credibility and demonstrated effectiveness. This is how small successes yield leadership capital that can be invested to yield larger returns. The underlying goal of the strategies presented in this book—whether getting early wins, creating coalitions, or building the team—is to help new leaders build momentum, and thus increase their leverage.

4.
Transitions are a crucible for leadership development and should be managed accordingly.
I hope this book has convinced you that Darwinian leadership development wastes time, energy, and talent. You should certainly use transitions into demanding new positions to challenge your up-and-coming leaders. But don’t just leave them to sink or swim. Teach them the transition acceleration skills they need to have a fighting chance. By leveling the playing field, you will also be better able to discern whose abilities really stand out.

5.

Successful adoption of a standard framework for accelerating transitions can yield big returns for
organizations.
Take the time to figure out how many people transition into new management roles in your organization in a typical year. Then estimate how many others each transitioning manager affects. What would you estimate as the net annual cost of transition in your organization? What would it be worth to reduce that cost by just 5 percent? Keeping people in jobs longer, as attractive as that might seem, is not the answer. Good people get bored after a few years and This document was created by an unregistered ChmMagic, please go to http://www.bisenter.com to register it. Thanks

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yearn for new challenges. The best approach is to help everyone in your organization to accelerate every transition.

If you are an experienced leader, you almost certainly are already using some of the approaches you encountered in the pages of this book. You may have said to yourself, “Aha, that’s what I was doing!” But some of your beliefs about what it takes to succeed in a new job should also have been reworked and refined. The biggest danger you face is belief in one-size-fits-all rules for success.

If you are still in an early stage of your career as a manager, you have many lessons yet to learn, but you haven’t picked up many bad habits either. You can get it right from the start. And you can work on honing your skills through the many transitions you will experience in the future.

Notes

1. Analysis of data from survey of participants in Harvard Business School’s 2003 YPO President’s Seminar and 2003 WPO/CEO Seminar.

2. Excellent exceptions to this general rule are John J. Gabarro,
The Dynamics of Taking Charge
(Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1987) and Linda A. Hill,
Becoming a Manager: How
New Managers Master the Challenges of Leadership,
2d ed. (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003).

3. For an excellent exploration of the challenges of moving from technical contributor to first-time manager, see Hill,
Becoming a Manager
.

4. Helen Handfield-Jones, “How Executives Grow,”
McKinsey Quarterly
1 (2000): 121.

5. This is an extrapolation of the results of a management transition survey of senior HR executives at
Fortune
500 companies that I conducted in 1999. The survey was sent to the heads of human resources at a random sample of 100
Fortune
500 companies. We received 40 responses. One question concerned the percentage of managers at all levels who took new jobs in 1998. The mean of the responses to this question was 22.3 percent. Extrapolated to the
Fortune
500 as a whole, this suggests that almost 700,000 managers take new jobs each year. The half-million figure is therefore a conservative estimate intended purely to illustrate the magnitude of the impact of leadership transitions.

6. Results are from the 1999 management transition survey that was sent to the heads of human resources at a random sample of 100
Fortune
500 companies (see previous note).

7. Analysis of data from survey of participants in Harvard Business School’s 2003 YPO President’s Seminar and 2003 WPO/CEO Seminar.

8. Results of a study by the Center for Creative Leadership, as cited in
Fortune
magazine. See Anne Fisher, “Don’t Blow Your New Job,”
Fortune,
22 June 1998. Brad Smart estimated the mishire rate to be over 50 percent. See Brad Smart,
Topgrading: How Leading Companies Win by Hiring,
Coaching, and Keeping the Best People
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999), 47.

9. This estimate comes from Brad Smart,
Topgrading,
46. Smart, a leading HR consultant, conducted a study that estimated the cost of a failed hire to be 24 times base compensation, assuming a base compensation of $114,000.

10. Data from 1999 management transition survey of heads of HR at
Fortune
500 companies.

11. For a discussion of key passages in the lives of managers, see Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel,
The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership-Powered Company
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001).

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1. Ivester’s story is chronicled in M. Watkins, C. Knoop, and C. Reavis, “The Coca-Cola Co. (A): The Rise and Fall of M. Douglas Ivester,” Case 9-800-355 (Boston: Harvard Business School, 2000).

2. C. Mitchell, “Challenges Await Coca-Cola’s New Leader,”
Atlanta Journal and Constitution,
27

October 1997.

3. P. Sellars, “Where Coke Goes from Here,”
Fortune,
13 October 1997.

4. “Clumsy Handling of Many Problems Cost Ivester Coca-Cola Board’s Favor,”
Wall Street Journal,
17 December 1999.

5. Chris Argyris, “Teaching Smart People How to Learn,”
Harvard Business Review,
May–June 1991.

6. See Ronald Heifetz,
Leadership Without Easy Answers
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1994).

1. For an informative exploration of organizational culture and the role of leaders in shaping it, see Edgar Schein,
Organizational Culture and Leadership,
2d ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992).

2. Geri Augusto, unpublished presentations to executive programs at the Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard Business School, Boston, MA.

1. See Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel,
The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the
Leadership-Powered Company
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001).

1.
See Dan Ciampa and Michael Watkins, ?Securing Early Wins,?
chapter 2
in
Right from the Start:
Taking Charge in a New Leadership Role
(Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999).

2. Stephen Leacock,
Laugh with Leacock: An Anthology of the Best Work of Stephen Leacock
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1981).

3. See John J. Gabarro,
The Dynamics of Taking Charge
(Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1987). This is a wonderful study of the transitions of general managers.

4. See Michael Watkins and Max Bazerman, “Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming,”
Harvard Business Review,
March 2003.

5. My colleague Amy Edmondson developed this very useful distinction.

1. This is an adaptation of the well-known McKinsey “7-S” organizational analysis framework. See R.

H. Waterman, T. J. Peters, and J. R. Phillips, “ Structure Is Not Organization,”
Business Horizons,
1980. For an overview, see “ Organizational Alignment: The 7-S Model,” Case 9-497-045 (Boston: Harvard Business School, 1996). The seven S’s are strategy, structure, systems, staffing, skills, style, and shared values.

2. The SWOT framework was originally described in the late 1960s by Edmund P. Learned, C.

Roland Christiansen, Kenneth Andrews, and William D. Guth in
Business Policy: Text and Cases
(Homewood, IL: Irwin, 1969).

3.

For an in-depth exploration of these issues, see Michael C. Jensen,
Foundations of