The First 90 Days (10 page)

Regardless of how much preparation time you get, start planning what you hope to accomplish by specific milestones.

You probably won’t have much time, but even a few hours of preentry planning go a long way. Begin by thinking about your first day in the new job. What do you want to do by the end of that day? Then move to the first week. Then focus on the end of the first month, the second month, and finally the three-month mark. These plans will be sketchy, but the simple act of beginning to plan will help clear your head.

Assess Your Vulnerabilities

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You have been offered your new position because those who hired you think you have the skills to succeed. You probably do.

But as we saw in the cases of Julia Gould and Douglas Ivester, it can be fatal to rely too much on what made you successful in the past. As one senior executive expressed it, “Everyone has an urge to work at one level below where they are. You need to work where you are, not where you were.”

One way to pinpoint your vulnerabilities is to assess your
problem preferences
—the kinds of problems toward which you naturally gravitate. Everyone likes to do some things more than others. Julia Gould’s preference was marketing; for Douglas Ivester it was finance and operations. Your preferences have probably influenced you to choose jobs where you can do more of what you like to do. As a result, you perfect those skills and feel most competent when you solve problems in those areas, which reinforces the cycle. This pattern is like exercising your right arm and ignoring your left: The strong arm gets stronger and the weak one atrophies. The risk, of course, is that you create an imbalance that leaves you vulnerable in situations in which success depends on being ambidextrous.

Table 1-1
is a simple tool for assessing your preferences for different kinds of business problems. Fill in each cell by assessing your intrinsic interest in
solving problems
in the domain in question. In the first cell, for example, ask yourself how much you like to work on appraisal and reward systems. This isn’t a comparative question; don’t compare this interest with others. Rank your interest in each type of problem separately, on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 10 (very much). Keep in mind that you are being asked about your intrinsic
interests,
not your skills or experience. Do not turn the page before completing the table.

Table 1-1: Assessment of Problem Preferences

Design of appraisal and reward

Employee morale __________

Equity/Fairness

systems __________

__________

Management of financial risk

Budgeting __________

Cost-consciousness

__________

__________

Product positioning __________

Relationships with customers

Organizational customer

__________

focus __________

Product or service quality

Relationships with distributors and

Continuous improvement

__________

suppliers __________

__________

Project management

Relationships among R&D,

Cross-functional

systems__________

marketing, and operations

cooperation __________

__________

Now transfer your rankings from
table 1-1 to the corresponding cells in table 1-2
. Then sum the three columns and the five rows.

The column totals represent your preferences among technical, political, and cultural problems.
Technical
problems encompass strategies, markets, technologies, and processes.
Political
problems concern power and politics in the organization.
Cultural
problems involve values, norms, and guiding assumptions.

If one column total is noticeably lower than the others, it represents a potential blind spot for you. If you score high on technical and low on cultural or political, for example, you may be at risk of overlooking the human side of the organizational equation.

The row totals represent your preferences for different business functions. A low score in any row suggests that you prefer not to grapple with problems in that functional area. Again, these are potential blind spots.

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.

Table 1-2: Preferences for Problems and Functions

Technical

Political

Cultural

Total

Human Resources

Finance

Marketing

Operations

Research and Development

Total

The results of this diagnostic exercise should help you answer the following questions: In what spheres do you most enjoy solving problems? In what spheres are you
least
eager to solve problems? What are the implications for potential vulnerabilities in your new position?

You can do a lot to compensate for your vulnerabilities. Three basic tools are
self-discipline, team building,
and
advice
and counsel
. You will need to discipline yourself to devote time to critical activities that you do not enjoy and that may not come naturally. Beyond that, actively search out people in your organization whose skills are sharp in these areas, so they can backstop you and so you can learn from them. A network of advisers and counselors can also help you move beyond your comfort zone. These strategies for compensating for your weaknesses are discussed in detail in

chapter 7
,
?Build Your Team,? and chapter 9
,
?Keep Your Balance.?

