Only a month after the new structure was put in place, productivity in the unit plummeted, threatening to delay the launch of a key new product. Chris convened his direct reports and urged them to “get the problems fixed, and fast.” But the problems remained, and morale throughout the operation slumped.
After only two months in his new role, Chris’s boss told him, “You’ve alienated just about everyone. I brought you here to improve quality, not tear it down.” His boss then peppered him with questions: “How much time did you spend learning about the operation? Did you know they’ve been asking for more investment for years? Have you seen what they were able to accomplish before you arrived with the resources they were given? You’ve got to stop doing and start listening.”
Shaken, Chris held sobering discussions with his managers, supervisors, and groups of workers. He learned a lot about the creativity they had displayed in dealing with the lack of investment in the operation. He also got direct feedback about what was not working with his new structure. He called an all-hands meeting and announced that, based on the feedback he had received, there would be significant adjustments to the structure. He also committed to upgrading testing technology and training before making any other changes.
What did Chris do wrong? Like many new leaders, he failed to focus on learning about his new organization and so made some bad decisions that undercut his credibility.
The first task in making a successful transition is to accelerate your learning. Effective learning gives you the foundational insights you need as you build your plan for the next 90 days. So 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. The more efficiently and effectively you learn, the more quickly you will close your window of vulnerability. You can identify potential problems that might erupt and take you offtrack. The faster you climb the learning curve, the earlier you can begin to make good business decisions.
Overcoming Learning Roadblocks
When a new leader derails, failure to learn effectively is almost always a factor. Early in your transition you inevitably feel as if you are drinking from a fire hose. There is so much to absorb that it’s difficult to know where to focus. Amid the torrent of information coming your way, it’s 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 critical learning about culture and politics.
To compound this problem, surprisingly few managers have received training in systematically diagnosing organizations. Those who have had such training invariably prove to be either human resource professionals or former management consultants.
A related problem is a 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.
Some leaders even have “learning roadblocks,” internal barriers to learning. One example is Chris’s failure to focus on understanding the history of the organization. A baseline question you always should ask is, “How did we get to this point?” Otherwise, you risk tearing down existing structures or processes without knowing why they were put there in the first place. Armed with insight into the organization’s history, you may indeed decide that things need to change. Or you may find there is a good reason to leave it exactly where it is.
A related learning block, as mentioned in the introduction, is the action imperative. The primary symptom is a nearly compulsive need to take action. Effective leaders strike the right balance between doing (making things happen) and being (observing and reflecting). But it is challenging, as Chris Hadley found, to let yourself “be” during transitions. And the pressure to “do” almost always comes more from inside the leader than from outside forces; it reflects a lack of confidence and a consequent need to prove yourself. Remember: simply displaying a genuine desire to learn and understand translates into increased credibility and influence.
So if you habitually find yourself too anxious or too busy to devote time to learning, you may suffer from the action imperative. It is a serious affliction, because often, being too busy to learn results in a death spiral. If, like Chris, you do not focus on learning, you can easily make poor early decisions that undermine your credibility, alienate potential supporters, and make people less likely to share important information with you. The result is that you make more bad decisions and enter 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 you will see in the next chapter, it is the right thing to do—but you risk being poorly prepared to see the real problems.
Perhaps most destructive of all, some new leaders arrive, as Chris did at Phoenix, with “the” answer. They have already made up their minds about what the organization’s problems are and how to solve them. Having matured in organizations where things were done “the right way,” these leaders fail to realize that what works well in one organization may fail miserably in another. As Chris found out the hard way, coming in with the answer leaves you vulnerable to making serious mistakes and is likely to alienate people. Chris thought he could simply import what he had learned at Dura to fix the Phoenix plant’s problems.
Leaders who are onboarding into new organizations must therefore focus on learning and adapting to the new culture. Otherwise they risk suffering the organizational equivalent of organ rejection syndrome (with the new leaders being the organs). They do things that trigger the organization’s immune system and find themselves under attack as a foreign body. Even in situations (such as turnarounds) when you have been brought in explicitly to import new ways of doing things, you still have to learn about the organization’s culture and politics to socialize and customize your approach.
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 quickly reach the break-even point in personal value creation. Chris would have acted differently if he had known that (1) senior management at Phoenix had systematically underinvested in the past, despite energetic efforts by local managers to upgrade, (2) the operation had achieved remarkable results in quality and productivity given what it 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 must 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 that 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 time. Chris’s approach to learning about the Phoenix operation was neither effective nor efficient.
