#135: You’ve Got A New Job. What’s Your Plan? (Part 1)
Good morning dear friends
Summer has been making its way into the Cape. We have gone in search of views and vines, well actually wine but views and vines had a nice rhyme to it, and of course vines and wine…Okay, I’m getting distracted here…
We went to Constantia Glen one week and Cape Point Vineyards the next. Both have remarkable views. Constantia Glen gives you mountain slopes with dense green forests. Cape Point; a sweeping view across sloping vineyards to the blue of False Bay. If you love Sauvignon Blanc, then head to Cape Point, their’s are consistently rated among the best in the world and Constantia Glen is home to some spectacular blends.
Today is the first of two letters about starting a new job.
We’re doing so through the lens of Thomas Neff and James M. Citrin‘s You’re in Charge-Now What? The 8-Point Plan.
Two Spencer Stuart executives, they wrote the book as a guide for new CEOs but the principles apply to any role (Thank you to another Spencer Stuart executive, Guy Lundy, for bringing their work to my attention).
In writing the book they examined 100 visible leadership transitions and conducted more than 50 in-depth interviews with CEOs about how they’d made a successful start to their roles – the proverbial ‘first one hundred days’.
You might not be starting a new job but think about what this means for how you should engage with newcomers to your organisation – you want to make sure that you’re doing everything you can do to maximise their success.
/strategy
100 days is not a lot of time.
If you work 50 hours a week, you only have 712 hours at your disposal. If you push it to 65 hours a week it gives 930 hours (Morten Hansen’s Great at Work tells us that we get performance improvements up to 50 hours a week, thereafter performance flatlines and after 65 hours performance starts to decline). So, be realistic about what you can achieve in that first period. If you push too hard or craft plans on inadequate information, you will only lose credibility.
Neff and Citrin caution us, “Do not feel compelled to walk into your new role with a strategy already developed – it will be wrong, incomplete and/or lack buy-in. Instead, integrate all the information into four of five themes to discuss and focus on”, and remind us that, “Though you have gained a reputation from your work in other companies, you are still a stranger within your new organisation, and as such, you face the critical task of re-establishing your credibility.”
To establish credibility, remember:
- You don’t have to have all the answers. “No one expects you to know everything; in fact, people will be suspicious if you imply that you do. Avoid the temptation to think that you have to be the saviour and have immediate answers.”
- Change makes people anxious, particularly if you’re coming in as a new CEO or department head. Take the time to listen to fears and concerns.
- Neutralise any resentment (someone else probably also wanted the job) by asking open-ended inviting questions like “What should I be thinking about?” or “What would you like me to deliver in this role?”
- Don’t disrespect your predecessor. In fact, how you treat your predecessor is so important and so easy to mishandle, that they identify it as one of the top traps for a new leader.
They asked the leaders they interviewed what the most important actions were to have a good start. The top 5 were:
- Absorb information
- Define the challenge.
- Establish credibility and win trust.
- Assess the team.
- Prepare yourself emotionally.
Underpinning this, their work shows that “Aligning expectations – make sure everyone agrees on the important issues and priorities is the foundation for the first 100 days and your future success”.
And remember, “Having all the answers is usually the wrong answer. People need to see you listening and assimilating their information. If you don’t pause to ask questions and circle back when you have more data, you will lose credibility and trust”.
So, spend time listening, check your interpretations, be open to them being reformulated and build a shared understanding of the situation with your colleagues.
They interviewed Lawrence Summers about his first 100 days as President of Harvard University. He identified three things that he felt he could have done better:
- “By asking and challenging everything, you create a lot of uncertainty, and that uncertainty can be debilitating to the ongoing functioning of the organisation.”
- “If you ask ten questions and make ten suggestions, people may take them less seriously, even if they’re all equally good. If you have only two issues or questions, people will take your two more seriously than they may take any of your ten.” and
- “During my first hundred days at Harvard, I could have had things I identified as success and could have signaled that it was a new day, without dissipating as much goodwill capital”.
