The Executive Transition Playbook

by Hilary Potts

  Make a real difference in your follow-up. Carry note cards so that you can send handwritten notes of praise or insight or simple appreciation to high-performing associates. You will stand out, as few people send pen-and-ink handwritten notes these days. The personal touch definitely makes a difference.

  Avoid Becoming Isolated

  As an enterprise leader, you have the advantage of seeing the entire business landscape. At the same time, you may be too far away and isolated from the real work activity to have a true impact. Unless you are careful, most of the information you hear will be sound bites and headlines that have been censored and filtered by your direct reports. The more layers there are in your organization, the more likely it is that the information you receive is synthesized and possibly slanted by others (or just plain wrong).

  Use your unique position to help make the cross-organizational connections and help leaders see the full business picture so that they can collectively find the best solution. Work to break through the barriers and silos by creating forums to talk directly to people and share information. Get involved and actively engage with a cross section of the organization to avoid getting isolated.

  Cultivating relationships and assessing the talent can go hand in hand. Look several layers deep inside the organization to meet the rising leaders. Solicit their perspective on the business, and learn about what’s keeping them motivated and what’s challenging them. The more you delve into the entire organization, the more you will see the day-to-day realities of how senior management decisions are truly playing out throughout the organization, for good or ill.

  In talking with people at various levels, you will see how messages and direction move from your direct reports down to the front line. This is valuable information for you, so meet and get to know people at all levels and ask them to share their ideas and perspectives regarding the business. Consider setting up ongoing forums to connect with multiple levels in the organization, so that you can hear and see for yourself what’s really going on.

  Develop Strong Peer Relationships

  Many say that strong bonds with peers are the most important relationships to cultivate. It’s easy to get a false sense that your efforts are working with direct reports, since you are in a position of authority and they likely look up to you. Not so with peers. You may find you need to shift your approach somewhat to gain their respect.

  Pave the way for cross-organizational collaboration by engaging with your peer group. Peers will have their own views, opinions, and approaches, and may not readily agree with your ideas. Your time will be well spent in building collaboration and cooperation among your peers. Prepare for meetings with them by using the Stakeholder Preparation Plan discussed in Chapter 11. Include both peers with whom you naturally connect well and those whom you may need to work a bit harder to reach. Use your meeting time to review business items and to find ways to enhance the business.

  Try several techniques to develop stronger relationships with your peers, and regularly assess their effectiveness:

  Connect on a Personal Level

  Go beyond the business meetings and get to know your peers. This may include talking more on a personal level and getting to know one another over a lunch discussion or even a weekend golf game or boating trip. Be prepared to listen to what your peers view as important.

  Collaborate Well

  Be curious and ask questions. As you hear different ideas and approaches, take care not to dismiss your peers’ ideas too quickly. Discuss ways in which you can mutually support one another’s business efforts. People will take notice when they see you working to mutually solve issues that cut across your organization.

  Provide Mutual Support

  Volunteer to help your peers, and in turn ask for assistance from them.

  Build Trust

  Relationships are constructed on trust. Take the time to set expectations of how you will work together. Share information and work toward solutions that benefit the entire organization. Regularly ask colleagues for feedback, to learn how you can better contribute to the management team.

  You and your peer group will want to show a united front in supporting the business initiatives. A trap that many new leaders fall into is to approach a problem too myopically instead of considering the broader implications across the entire business ecosystem. As you and your colleagues work on initiatives, take care that you do not solve one problem only to find that you have created another one. This can happen when a business fails to take a true ecosystem approach.

  PART V

  Leading Effectively for the Long Term

  Chapter 23

  Assessing and Using the Information Collected

  The first step toward change is awareness.

  – Nathaniel Branden

  If you have taken the time to collate an Executive Transition Sourcebook, you can use the information in it to identify key business themes and make pertinent decisions. Otherwise, this is a good time to collect the pertinent information in one place before turning your attention to step 3 of the Executive Transition Playbook: Assess the Business.

  Your assessment will produce a clear picture of the business and what to do next. Use the assessment period to collect your thoughts, weigh the options, and get clear on next steps. How is the business performing today, and where do you want to make changes? Make notes on how the organization will react to any changes you will be proposing. Here is where the clarity of messages becomes important, enabling you to adequately address the questions and concerns and to build buy-in. The key is to create a direction where you wish to take the business. With a clear picture of what needs to be accomplished, map out how you will socialize and then enroll others in your campaign.

