The First 90 Days (12 page)

Soon after arriving at the plant, Chris declared it outdated and went on record as saying that it needed to be rebuilt from the ground up “the Sigma way.” He immediately brought in high-powered operations consultants. The consultants delivered a scathing report, characterizing the plant’s technology and systems as “antiquated” and the workforce’s skills as “ marginal.” They recommended a thorough team-based reorganization of the plant, as well as substantial investments in technology and worker training. Chris shared this report with his direct reports, saying that he planned to act quickly on the recommendations. He interpreted their silence as agreement.

Soon after the new team structure was put in place in one of the plant’s four production lines, productivity plummeted and quality suffered. Chris convened his team and urged them to “get the problems fixed, and fast.” But the problems remained and worker morale throughout the plant slumped.

After three months, Chris’s boss told him, “You’ve alienated just about everyone. I brought you here to improve the plant, not tear it down.” His boss then peppered him with questions: “How much time did you spend learning about this plant? Did you know they had already experimented unsuccessfully with team production? Have you seen what they were able to accomplish before you arrived with the resources they were given? You’ve got to stop doing and start listening.”

Shaken, Chris held sobering discussions with his managers, supervisors, and groups of workers. He learned a lot about the creativity they had displayed in dealing with lack of investment in the plant. He then called a plantwide meeting and praised the workforce for doing so much before he took charge. He announced the reorganization was on hold and that they would focus on upgrading the plant’s technology before making any other changes.

What did Chris do wrong? Like too many new leaders, he failed to learn enough about his new organization and so made some costly assumptions. It is essential to figure out what you need to know about your new organization and then to learn it as rapidly as you can. Why? Because efficient and effective learning reduces your window of vulnerability: You can identify potential problems that might erupt and take you off track. It also equips you to begin to make
good
business decisions earlier. Remember, your internal and external customers won’t wait for you to take a leisurely stroll up the learning curve.

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Overcoming Learning Disabilities

When a new leader derails, failure to learn is almost always a factor. Information overload can obscure the most telling issues. There is so much to absorb that it is difficult to know where to focus. Amid the torrent of information coming your way, it is easy to miss important signals. Or you might focus too much on the technical side of the business—products, customers, technologies, and strategies—and shortchange the critical learning about culture and politics.

To compound this problem, surprisingly few managers have received any training in systematically diagnosing an organization. Those who have had such training invariably prove to be either human resources professionals or former management consultants.

A related problem is failure to plan to learn. Planning to learn means figuring out in advance what the important questions are and how you can best answer them. Few new leaders take the time to think systematically about their learning priorities. Fewer still explicitly create a learning plan when entering a new role.

Some leaders even have “learning disabilities,” potentially crippling internal blocks to learning. One is a simple failure even to try to understand the history of the organization. A baseline question that every new leader should ask is,

“How did we get to this point?” Otherwise, you risk tearing down fences without knowing why they were put up. Armed with insight into the history, you may indeed find the fence is not needed and must go. Or you may find there is a good reason to leave it where it is.

Other new leaders suffer from the action imperative, a learning disability whose primary symptom is a near-compulsive need to take action. If you habitually find yourself too anxious or too busy to devote time to systematic learning, you may suffer from this malady. It is a serious affliction, because being too busy to learn often results in a death spiral. If you do not learn, you can easily make poor early decisions that undermine your credibility, making people less likely to share important information with you, leading to more bad decisions. The result is a vicious cycle that can irreparably damage your credibility. So beware! It may feel right to enter a new situation and begin acting decisively—and sometimes, as we will see in the
next chapter
, it
is
the right thing to do—but you risk being poorly prepared to see the real problems.

Perhaps most destructive of all, some new leaders arrive with “the answer.” They have already made up their minds about how to solve the organization’s problems. Having matured in an organization where “things were done the right way,” they fail to realize that what works well in one organizational culture may fail miserably in another. As Chris Bagley found out the hard way, this stance leaves you vulnerable to serious mistakes and is likely to alienate people.

Bagley thought he could simply import what he had learned at Sigma to fix the plant’s problems. Even in situations (such as turnarounds) in which you have been brought in explicitly to import new ways of doing things, you still have to learn about the organization’s culture and politics to customize your approach. Besides, displaying a genuine ability to listen often translates into increased credibility and influence.