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The
First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels
by Michael Watkins Rating: •••• (Highly
Recommended) |
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title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Turbo Harvard
professor Michael Watkins presents a great new tool for leaders in his new
book, The
First 90 Days. Many new hires and their managers take a breath after the
hiring process is complete. The new hire is often left to sink or swim. Some new
leaders assimilate quickly into their new jobs, while others take a lot
longer, and sometimes fail. Based on close analysis and work with
organizations, Watkins proposes a structured approach to assimilation based
on what really worked for many other leaders. Here’s an excerpt from the
beginning of Chapter 2, “Accelerate Your Learning,” (pp. 33-41): Chris Bagley
headed the quality function at Sigma Corporation, a medium-sized durable
goods company. When Chris's boss left to become vice president of
manufacturing at White Goods, a struggling manufacturer of appliances, he
offered Chris a job as general manager of its largest plant. Chris jumped at
the opportunity. Sigma had
built a strong manufacturing organization. Chris had joined the company right
out of engineering school and rotated through most of the major manufacturing
functions. He was highly skilled; however, he had grown accustomed to dealing
with state-of-the-art technology and a motivated workforce. He had toured the
White Goods plant before taking the job and knew that it did not come close
to measuring up. He was determined to change that—and quickly. 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outdated and went on record as saying that it needed to be rebuilt from the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.
I 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. 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. Managing
Learning as an Investment Process If you
approach your efforts to get up to speed as an investment process—and your
scarce time and energy as resources that deserve careful management—you will
realize returns in the form of actionable insights. An actionable insight
is knowledge that enables you to make better decisions earlier and so helps
you reach the breakeven point in terms of personal value creation sooner.
Chris Bagley would have acted differently if he had known that (1) senior
management at White Goods had systematically underinvested in the plant,
despite energetic efforts by local managers to upgrade, (2) the plant had
achieved remarkable results in quality and productivity given what they had
to work with, and (3) the supervisors and workforce were justifiably proud of
what they had accomplished. To maximize your return on investment in learning, you
have to effectively and efficiently extract actionable insights from the mass
of information available to you. Effective learning calls for figuring
out what you need to learn so you can focus your efforts. Devote some
time to defining your learning agenda as early as possible, and return to it
periodically to refine and supplement it. Efficient learning means
identifying the best available sources of insight and then figuring out how
to extract maximum insight with the least possible outlay of your precious
time. Chris Bagley's approach to learning about the White Goods plant was
neither effective nor efficient. Defining Your Learning Agenda If
Chris Bagley had it to do over, what might he have done? He would have
planned to engage in a systematic learning process—creating a virtuous cycle
of information gathering, analyzing, hypothesizing, and testing. The starting point is to begin to define your learning
agenda, ideally before you even formally enter the organization. A learning
agenda crystallizes your learning priorities: What do you most need to learn?
It consists of a focused set of questions to guide your inquiry,
or hypotheses that you want to explore and test, or both. Of course, learning
during a transition is iterative: At first your learning agenda will consist
mostly of questions, but as you learn more you will hypothesize about what is
going on and why. Increasingly, your learning will shift toward fleshing out
and testing those hypotheses. How should you compile your early list of guiding
questions? Start by generating questions about the past, questions
about the present, and questions about the future. Why are
things done they way they are? Are the reasons why something was done (for
example, to meet a competitive threat) still valid today? Are conditions
changing such that something different should be done in the future? The
accompanying boxes offer sample questions in these three categories. Questions About the Past Performance • How has this organization
performed in the past? How do people in the organization think it has
performed? • How were goals set? Were
they insufficiently or overly ambitious? • Were internal or external
benchmarks used? • What measures were employed?
What behaviors did they encourage and discourage? • What happened if goals were
not met? Root Causes • If performance has been good, why has that
been the case? • What have been the relative
contributions of the organization's strategy, its structure, its technical
capabilities, its culture, and its politics? • If performance has been poor, why has that
been the case? Do the primary issues reside in the organization's strategy?
Its structure? Its technical capabilities? Its culture? Its politics? History of Change • What efforts have been made
to change the organization? What happened? • Who has been instrumental in shaping this organization? Questions About the Present Vision and Strategy • What is the stated vision and strategy of the
organization? • Is it really pursuing that strategy? If
not, why not? If so, is the strategy going to take the organization where it
needs logo? People • Who is capable and who is
not? • Who can be trusted and who
cannot? • Who has influence and why? Processes • What are the key processes of
the organization? • Are they performing
acceptably in terms of quality, reliability, and timeliness? If not, why not? Land Mines • What lurking surprises could
detonate and push you off track? • What potentially damaging
cultural or political missteps must you avoid making? Early Wins • In what areas (people,
relationships, processes, or products) can you achieve some early wins? Questions About the Future Challenges and Opportunities • In what areas is the business
most likely to face stiff challenges in the coming year? What can be done now
to prepare for them? • What are the most promising
unexploited opportunities? What would need to happen to realize their
potential? Barriers and Resources • What are the most formidable
barriers to making needed changes? Are they technical? Cultural? Political? • Are there islands of
excellence or other high-quality resources that you can leverage? • What new capabilities need to
be developed or acquired? Culture • Which elements of the culture
should be preserved? • Which elements need to
change? Watkins
provides a good balance in The First
90 Days between examples or stories, and a specific recommended approach
for action. While the basis for his recommendations is described as research
with what’s worked for many leaders, readers who want to kick the tires
around the fact base will be disappointed. Nonetheless, The First
90 Days is one of the best transition books I’ve read in years, and is
highly recommended, especially for leaders and new hires who see a benefit in
adding some structure to the assimilation process. Steve
Hopkins, January 22, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the February 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
First 90 Days.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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