  The following ideas are meant to spark your thinking about next steps for the overall strategy, leadership capabilities, and business implementation. Depending on your situation, you may find that you need to address other aspects of the business, such as organizational structure, processes, or perhaps metrics. You will likely want to dig deeper into specific tools to address these areas. The key is to clarify the themes and share them with other leaders and, together, get the organization focusing on next steps.

  Chart a Direction

  Refer back to the information you’ve captured about the business. Take a look at the strategy of the business and assess how well the organization is following it, in light of these questions:

  ◆Is the organization working in concert with the company’s mission, vision, and values? Are leaders committed and aligned to the company’s vision, values, and strategy?

  ◆Is the company well positioned and valued by customers, strategic suppliers, and competitors?

  ◆Is the strategy clearly defined? Is it achieving the desired results?

  ◆Do business segments, functions, and departments themselves have clearly defined strategies? Are those strategies aligned to the enterprise strategy?

  ◆Are work processes clearly defined? Do people follow them, or do they create work-arounds?

  ◆Are people engaged and concentrating on the right things?

  ◆How aligned are the work efforts across the organization?

  ◆What themes are emerging?

  It’s one thing to have a strategy; it’s another to follow its direction. Check to see if people are truly committed to the strategic direction. If they are not, what are they spending their time on, and why?

  When business units and functional departments become more focused on activities and dealing with the day-to-day issues, the strategy can get lost in the details. Without a consistent direction, people may be doing many different things, but the efforts can fall short. So take a look at each of the business, functional, and regional strategies to see if they are aligned to the enterprise. Assess how aligned the organization is toward achieving the business goals. If the daily activities aren’t aligned to what really matters, how will you get people back on track?

  Review the strategies for
the brands and products to see if the strategies align with the corporate strategy. Assess the interdependencies between the businesses, functions, and geographies to identify what needs to be addressed. What areas must be adjusted to get all parts of the organization aligned and moving in the right direction? Capture your observations and actions on paper. Use these ideas to engage others in next steps.

  Walk through each of the major business elements and assess how well the organization is performing in each of them. Then look across all the elements to determine whether business efforts overall are complementing one another or warring with one another, and whether you find disconnects in the work activities. It helps to go back and forth from the enterprise view to the individual business, brand, functional, or regional views to determine key priorities. Look for what’s working and where the business connections can be improved. Also review the strategic initiatives. These initiatives usually require cross-organizational collaboration. Often, you will find disconnects and difficulties in carrying out these initiatives. Where would better cross-organizational dialogue enhance these efforts?

  Assess the Talent

  Executing the strategy comes down to the people, processes, and systems that are in place to enable the work to get done. Processes and systems are, of course, created and executed by people, not machines. You have had a chance to meet many of your people. From your vantage point, does the organization have the right talent and capability to follow through on its business plans? Where are the leadership strengths in the organization? What developmental needs are required to enhance capability? Formulate your ideas, so you can put in place a talent strategy that aligns with the overall strategic direction. Make sure to also take a look at the rewards and compensation programs to determine if they are aligned with the business metrics. People may be doing the wrong things when the rewards systems are out of sync with the business metrics.

  Consider enlisting the Human Resources leader to assist in crafting a clear picture of the talent plan. Also, utilize the managers throughout the business and tap into their insights on talents and capabilities in their units.

  Execute Business Strategy

  Most incoming executives will make changes. Many strategic initiatives, however, fall short because of poor execution. Great strategies and programs badly or insufficiently executed lead to missed goals. An entire shelf of books could be dedicated to addressing strategies to deploy changes. This brief section is meant to get you thinking about the changes you will be making and the impact they will have on the people you are counting on to support those changes.

  It’s easy to pull the trigger on a change before the implications have been fully explored. So you will want to spend as much time leading the changes as you did coming up with the strategic concepts themselves. If you understand the organization’s history and approach to deploying initiatives, the insights you glean will provide clues about the actions you will need to take to make leading initiatives more effective.

  In your assessment of the business, how well does the organization deploy and execute strategies, processes, and programs? What project and change management tools are available to implement the solutions? As it pertains to executing change, what does the organization do well, and what could be enhanced? How are your fellow leaders engaged in leading change? What will it take to get the organization to being “implementation-savvy”?

  Assess whether you need to adjust current initiatives or deploy new ones. In your assessment, determine how you will lead the current initiatives that you are inheriting.

  Before you embark on making changes to the business, answer the following questions in detail:

  ◆What is your vision of the future?