Defining Your Learning Agenda
If Chris 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 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 the hypotheses 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 le
arn 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, the present, and the future (see boxes, “Questions About the Past,” “Questions About the Present,” and “Questions About the Future”). Why are things done the way they are? Are the reasons something was done (for example, to meet a competitive threat) still valid? Are conditions changing so that something different should be done in the future? The accompanying boxes offer sample questions in these three categories.
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?
What have been the relative contributions of strategy, structure, systems, talent bases, culture, and politics?
If performance has been poor, why has that been the case? Do the primary issues reside in the organization’s strategy? 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?
Is the organization really pursuing that strategy? If not, why not? If so, will the strategy take the organization where it needs to go?
People
Who is capable, and who is not?
Who is trustworthy, and who is not?
Who has influence, and why?
Processes
What are the key processes?
Are they performing acceptably in quality, reliability, and timeliness? If not, why not?
Land Mines
What lurking surprises could detonate and push you offtrack?
What potentially damaging cultural or political missteps must you avoid?
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 organization 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? Cultural? Political?
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?
As you work to answer these questions, think, too, about the right mix of technical, interpersonal, cultural, and political learning.1 In the technical domain, you may have to grapple with unfamiliar markets, technologies, processes, and systems. In the interpersonal domain, you need to get to know your boss, peers, and direct reports. In the cultural domain, you must learn about norms, values, and behavioral expectations, which are almost certainly different from those in the organization you came from, even if you’re moving between units in the same company. In the political domain, you must understand the shadow organization—the informal set of processes and alliances that exist in the shadow of the formal structure and strongly influence how work actually gets done. The political domain is both important and difficult to understand, because it isn’t easily visible to those who have not spent time in the organization and because political land mines can easily stymie your efforts to establish a solid base of support during the transition.
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. But to make effective decisions, you also need “soft” information about the organization’s strategy, technical capabilities, culture, and politics. The only way to gain this intelligence is to talk to people who have critical knowledge about your situation.
Who can provide the best return on your learning investment? Identifying promising sources will make your learning both comprehensive and efficient. Keep in mind that you need to listen to key people both inside and outside the organization (see figure 2-1). Talking to people with different points of view will deepen your insight. Specifically, it will help you translate between external realities and internal perceptions, and between people at the top of the hierarchy and people on the front lines.
FIGURE 2-1
Sources of knowledge
The most valuable external sources of information are likely to be the following:
Customers. How do customers—external or internal—perceive your organization? How do your best customers assess your products or services? How about your customer service? If your customers are external, how do they rank your company against your competitors?
Suppliers. 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 your internal systems for managing quality and customer satisfaction.
Distributors. From distributors, you can learn about the logistics of product movement, customer service, and competitors’ practices and offerings. You can also get a sense of the distributors’ own capabilities.
Outside analysts. Analysts can give you a fairly objective assessment of your company’s strategy and capabilities as well as those of your competitors. Analysts also have a broad overview of the demands of the market and the economic health of the industry.
Indispensable internal information sources are the following:
Frontline R&D and operations. These are the people who develop and manufacture your products or deliver your services. Frontline people can familiarize you with the organization’s basic processes and its relationships with key external constituencies. They can also shed light on how the rest of the organization supports or undermines efforts on the front line.
Sales and procurement. These people, along with 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.
Staff. Talk with heads or key staff members of the finance, legal, and human resource functional areas. These people have specialized but useful perspectives on the internal workings of the organization.
Integrators. 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 company work and how the functions mesh. These people also can help you discover the true political hierarchies and identify where internal conflicts lie.
Natural historians. Keep an eye out for “old-timers” or natural historians—people who have been with the organization for a long time and who naturally absorb its history. From these people, you can learn about the company’s mythology (key stories about how the organization came to be and trials it has gone through) and the roots of its culture and politics.
If you are new to the organization, there often is much you can do to accelerate the onboarding process before you arrive. The starting point, beyond the recruiting process, is
to leverage the rich array of resources available online, including background information and analysis of the organization, biographies of key people, and information available on the organization’s own website. Beyond that, it is highly desirable, if possible, to reach out to current or former employees to get a bead on the history and culture.
Adopting Structured Learning Methods
Once you have a rough sense of what you need to learn and where to seek it—whether from reports, conversations with knowledgeable people, or electronic resources—the next step is to understand how best to learn.
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 it can be time-consuming and because its lack of structure makes it difficult to know how much weight to place on various individuals’ observations. 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 to influence you.
Instead, you should consider using a structured learning process. To illustrate the advantages of this approach, imagine that you plan to meet with your direct reports to elicit their assessments. How might you go about doing this? Bringing them together right away might be a mistake, because some people will hesitate to reveal their views in a public forum.
The First 90 Days, Updated and Expanded_Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter Page 5