Watch Out for Your Strengths

Your weaknesses can make you vulnerable, but so can your strengths. Every strength has its attendant pitfalls. The qualities that have made you successful so far can prove to be weaknesses in your new role. Both Julia Gould and Douglas Ivester were attentive to detail. Though clearly a strength, attention to detail has a downside, especially in tandem with a high need for control: The result may be a tendency to micromanage people in the areas you know best. This behavior pattern can demoralize people who want to make their own contributions without intrusive oversight.

Relearn How to Learn

It may have been a long time since you faced such a steep learning curve. “Suddenly I realized how much I didn’t know” is a common lament from leaders in transition. You may have excelled in a function or discipline, like Julia Gould, and now find yourself in a general-management position. Or having flourished in line positions, you may have been called on to manage in a staff position or a matrix management arrangement. Or you may be joining a new company where you lack an established network and sense of the culture. Regardless, you suddenly need to learn a lot fast.

Having to start learning again can evoke long-buried and unnerving feelings of incompetence and vulnerability, especially if you suffer any early setbacks. You may find yourself mentally revisiting a juncture in your career when you had less confidence. Perhaps you will make some early missteps and experience failure for the first time in ages. So you unconsciously begin to gravitate toward areas where you feel competent and people who reinforce your feelings of self-worth.

New challenges and associated fears of incompetence can set up a vicious cycle of denial and defensiveness, as Chris Argyris noted in “Teaching Smart People How to Learn” in the
Harvard Business Review:
Because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure. So whenever their . . . learning strategies go wrong, they become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the “blame” on anyone and everyone but themselves. In short, their ability to

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learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it the most.

Put bluntly, you can decide to learn or you can become brittle and fail. Your failure may be dramatic, like Julia Gould’s, or it may be death by a thousand cuts, as in the case of Douglas Ivester, but it is inevitable. As we discuss in the
next

chapter
, denial and defensiveness are a sure recipe for disaster.

Relearning to learn can be painful. Transitioning into a new job may revive some deep fears about your capabilities that you thought you had long laid to rest. So if you find yourself waking up in a cold sweat, take comfort. Most new leaders experience the same feelings. And if you embrace the need to learn, you can surmount them.

Rework Your Network

As you advance in your career, the advice and counsel you need changes. Promoting yourself calls for working proactively to restructure your advice-and-counsel network. Early in your career, there is a premium on cultivating good technical advisers—experts in certain aspects of marketing or finance, for instance, who can help you get your work done. As you are progressively promoted, however, it becomes increasingly important to get good political counsel and personal advice. Political counselors help you understand the politics of the organization, which is especially important when you plan to implement change. Personal advisers help you keep perspective and equilibrium in times of stress. As discussed in
chapter 9
, transforming your advice-and-counsel network is never easy.

Your current advisers may be close friends, and you may feel comfortable with technical advisers whose domains you know well.

Watch Out for People Who Want to Hold You Back

Consciously or not, some individuals may not want you to advance. Your old boss may not want to let you go, for example. So you have to negotiate clear expectations, as soon as you know when you will be transitioning, about what you will do to close things out. This means being specific about what issues or projects will be dealt with and to what extent and, critically, what is
not
going to be done. Take notes and circulate them back to the boss, so that everyone is on the same page. Then hold your boss, and yourself, to the agreement. Be realistic about what you can accomplish.

There is always more that you could do, so keep in mind that time to learn and plan before you enter a new job is a very precious commodity.

Friends may not want their relationships with you to change. But change they must, and the sooner you accept that (and help others to accept it too), the better. Others in your organization will be looking for signs of favoritism and will judge you accordingly.

If you have been promoted to supervise people who were once your peers, some may be jealous. Some may even work to undermine you. This may subside with time. But expect early tests of your authority and plan to meet them by being firm and fair. If you don’t establish limits early, you will live to regret it. Getting others to accept your promotion is an essential part of promoting yourself. So if you conclude the people in question are never going to accept the situation, then you have to find a way to move them out of your organization as quickly as possible.