The First 90 Days (7 page)

[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.

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Success Strategies for New Leaders

Why is so little good advice available about accelerating transitions? In part, the answer is because there are many different kinds of transitions; thus, it is not enough to come up with general rules or one-size-fits-all advice. Consider the following pairs of transition situations. How do the definitions of success and the imperatives for making effective transitions differ in these cases?

Promotion to a more senior role in marketing versus moving from marketing to a position as general manager of a business unit

Moving to a new position within your existing organization versus moving to a new company Moving from a staff position to line management versus moving from line to staff Taking over a group facing very serious problems versus taking over a group widely and accurately viewed as very successful

The point? The challenges of transition acceleration vary depending on situational factors. It matters a great deal whether you are making a key career “passage” in terms of level in the organization, whether you are an insider or an

[11]

outsider, whether you have formal authority, and whether you are taking over a successful or troubled group.

Thus, it is essential that you match your strategy to the situation you face.

Practical advice has to be tailored to the situation, the level of the new leader, his or her experience with the organization, and the condition of the business. That is the fundamental goal of this book: to provide new leaders with practical frameworks for diagnosing their situations and developing their own customized transition acceleration plans.

To illustrate the power of a systematic approach to transition acceleration, consider the challenge a new leader faces in diagnosing his new organization’s business situation. How does he characterize the challenges and opportunities?

How does he reach consensus with his new boss and direct reports about what actions need to be taken? Without a conceptual framework to guide diagnosis and planning, this turns out to be a lot of work. It is also easy to blunder into dangerous misunderstandings with bosses or direct reports about what needs doing. Even if the new leader achieves the necessary shared understanding, he is likely to have consumed significant time and energy in the process and might have missed some important opportunities and failed to identify some ticking time bombs.

Now suppose instead that the new leader is counseled to figure out early on whether his new job is a
start-up,
turnaround, realignment,
or
sustaining-success
situation. Suppose too that he has clear descriptions of the challenges and opportunities typical of each of these situations and actionable guidelines for establishing priorities in each one.

What changes?

This diagnostic tool, called the STARS model (for Start-up, Turnaround, Realignment, and Sustaining success), is developed in detail in
chapter 3
. It powerfully accelerates the new leader’s diagnosis of his new organization and his development of effective action plans. It also helps the new leader to more rapidly reach a shared understanding of the situation with other key players, including his boss and direct reports. Whether he is taking over an entire organization or managing a group or a short-term project, he can use this tool to accelerate his transition.

So take heart. There are structural similarities in challenges and opportunities, and corresponding guidelines—must do’s and don’t do’s—for different types of transitional situations. The key is to engage in careful diagnosis and then adapt some general principles to the demands of the situation.

[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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Plan of the Book

The rest of the book provides a road map for creating your 90-day acceleration plan. The conceptual backbone of the road map is ten key transition challenges: