The first 90 days ebook free download

The first 90 days ebook free download

The First 90 Days.pdf,The Monsters Know What They're Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters by Keith Ammann

04/01/ · [ PDF] Ebook The First 90 Days: Critical. Success Strategies for New Leaders at All. Levels [PDF,EPuB,AudioBook,Ebook]. to download this book the link is on the last page. Download the "The First 90 Days" Book Summary in PDF for free. Then download the free PDF and read wherever and whenever you want: Overview: "The Balance Point" You have 90 Download a FREE excerpt from The First 90 Days, Updated and Expanded: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter, by Michael D. Watkins. Since its original release, e-book first 90 days – Raw Selection FREE E-BOOK How to succeed in your first 90 days: FREE E-book. Our free checklist is aimed at anyone in a new senior executive role, especially The First 90 Days is also an outgrowth of my work with Johnson & Johnson. Inaki Bastarrika, formerly of J&J’s Management Education and Development (MED) department, convinced me ... read more

SHOW LESS. ePAPER READ DOWNLOAD ePAPER. TAGS download ebook strategies leaders levels epub audiobook author watkins publisher. Create successful ePaper yourself Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software. START NOW. W at kins Publisher : Harvard Business Review Press ISBN : Public at ion D at e : Language : eng Pages : [EbooK Epub], DOWNLOAD EBOOK PDF KINDLE, EBook, Download and Read online, R. Wa Page 4 and 5: if you want to download or read The.

Share from cover. Share from page:. Copy [ PDF ] Ebook The First 90 Days Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels [PDF EPuB AudioBook Ebook] Extended embed settings. Flag as Inappropriate Cancel. Delete template? Are you sure you want to delete your template? Cancel Delete. no error. Cancel Overwrite Save. products FREE adFREE WEBKiosk APPKiosk PROKiosk. com ooomacros. org nubuntu. Company Contact us Careers Terms of service Privacy policy Cookie policy Imprint. Terms of service. Privacy policy. Cookie policy. Change language. Made with love in Switzerland. 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 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. 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. 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. Table 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. 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.

And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure. So whenever their. learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it the most. 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. 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. Thanks Overcoming the Barriers Promoting yourself turns out to be hard work, and some of the barriers may lie within you. Take a few minutes to think hard about your personal vulnerabilities in your new position, as revealed by your analysis of your problem preferences. How will you compensate for them?

Then think about the external forces, such as commitments to your current boss, that could hold you back. How can you avoid that outcome? To borrow an old saw, promoting yourself is a journey and not a destination. Use these questions to guide your analysis and tailor your day acceleration plan. What has made you successful so far in your career? Can you succeed in your new position by relying solely on those strengths? If not, what are the critical skills you need to develop? Are there aspects of your new job that are critical to success but that you prefer not to focus on? Why is that the case?

How will you compensate for your potential blind spots? What do you need to do to ensure that you make the mental leap into the new position? From whom might you seek advice and counsel on this? What other activities might help you do this? Chapter 2: Accelerate Your Learning Overview Chris Bagley headed the quality function at Sigma Corporation, a medium-sized durable goods company. 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.

Chris shared this report with his direct reports, saying that he planned to act quickly on the recommendations. He interpreted their silence as agreement. I brought you here to improve the plant, not tear it down. 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? 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. 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. 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. 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. One is a simple failure even to try to understand the history of the organization. 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. As Chris Bagley found out the hard way, this stance leaves you vulnerable to serious mistakes and is likely to alienate people. 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.

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. Identifying the Best Sources of Insight You will learn from various types of hard data, such as financial and operating reports, strategic and functional plans, employee surveys, press accounts, and industry reports.

The only way to gain this intelligence is to talk to people who have critical knowledge about your situation. 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? If performance has been poor, why has that been the case? 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 to go? 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? 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? 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? Who can provide the best return on your learning investment? Identifying promising sources will make your learning process both more complete and more efficient. Keep in mind that you need to listen to key people both inside and outside the organization see figure Talking to people with different points of view will deepen your insight.

Specifically, this will enable you to translate between external realities and internal perceptions, and between the top of the hierarchy and the people on the front lines. Figure Sources of Knowledge The most valuable external sources of information are likely to be the following: Customers. How do customers perceive your organization? How do your best customers assess your products or services? How about your customer service? How do they rank your company against your competitors? Suppliers can give you their perspectives on your organization in its role as a customer.

You can also learn about the strengths and flaws of internal operations management and systems. Outside analysts. demands of the market and the economic health of the industry. These are the people who develop and manufacture your products or deliver your services. They can also shed light on how the rest of the organization supports or undermines efforts on the front line. Sales and purchasing. These people, and customer service representatives and purchasing staff, interact directly with customers, distributors, and suppliers. Often they have up-to-date information about trends and imminent changes in the market. Talk with heads or key staff members of the finance, legal, and human resources functional areas. These people have specialized but useful perspectives on the internal workings of the organization. Integrators are people who coordinate or facilitate cross-functional interaction, including project managers, plant managers, and product managers.

You can learn from them how links within the organization work and how the functions mesh. These people can help you discover the true political hierarchies and identify where internal conflicts lie. Natural historians. Adopting Structured Learning Methods Once you have a rough sense of what you need to learn and where to seek it—whether from reports or from conversations with knowledgeable people—the next step is to understand how best to learn. You will pick up much soft information this way, but this method is not efficient. Your views may be shaped excessively by the first few people or last few with whom you talk.

And people may seek you out early precisely so they can influence you. Thus, you should consider using a structured learning process designed for new leaders. To illustrate the advantages of a structured approach, imagine that you plan to meet with your direct reports to elicit their assessments of the situation. How might you go about doing this? Bringing them together right away might be a mistake, because some will hesitate to reveal their views in a public forum. Instead, you decide to meet them one-on-one. Of course, this has its drawbacks too, because you have to meet people in some order. You should therefore expect that the people who are later on your schedule will be talking to the earlier ones to try to get a sense of what you are after. This may both reduce your ability to gain a range of views about what is going on and allow others to interpret your messages in ways you might not intend.

Suppose that you decide to meet with your direct reports one-on-one. In what order will you meet with them? And how will you avoid being excessively influenced by what the first couple of people say to you? Its format might consist of brief opening remarks about yourself and your approach, followed by questions about the other person background, family, and interests and then a standard set of questions about the business. This approach is powerful because the responses you get are comparable. You can line them up side by side and analyze what is consistent and inconsistent about the responses. This helps you gain insight into which people are being more or less open.

When diagnosing a new organization, start by meeting with your direct reports one-on-one. This is an example of taking a horizontal slice across an organization by interviewing people at the same level in different functions. Ask them essentially the same five questions: 1. What are the biggest challenges the organization is facing or will face in the near future? Why is the organization facing or going to face these challenges? What are the most promising unexploited opportunities for growth? What would need to happen for the organization to exploit the potential of these opportunities?

If you were me, what would you focus attention on? These five questions, coupled with careful listening and thoughtful follow-up, are certain to elicit many insights. By asking everyone the same set of questions, you can identify prevalent and divergent views, and thus avoid being swayed by the first or most forceful or articulate person you talk to. How people answer can also tell you a lot about your new team and its politics. Who answers directly and who is evasive or prone to going on tangents? Who takes responsibility and who points fingers? Who has a broad view of the business and who seems stuck in a silo? Once you have distilled these early discussions into a set of observations, questions, and insights, convene your direct reports as a group, feed back your impressions and questions, and invite some discussion.

You will learn more about both substance and team dynamics by doing so, and will simultaneously demonstrate how quickly you have begun to identify key issues. You need not follow this process rigidly. Or you could invite an internal facilitator to run the process. dramatically accelerate your ability to extract actionable insights. Naturally, the questions you will ask will be tailored specifically for the groups you meet. If you are meeting with salespeople, for example, consider asking: What do our customers want that they are getting from our competitors and not getting from us? New Leader Assimilation Processes One example of a structured learning method is the New Leader Assimilation Process originally developed by GE.

In this process, each time a manager enters a significant new role, he or she is assigned a transition facilitator. The facilitator meets first with the new leader to lay out the process. What would you like him or her to know about you? about the business situation? The main findings are then fed back, without attribution, to the new leader. The process ends with a facilitated meeting between the new leader and the direct reports. Other structured learning methods are valuable in particular situations. Some of the methods described in table may increase the efficiency of your learning process depending on your level in the organization and the type of business situation you are in. Effective new leaders employ a combination of methods, tailoring their learning strategy to the demands of the situation. Table Structured Methods for Learning Method Uses Useful For Organizational climate and employee satisfaction surveys Learning about culture and morale.

Many organizations do such surveys regularly, and a database may already be available. If not, consider setting up a regular survey of employee perceptions. Useful for managers at all levels, if analysis is available specifically for your unit or group. Identifying shared and divergent perceptions of opportunities and problems. You can interview people at the same level in different departments a horizontal slice or bore down through multiple levels a vertical slice. Most useful for managers leading groups of people from different functional backgrounds.

Probing issues that preoccupy key groups of employees, such as morale issues among frontline production or service workers. Gathering groups of people who work together also lets you see how they interact and who displays leadership. Fostering discussion promotes deeper insight. Most useful for managers of large groups of people who perform a similar function, such as sales managers or plant managers. Analysis of critical past decisions Illuminating decision-making patterns and sources of power and influence. Select an important recent decision and look into how it was made. Who exerted influence at each stage? Talk with people involved, probe their perceptions, and note what is and is not said. Most useful for higher-level managers of business units or project groups. Process analysis Examining interactions among departments or functions and assessing the efficiency of a process.

Select an important process, such as delivery of products to customers or distributors, and assign a crossfunctional group to chart the process and identify bottlenecks and problems. Most useful for managers of units or groups in which the work of multiple functional specialties must be integrated. Plant tours are opportunities to meet production personnel informally and to listen to their concerns. Meetings Most useful for managers of business units. This also assumes the survey instrument is a good one and the data have been collected carefully and analyzed rigorously. Can be useful at lower levels if the unit is experiencing significant problems. Can be useful for more senior managers as a way of getting some quick insights into the perceptions of key employee constituencies. Can be useful for lower-level managers as a way of understanding how their groups fit into larger processes.

Method Uses Useful For help you assess technical capabilities. Market tours can introduce you to customers, whose comments can reveal problems and opportunities. Pilot projects Gaining deep insight into technical capabilities, culture, and politics. Though these insights are not the primary purpose of pilot projects, you can learn a lot from how the organization or group responds to your pilot initiatives. Useful for managers at all levels. The size of the pilot projects and their impact will of course increase as one rises through the organization. Creating a Learning Plan Your learning agenda defines what you want to learn. Your learning plan defines how you will go about learning it. It translates learning goals into specific sets of actions—identifying promising sources of insight and using systematic methods—that accelerate your learning. Your learning plan is a critical part of your overall day plan. In fact, as we will discuss later, learning should be a primary focus of your plan for your first 30 days on the job.

The heart of your learning plan is a cyclical learning process in which you collect information, analyze and distill it, develop hypotheses, and test them, thus progressively deepening your understanding of your new organization. Obviously, the specific insights you decide to pursue will vary from situation to situation. You can begin by looking critically at the learning plan template in the accompanying box and deciding which elements make sense for you, which do not, and what is missing. In the next chapter, we will explore different types of transition situations and return to the subject of what you need to learn and when. Look for external assessments of the performance of the organization. You will learn how knowledgeable, fairly unbiased people view the organization. If you are a manager at a lower level, talk to people who deal with your new group as suppliers or customers. Find external observers who know the organization well, including former employees, recent retirees, and people who have transacted business with the organization.

Talk with your predecessor if possible. Talk to your new boss. As you begin to learn about the organization, write down your first impressions and eventually some hypotheses. Compile an initial set of questions to guide your structured inquiry once you arrive. Soon After Entry Review detailed operating plans, performance data, and personnel data. Meet one-on-one with your direct reports and ask them the questions you compiled. You will learn about convergent and divergent views, and about them as people. Assess how things are going at key interfaces from the inside. You will also learn about problems they see that others do not. Test strategic alignment from the top down. Then see how far down into the organizational hierarchy those beliefs penetrate.

