Take Charge Fast
Executive and Management Coaching Consultants
There are few career moments as exciting--or as risky--as assuming a new position with significant leadership responsibilities. What exactly do you do, once you've landed the new job, to ensure success?
- Begin your transition before you start the job. Use the job interviews to get an early jump on learning about the business, organization behavior, management and employees. Ask critical questions.
- Interview widely within your organization, listen carefully, and look for patterns in everything you see and hear. Prepare a list of questions. Talk to employees up and down the hierarchy and listen carefully. Patterns about what's going on will emerge. Record your observations daily.
- As you scout the organization, look for the rising stars you may want as part of your team. Your sensing tour will identify key players whose skills you need for your management team.
- Identify the kinds of people who flourish in the organization culture you are establishing. Even before assembling your team, take the time to identify the challenges ahead -- and the kinds of people motivated by those situations.
- After you've identified key individuals, identify the best team. Don't stop at finding the type of person you need. Envision how each person will interact with others to get the goals accomplished. Assemble the mix of talent required for organization effectiveness.
- Acknowledge that you don't know it all. Identify those around you who are the experts and commit them to the organization transformation by leaning on them. Use an outside resource for balanced perspectives, coaching and non- invested ways forward. No one expects an incoming leader to know everything. And there is nothing more disheartening to a fresh start than someone who mistakenly thinks he or she does.
- Listen to people who disagree. Listen actively to those around you, especially those who challenge your assumptions. Take note of new insights.
- Clean house if you have to. Depending on the situation you step into, no matter how clear your vision and how influential you are, acknowledge that there are people -- some of whom may have already seen your predecessors come and go -- who are too jaded to follow. Act quickly.
- Establish a way to engage -- and listen to -- your entire team. Your strategic course of action is only as effective as its execution. Deploy Align - Accelerate - Transformation and establish the pipelines to get your message up to management through the levels and to customers. In the hurry to create momentum, remind yourself that communication goes both ways.
- Don't trash your predecessor: promote your agenda. Do not assume that the prior administration screwed up or couldn't execute. There's probably an element of truth in that. But it's almost certainly true that they had a different disaster that they were working to avoid. With a clear vision of what needs to be fixed, by all means implement it. Then ask yourself what led those really smart predecessors to do what they did in such a way that it made sense to them?
- Settle on a handful of significant priorities. Typically, you can't do everything you want to do, so make strategic choices that transform the organization by delivering outcomes visible to management, employees and customers.
- Meet the customers. Balance the big picture vision with front-line views. There is no reconnaissance more important than scouting out the territory where your products and services meet their internal and external customers. Seeing the customers actually interact provides invaluable insights.
- Target a few early wins. Momentum counts, and nothing succeeds like visible measured outcomes. Pick some problems and results the organization has not been able to address and figure out a way to fix or achieve them quickly to establish a new direction.
- Faster is almost always better. When you're new to an organization, many people will want your attention. While it's pleasant to swap stories and engage in small talk, you're better off saving this for coffee break and lunch, and using the time in the office to engage in a learning-oriented conversation.
- Don't be afraid of mistakes, but recoup by fixing them quickly. Any new situation is fraught with hazards, and taking over a new job exposes a new leader to pitfalls ranging from the personal to the organizational. Accept that you can't know everything in your first six months, and even an extensive professional background can't insulate you from making mistakes in an unfamiliar company and culture. The key is to assess yourself and your progress as rigorously as you do your new colleagues and workplace, and to be prepared to assume accountability for course corrections as you go along.
- Be wary of reckless "musical chairs" and reorganizing boxes on org charts. If you're assuming leadership of a large organization, department or project, take the time to understand its current trajectory. Overhyped change initiatives ultimately fail because they lack accountability, they fail to achieve credibility, and they have no visible outcomes.
- Expect to find new ideas in unusual places. Don't just read your own industry's trade and management journals. Cast a wide net for insights -- sometimes the breakthrough idea comes from an outside perspective or lies in the triumphs of a completely different industry.
- Ask yourself: Who do you really want to prevail, you or your organization? There is a difference.
- Take advantage of Executive Coaching. Coaches provide executives with objective data and help integrate leadership development with organization goals and needs. This helps senior managers adapt to new accountabilities, reduce counterproductive behavior, improve retention, enhance teamwork, align individuals to collective results, take risks to innovate, and navigate the organization to execute strategic transformation and improvement.
With experience in coaching management in a variety of industries worldwide, Moravec and Associates Executive Coaching Consultants have developed disciplined on-the-job processes to help incumbents hit the ground running.
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