Notes on Michael Watkins' guide to leadership transitions.
Book: The First 90 Days by Michael D. Watkins
Focus: Proven strategies for getting up to speed faster and smarter in new leadership roles
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.
Start by generating questions about the past, the present, and the future:
Many leaders tend to dive in and start talking to people. You will pick up much soft information in this way, but it is not efficient. That's because its lack of structure makes it difficult to know how much weight to place on various individuals' observations.
Instead, you should consider using a structured learning process.
When diagnosing a new organization, start by meeting with your direct reports one-on-one. Ask them essentially the same five questions:
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.
| Method | Uses | Useful for |
|---|---|---|
| Organizational climate surveys | Learning about culture and morale. Many organizations do such surveys regularly, and a database may already be available. | Useful for managers at all levels if the analysis is available specifically for your unit or group. Usefulness depends on granularity of collection and analysis. |
| Structured sets of interviews | Identifying shared and divergent perceptions of opportunities and problems. Can interview people at same level in different departments (horizontal slice) or bore down through multiple levels (vertical slice). | Most useful for managers leading groups of people from different functional backgrounds. Can be useful at lower levels if the unit is experiencing significant problems. |
| Focus groups | Probing issues that preoccupy key groups of employees, such as morale issues among frontline production or service workers. 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. Can be useful for senior managers as a way of getting quick insights into the perceptions of key employee constituencies. |
| 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. | Most useful for higher-level managers of business units or project groups. |
| Process analysis | Examining interactions among departments and functions and assessing the efficiency of a process. Select an important process, such as delivery of products to customers or distributors, and assign a cross-functional 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. Can be useful for lower-level managers as a way of understanding how their groups fit into larger processes. |
| Plant and market tours | Learning firsthand from people close to the product. Plant tours let you meet production personnel informally and listen to their concerns. Market tours can introduce you to customers, whose comments can reveal problems and opportunities. | Most useful for managers of business units. |
| Pilot projects | Gaining deep insight into technical capabilities, culture, and politics. Although 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 increase as you rise through the organization. |
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 90-day plan.
Notes from The First 90 Days by Michael D. Watkins. Highly recommended for anyone starting a new leadership role.