You will learn how well the previous leader drove vision and strategy down through the organization. Test awareness of challenges and opportunities from the bottom up. Then work your way up. You will learn how well the people at the top check the pulse of the organization. Update your questions and hypotheses. Meet with your boss to discuss your hypotheses and findings. By the End of the First Month Gather your team to feed back your preliminary findings. You will elicit confirmations and challenges of your assessments, and will learn more about the group and its dynamics. Now analyze key interfaces from the outside in.

You will learn how people on the outside suppliers, customers, distributors, and others perceive your organization and its strengths and weaknesses. Analyze a couple of key processes. Convene representatives of the responsible groups to map out and evaluate the processes you selected. You will learn about productivity, quality, and reliability. Meet with key integrators. You will learn how things work at interfaces among functional areas within the company. What problems do they perceive that others do not? Seek out the natural historians. They can fill you in on the history, culture, and politics of the organization, and they are also potential allies and influencers. Meet with your boss again to discuss your observations. Learning About Culture Your most vexing business problems likely will have a cultural dimension.

In some cases, you will find that aspects of the existing culture are key impediments to realizing high performance. You will thus have to struggle to change them. Other aspects of the culture will turn out to be functional and thus worthy of preservation. Having realized how proud and motivated the workforce was, Chris Bagley could draw on this energy to upgrade the plant. Think how much more difficult it would have been had he inherited a group of complacent, hostile people. Because cultural habits and norms operate powerfully to reinforce the status quo, it is vital to diagnose problems in the existing culture and to figure out how to begin to address them. These assessments are particularly important if you are coming in from the outside or joining a unit within your existing organization that has a strong subculture.

Are there distinctive symbols that signify your unit and help members recognize one another? What elicits scorn or disapproval? Assumptions are the often-unarticulated beliefs that pervade and underpin social systems. These beliefs are the air that everyone breathes. What truths does everyone take for granted? To understand a culture, you must peer below the surface of symbols and norms and get at underlying assumptions. To do this you need to carefully watch the way people interact with one another. For instance, do people seem most concerned with individual accomplishment and reward, or are they more focused on group accomplishment? Does the group seem more casual, or more formal? More aggressive and hard-driving, or more laid-back? Regarding power, key questions are as follows: Who do key people in your organization think can legitimately exercise authority and make decisions? What does it take to earn your stripes? Regarding value, what actions are believed by employees to create and destroy value?

At White Goods, employees were proud of producing premium-quality products, so a decision to move downmarket could easily trigger resistance. Divergent assumptions about power and value—for example, between workers and managers—can complicate efforts to align the organization. Some degree of divergence is, of course, unavoidable. The danger comes when the gap becomes too wide to be bridged by effective communication and negotiation. Organizational, Professional, and Geographic Perspectives You can also think about culture from three perspectives: organizational, professional, and geographic. Start by zooming in to see organizational culture, then gradually widen your focus to see professional culture, and then focus broadly on geographic culture. Organizational Culture. Cultures within organizations or groups develop over time, and can be deeply rooted. Organizational culture is expressed in the way people treat one another friendly, formal, relaxed , the values they share honesty, competitiveness, hard work , the routines they follow as they hold meetings and exchange information, and so on.

Organizational cultures vary within and across industries. For example, managers in an established, traditional consumer products company may be comfortable with more elaborate processes and systems than managers in a start-up in the same industry. Professional Culture. Managers as a group also share cultural characteristics that distinguish them from other professional groups such as engineers, administrative assistants, and doctors or teachers. In part, this is because the people who gravitate toward these functions have different professional training. Geographic Culture. Geographic changes can present the greatest diversity in culture. The way people do business in different regions of a country can vary significantly. Differences in business cultures between two countries are even more pronounced.

For example, U. managers tend to work within a more individualistic culture, whereas Japanese managers stress more collectivist values and behaviors. Your new position may take you to a different functional arena for example, from operations to marketing or to a whole new level of responsibility for instance, from a functional area to general management. In such cases, you will face professional cultural changes—differences that are significant even when you move to a new position within the same organization. These different kinds of culture change can overlap and reinforce one another see figure It is useful to assess your culture adaptation challenge on a scale of 1 to 10 on each of these three dimensions. On the organizational culture dimension, a 10 would be a move from a highly centralized, process-focused organization to a highly decentralized, relationship-focused organization.

