Each year hundreds of thousands of managers in U.S. companies transition into challenging new roles.[1] in part because everyone is expecting change to occur. The actions they take during their first few months have a major impact on their overall success or failure, yet they seldom get good advice on how to take charge. Transitions are pivotal times, but they are also periods of great vulnerability when new leaders lack established working relationships and detailed knowledge of their new roles. New leaders who fail to build momentum during their transitions face uphill battles from that point forward.
It is a fact that 40% of senior-level external hires fail within the first 18 months of their transitions, a mistake which can cost a company as much as 10 times the salary of the executive involved. Through my research I've identified common traps into which new leaders fall and I have laid out basic principles for avoiding these potential pitfalls. Think of it as a blueprint for accelerating yourself and your entire organization. About 25% of the managers in a typical Fortune 500 company take new positions each year. But once the external recruiting or internal appointments are complete, too many organizations leave their most precious assets to "sink or swim" in their new roles. The result? Everyone has to relearn the same lessons the hard way. And the cost of doing so—in terms of failure rates and lost opportunities—is both very high and largely avoidable.
Getting to Breakeven Faster
When 200+ company CEOs and presidents were asked for their best estimates of the time it takes a typical midlevel manager in their organizations to reach the breakeven point, the average of their responses was 6.2 months.[2] The purpose of transition acceleration, then, is to help new leaders reach the breakeven point earlier.
Transition Traps
Leaders who underperform in their new roles often do so because they fall into one or more of the following common traps:
- Becoming isolated—not getting out and connecting to the people who really know what's going on.
- Coming in with "the answer"—feeling like they must come in and appear decisive and establish a directive tone and "fix" the organizational problems.
- Staying too long with the existing team—retaining team members with a record of mediocre performance.
- Attempting too much—trying to do too many things at once, often confusing and overwhelming people rather than spurring them to action.
- Getting captured by the wrong people—listening to people who have limited or skewed perceptions, or their own agendas to advance.
- Setting unrealistic expectations—not understanding the nature of key constituencies' expectations and carefully deflating those that are dangerously high, while taking advantage of those that can be useful.
- Not adapting to the culture—acting in ways that are inconsistent with the culture, causing them to be disconnected and isolated from the flow of critical information.
Meeting the Challenge
How can you avoid these traps and make successful transitions? My research on transition management points to seven core principles that can help new managers take charge more effectively:
Principle #1: Leverage the time before entry
The transition begins with the selection process, not with formal entry into the organization. New leaders who fail to use the time before entry effectively undermine their ability to get on top of the job right at the outset of their tenure. There is a strong tendency to put off getting to the job until the last minute because you're trying to organize personal affairs or take a break or complete things at the old job. But the time prior to entry is a priceless period during which a new leader can absorb information about an organization and begin to plan. Upon formally entering a new organization, the new leader is invariably swept up in the day-to-day demands of the office and has little time to do preparatory research. Anticipating the day-to-day demands of starting a new job, the wise new leader uses the time between the decision to take a new position and formal entry to jump-start the transition process.
Principle #2: Organize to learn
Entering a new organization can be akin to sailing in a dense fog. Able to see only a short distance, new leaders must exercise caution as they strive to get their bearings. Because expectations are high and time is precious, they must learn as efficiently as possible everything that they can about the organization’s markets, strategy, and capabilities. Effective new leaders focus on three distinct types of learning: technical, political, and cultural.[3] Technical learning means understanding (1) the nature and key success factors of products and target markets and customers, (2) the current strategy and its organizational requirements, and (3) an organization's technological and human capabilities. Political learning means assessing how decisions are made, understanding who is most influential, and identifying key sources of power. Cultural learning means identifying an organization's norms and values, accepted "ways of working," and habits that make up its unique character.
Principle #3: Secure early wins
By the end of the transition period, a new leader must have made substantial progress energizing people and focusing them on solving the business's most pressing problems using techniques that have a quick, dramatic impact. It is crucial that employees perceive momentum to be building during the transition. Tangible improvements in performance motivate employees and encourage them to further experiment. Early wins are a powerful way to get people pumped up. Examples include bottlenecks that limit productivity and misaligned incentive systems that undermine performance by generating internal conflict. Efforts at team building or improving the effectiveness of meetings, although they might make eventual contributions to the business, do not provide early wins.