In simple language, don’t be a know-it-all, be focused and be nice. Next week’s letter will share more, but it’s worth reading the book.
/self
Neff and Citrin remind us that underneath the new job, is you the person. You have relationships, emotions, and a body. New jobs are demanding, so have a plan to take care of each element.
Speak to friends and family about what support you might need. If you are going to do the 65-hour weeks, you’re going to have to ask for their patience whilst you disappear into work.
Ensure you have emotional and strategic support. You’ll be encountering a lot of newness – it’s useful to have some places where you can process your experiences. Mentors, a coach, a therapist, and trusted industry experts are all ways to add to your capacity in those early days.
You’ll need stamina, so ensure that you’re eating well and exercising.
All of this seems self-evident, but in the rush to make a success of an opportunity, it is easy to forget to care for yourself. And it is you that will be the foundation of your success.
/soul
The joy of my work is that I get to work with amazing people. Sometime last year, Roxanne laughed at me saying “Do you know that you say that all the time?”
She’d asked me what my day held. I said, “I am meeting some of my favourite clients today”. It remains true, I am truly blessed by the people who want to work with me. Last week, one of those people left us in a tragic accident.
It feels important that I tell you a little about him. He was an exceptionally skilled businessperson. He combined a powerful strategic vision with an impatience for action and excellence. This ability to see and shape the future made him the person that shareholders turned to when they wanted to change the fortunes of their businesses.
He said, “I’d become the ‘re’ guy – re-engineer, restructure, reorganise” and after sixteen years of doing this work, he felt that he’d become hardened, lost touch with his humanity, and he wanted to change that. And so, in his late fifties, he put himself on a new path. He studied. He wrote exams, got the required certifications and started a new career, a new business, one in which he felt that he could be of service to others.
When we met, earlier this year, he was four years into that journey. Covid had made it tough, and he wanted to assess his strategy. He felt he was doing all the right things but wanted to think it through with me.
He told me that he’d recently put himself on a comedy diet. His view was that his new work was helping him evolve into the version of himself that he wanted to be, but he was dissatisfied with the pace and figured that a strict diet of comedy might accelerate the ‘lightening up’ process. I loved it. I have shared it with other clients. Like in his business life, he had a vision and was determined to take all the required actions to get the results. The irony of being impatient at becoming more easy-going was not lost on him.
I’d asked him what had made him so successful in his roles.
He said his guiding principle was ‘minimum of 3 / maximum of 5’. He explained that if you have less than 3 priorities, you’ll have insufficient impact; if you have more than five, you’ll dilute your efforts too much.
He believed that each business has an essence. His first step was always to understand what that was. He reflected that new leaders sometimes try to take a business away from the founder’s vision and that it never works. He believed that his success came from reconnecting the business to the power of the founding essence. He said that once that was done, everything else became easier.
It was a profoundly spiritual view from a tough, pragmatic change merchant. He could see what I was thinking. He shrugged, said “yep”. He was quiet for a moment, then gave a little smile, shook his head, perhaps slightly bemused that he’d voiced that thought. He called it ‘going back to the future’.
We finished our work together in April. In September, I received an email from him telling me that he’d had a record month. It didn’t surprise me. He said that he felt like he’d turned a corner, that he was headed where he wanted to be going.
This week as I reflected on his decision to completely renew his life after more than four decades in the same sector, to leave behind his identity as the tough change-maker, I was taken to Michael Meade’s words “A certain kind of courage is required to follow what truly calls to us; why else would so many choose to live within false certainties and pretensions of security? If genuine treasures were easy to find this world would be a different place. If the path of dreams were easy to walk or predictable to follow many more would go that route. The truth is that most prefer the safer paths in life even if they know that their souls are called another way.”
He listened to his soul. He acted with courage. I wish you the same blessing.
Best wishes
Karl
PS: If you’d like to subscribe to this letter, you can do so here.