On the professional culture dimension, a 10 would be a move from finance to human resources or vice versa. Finally, on the geographic dimension, a 10 would be a move from Minneapolis to Tokyo. If the total of these three numbers is 15 or greater, then you are facing a major cultural shift. To avoid missteps, you must devote significant energy to understanding and adapting to the new culture or cultures. Thanks Figure Intersecting Dimensions of Culture Adaptation or Alteration? Your future success depends on knowing the difference—and taking the proper action. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Closing the Loop Your learning priorities and strategies will inevitably shift as you dig deeper.

As you start to interact with your new boss, or to figure out where to get some early wins, or to build supportive coalitions, it will be critical for you to gain additional insights. So plan to return to this chapter periodically to reassess your learning agenda and create new learning plans. Are you effective at learning about new organizations? Do you sometimes fall prey to the action imperative? If so, how will you avoid doing this? What is your learning agenda? Based on what you know now, compose a list of questions to guide your early inquiry. If you have begun to form hypotheses about what is going on, what are they and how will you test them?

Given the questions you want to answer, which individuals are most likely to provide you with solid actionable insights? How might you increase the efficiency of your learning process? What are some ways you might extract more actionable insights for your investment of time and energy? Given your answers to the previous questions, start to create your learning plan. Chapter 3: Match Strategy to Situation Overview When Claire Weeks stepped into her new role as head of the industrial products division of a large multinational company, she believed the division had enough strength to continue to achieve double-digit earnings growth. Growth had been strong over the past four years, and the division had several promising products in the pipeline.

Claire soon discovered the situation was less rosy. Although not mortal threats, these problems made it difficult for Claire to meet her targets. Rather than go to the CEO, explain the problems, and take the hit, however, she elected to push forward. She believed that she could eke out enough growth through price increases and acquisitions to keep results on track until a key new product was launched. Struggling to achieve the goals she had committed herself to, Claire made a series of avoidable missteps that eroded her credibility. She made a couple of bad calls trying to speed up critical new-product launches. As it became obvious that she would not meet her targets through organic growth, she tried and failed to make a significant acquisition. Believing that she was in a sustaining-success situation, she signed on to overly ambitious growth targets. In reality, the company was in need of a significant realignment. Rather than confront the need for realignment and reset expectations, Claire became a victim of her own shortsightedness.

She resigned when it became clear the CEO had lost confidence in her ability to lead the division. Far too many new leaders like Claire Weeks do a poor job of diagnosing their situations and tailoring their strategies accordingly. This painful scenario continues to recur because people typically model their own transitions on a limited set of experiences. Consider taking some time to summarize your own rules of thumb for making a successful transition before you read further. Now step back and assess how robust and actionable these insights are. By methodically diagnosing the situation, Claire Weeks could have avoided her problems. Matching your strategy to your situation requires careful diagnosis of the business situation.

Only then can you be clearheaded, not just about the challenges, but also about the opportunities and resources available to you. Diagnosing the Business Situation The four broad types of business situations that new leaders must contend with are start-up, turnaround, realignment, and sustaining success. From now on we will refer to this framework of transition types as the STARS model. An outline of the characteristics of each of these types, and their associated challenges and opportunities, will help you to recognize the key structural features of your own situation. What are the defining features of each of the four STARS situations? In a start-up you are charged with assembling the capabilities people, funding, and technology to get a new business, product, or project off the ground. In a turnaround you take on a unit or group that is recognized to be in trouble and work to get it back on track. To a significant degree, you get to start fresh.

But both require that you start making tough calls early. Realignments and sustaining-success situations, by contrast, are situations in which you enter organizations that have significant strengths, but also serious constraints on what you can and cannot do. In realignment, your challenge is to revitalize a unit, product, process, or project that is drifting into trouble. In a sustaining-success situation, you are shouldering responsibility for preserving the vitality of a successful organization and taking it to the next level. Put another way, in realignments you have to reinvent the business; in sustaining success situations, you have to invent the challenge. In both situations, you typically have some time before you need to make major calls, which is good news because you have to learn a lot about the culture and politics and begin building supportive coalitions.