Principle #4: Lay the foundation for major improvements
Early wins can help a new leader get off to a good start, but they are not sufficient for continued success. To meet the boss's and their own expectations, new leaders must also lay a foundation for the deeper changes needed to support sustained improvement in the organization's performance. The process is not unlike the launching of a two-stage rocket into orbit; securing early wins lifts a new leader off the ground, and efforts at foundation building provide the thrust necessary to achieve orbit and avoid falling back to earth. Are there steps a new leader can take during the transition period to begin the process of deeper change? Yes, but it is important here to emphasize the obvious: there are intrinsic limits to what a new leader can do during the transition period. Except under the most unusual circumstances, key people will not be let go, strategy will not be changed, major plants will not be closed or relocated, new products will not be scrapped, and acquisitions will not be consummated solely on the initiative of the new leader. A new leader’s efforts during the first six months to lay a foundation for long-term improvements must focus on diagnosing systemic problems and taking early actions that begin to change perceptions.
Principle #5: Create a personal vision
Visioning is a process through which a new leader conceives a personal vision for an organization and prepares to make it a shared vision. Visioning begins during, but continues beyond, the transition period. A shared vision begins with a mind's-eye image consistent with the leader’s style and situation. It then is subjected to progressive stages of clarification, testing, and exposure to others. It evolves gradually into a common vision that provides both inspiration and a more unified sense of purpose.
Whether it is from subordinates who are becoming trusted aides, bosses, or external advisors, effective new leaders find people they can trust to help them test and clarify their personal visions.
Principle #6: Build winning coalitions
For an organization to be transformed, powerful people and groups must perceive it to be in their interest to help realize the new leader’s goals for the organization. New leaders can learn and plan, but alone can achieve little. To ensure that employees act in ways that support what they want their organizations to become, new leaders must build supportive coalitions and either change the orientation or diminish the influence of existing coalitions that are not supportive.
Principle #7: Manage yourself
Finally, new leaders must manage themselves if they are to stay on the rested edge. The physical demands of a transition are high; new leaders log many hours traveling to field sites and attending meetings only to face more work as they return at night with a bulging briefcase. Emotional demands are also great as new leaders must cope with not only the challenges at work but also disruptions in the usual rhythms of home life. New leaders must prepare for the emotional impact of transition by developing mechanisms that help them maintain equanimity. What can new leaders do to manage the inevitable tensions of transition? The key is to find ways to exercise clear-headed judgment, stay focused, and maintain emotional evenness. Knowing and managing oneself is as important as knowing and managing the organization.
It's Up to You
Success in putting the seven principles into practice isn't a guarantee of effectiveness. Even the best-laid plans can go awry. But care in planning for and undertaking a transition can substantially improve one’s chances of success and, thereby, better prepare one to exploit opportunities to make further transitions in the future.
Lore International Institute has aligned with principal subject matter expert Dr. Michael Watkins, a professor at Harvard University, whose research in leadership transitions has set the industry standard for excellence. Through our exclusive coaching partnership with Dr. Watkins, Lore is able to offer First 90 Days Acceleration Coaching for new executives, designed to increase your company's success through successful coaching of newly promoted and newly recruited executives, leading to faster realization of company goals and return on investment. For more information contact impact@lorenet.com or call 800-866-5548.
[1] This is an extrapolation of the results of a Management Transition Survey of senior HR executives at Fortune 500 companies. The average percentage of managers at all levels that took new jobs in the reporting companies was 22.3%. Extrapolated to the Fortune 500 as a whole, this suggests that almost 700,000 managers take new jobs each year.
[2] This is based on analysis of data from a survey of participants in Harvard Business School’s 2003 YPO President’s Seminar and 2003 WPO/CEO Seminar.
[3] The technical, political, cultural framework for organizational analysis was developed by Noel Tichy. It appears in many of his publications, but the most comprehensive theoretical statement is given in Tichy, N.M. 1983. Managing strategic change: technical, political and cultural dynamics. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
©2007 Genesis Advisers.
Michael Watkins is co-founder of Genesis Advisers and Professor of General Management at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland. The foremost expert on accelerating leadership transitions, Dr. Watkins is the author of the international bestseller, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at all Levels (HBS Press 2003) and Shaping the Game: The New Leader's Guide to Effective Negotiating (HBS Press 2006). Visit Michael Watkins' blog at Harvard Business Online.