  ◆How will these changes positively affect customers, revenues, and earnings?

  ◆Why is it important to make these changes now?

  ◆How prepared is the organization to take on the changes you are proposing?

  ◆Where do you expect the leaders and others to resist the changes?

  ◆How does the organization currently implement change? Are additional tools and methodologies at hand that could help with implementation? Do these have a track record of being effective in implementing change?

  ◆How will you prepare your senior management team to get aligned around the changes?

  ◆What is your overall plan to achieve the desired outcomes?

  The table in Figure 23-1, Observations and Key Themes, provides a way to capture the findings and observations you collected during your transition and to prioritize the actions going forward. This will let you chart the business direction, cultivate the talent, and execute the business strategy to achieve the business outcomes.

  Chapter 24

  Sharing Your Observations

  The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.

  – Seth Godin

  People will want to hear your opinions. You are in a unique position, because you have looked at all aspects of the business from an objective, “outsider” perspective. You are now able to see what’s working and what’s not. People will also be curious about how you plan to lead the organization and whether you will change the company’s strategy, processes, and people. They will expect you to make some changes. They aren’t quite sure, though, to what degree these changes will affect them. The fourth step in the Executive Transition Playbook (see Figure 2-1) is about Sharing the Information and insights you gained from looking at the business.

  I suggest creating a presentation or report that allows you to outline key areas and themes to share your observations coherently and concisely. You will find that doing so will achieve the following:

  ◆Help you discuss your plans with your boss, peers, and direct reports

  ◆Enable you to align with others

  ◆Give you a way to consistently and regularly update others on your plans

  Craft Your Messages

  Whenever you share your observations, that’s a good time to demonstrate that you are taking full accountability for the business. Review the information you gathered and the insights from the exercises in Chapter 23 and the findings you identified in Figure 23-1 to prepare to share the information with the organization. Figure 24-1 suggests a presentation outline, which you can use or adapt to communicate your observations and insights effectively. By collecting your observations into key themes, it will be easier to share your ideas in both conversations and group forums. Consider what your audience needs to hear from you and the tone of your messages. Using the presentation as a guide, outline core themes and areas for action. It can be helpful to weave a story of the “who, what, when, where, and how:”

  ◆What is the vision for the future? (Share your observations about the current state of the business. Then project what the future might look like.)

  ◆Why is it important to make these changes?

  ◆Who will be involved in the change?

  ◆What processes will be used?

  ◆How will success be measured?

  ◆How will changes be deployed?

  ◆What do you need from others to gain their buy-in and commitment?

  ◆When do we need to hit certain milestones?

  In essence, now that you have a sense of the business history and current situation, you will be working collaboratively with others to take the business into the future. Be sure your comments are in the spirit of helping, engaging, and enrolling others. Use language and examples that coach others toward a new way. Avoid terms that tend to disenfranchise the group, such as words that find fault with the current state of business or with former leaders. Instead, communicate a compelling case for change. This means less criticizing and more enrolling to create agreement, commitment, and buy-in to the solutions. It may be helpful to show how prior events built a solid foundation to prepare the organization for the next phase of the business. There may be market or other environmental factors that inf
luence the decision to make significant changes now.

  Some leaders use the presentation as an outline for a Leadership Summit to review the business strategies and plans going forward. They create collaborative work sessions to gain leadership alignment with the executive team. Depending on your business, you might engage the top 25, 50, or even 100 leaders in the solutions.

  Your actions and involvement send a strong message that you are fully in charge and ready to take on the business challenges with the team. Use the newly identified themes as a springboard to initiate dialogues and discussions. Make sure that everyone becomes a real part of the solution. Some leaders start this process by working in smaller teams to flesh out ideas before sharing the direction with a broader audience. The method mostly depends on your business situation and your personal approach. The key aspect of this step is to share your findings and engage a broad audience in helping you carry out the next steps. This signals the end of your learning period.

  As you complete this step of the Executive Transition Playbook, you will want to communicate any management process changes, reconfirm the business calendar, and set expectations and team guidelines. The presentation outline in Figure 24-1 provides a section to discuss go-forward plans. In addition to the presentation, consider establishing a Communication Plan similar to the Transition Communication Plan described in Chapter 13. A Communication Plan will provide a structure and cadence to communicate key messages and keep others informed. Similarly, while you are sharing your findings, start incorporating any new leadership behaviors you have identified as desirable (see Figure 7-2).

  Chapter 25

  Stepping into Action: Beyond the Transition