Applying these categories to business situations is useful regardless of your level in the organization. You may be a new CEO taking over an entire company that is in start-up mode. All of these situations share the characteristics of a start-up. Turnovers, realignments, and sustaining-success situations also arise at all levels, in companies large and small. Understanding the History The relationships among these four business situations are depicted in the ST ARS model of business evolution shown in figure The key point is that businesses and, for that matter, projects, processes, products, and plants tend to move predictably from one type of situation to another. Understanding the history of your new organization will help you grasp the challenges and opportunities of your situation. Figure The STARS Model Let us start, fittingly, with start-ups. Successful start-ups grow and eventually become sustaining-success situations.

Often the individuals who managed the start-up move on to tackle new start-ups, and managers more experienced at running larger businesses take over. These successful businesses may in turn give birth to internal start-ups as they diversify into new products, services, processes, or technologies. In this way, healthy companies enter a growth cycle. But entropy increases. Successful businesses tend, because of internal complacency or external challenges or both, to drift toward trouble. Even if the organization is not yet in crisis, acute observers see gathering storm clouds that signal a need for realignment. This was the situation facing Claire Weeks, who failed to recognize it early enough. Realigning an organization usually means redirecting its resources, such as by abandoning aging product lines and developing new technologies.

Realigning the business returns it to a sustaining-success state, designated in the model as the recovery cycle. One of the main hurdles of realignment is that many in such organizations, like Claire Weeks, are in denial about the situation. They continue to believe they are sustaining success even as they are heading for trouble. If efforts to realign the business fail, it can end as a full-scale turnaround. This happens when prior leaders failed to see the need for realignment. After all, businesses rarely go directly from sustaining success to turnaround. No matter why this happened, there is rarely argument about the need to make big changes fast if the situation is dire, the business is losing money, and its best talent is jumping ship. Turning around a failing business requires the new leader to cut it down to a defendable core fast and then begin to build it back up. This painful process, if successful, leaves the business in a sustaining-success situation, as illustrated by the crisis cycle in figure If efforts to turn around the business fail, the result is shutdown or divestiture.

It is important to understand these cycles. You cannot figure out where to take a new organization if you do not understand where it has been and how it got where it is. In a realignment, for example, it is essential to understand what made the organization successful in the past and why it drifted into trouble. Identifying Challenges and Opportunities In all four of the STARS situations, the eventual goal is the same: a successful and growing business. But each type of transition presents a distinct set of challenges. If you are succeeding the leader of a high-performing business, the challenge will be to take charge in your own way while preserving what is good about the organization.

If you are in a start-up situation, such as getting a new product off the ground, you will be responsible for creating the organization. If you are in a realignment situation, you will have to build awareness of the need for change. Each situation also presents characteristic opportunities that you can leverage to build momentum. In a turnaround situation, everyone realizes that changes need to be made quickly. That group awareness can help you move forward. By finding these islands of excellence, you can marshal the building blocks to make needed changes. Although every situation is unique, each of the four types of transitions exhibits distinct challenges and opportunities, summarized in table Table Challenges and Opportunities of Transition Types Transition Type Start-up Challenges Opportunities Building structures and systems from scratch without a clear framework or boundaries.

Welding together a cohesive high-performing team. Making do with limited resources. Turnaround Reenergizing demoralized employees and other stakeholders. Handling time pressure and having a quick and decisive impact. Going deep enough with painful cuts and difficult personnel choices.

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The facilitator meets first with the new leader to lay out the process. Turnaround Reenergizing demoralized employees and other stakeholders. Failure is never just about the flaws of the new leader. To a significant degree, you get to start fresh. Think hard about the differences between the two and in what ways you have to think and act differently. Transition failures happen when new leaders either misunderstand the essential demands of the situation or lack the skill and flexibility to adapt to them. How might you increase the efficiency of your learning process?

The first 90 days ebook free download is a serious affliction, because being too busy to learn often results in a death spiral. You can learn from them how links within the organization work and how the functions mesh. Understanding the History The relationships among these four business situations are depicted in the ST ARS model of business evolution shown in figure Barriers and Resources What are the most formidable barriers to making needed changes? The quicker you can get your new direct reports up to speed, the more you will help your own performance.