Companies typically have systems in place to assess and manage other risks of comparable magnitude, and they should manage executive transition risk with equal rigor. An acceleration system is therefore an element of overall enterprise risk management.
Now consider the cumulative impact on performance of the many ongoing transitions occurring at all levels. Recall that about a quarter of all the leaders in typical Fortune 500 companies change jobs each year. Executives have even higher annual rates of transition—35 percent in the top three tiers of leadership in one study, with 22 percent moving internally and 13 percent being hired from the outside. And each transition materially impacts the performance of about a dozen people surrounding the leader—peers, direct reports, and bosses.
Imagine the value of accelerating all those transitions by only 10 percent, never mind 40 percent. Success in accelerating everyone contributes directly to improving company performance. It’s even a potential source of competitive advantage; if you can help everyone get up to speed faster, the business will be more nimble and responsive. An acceleration system is therefore a key element of a high-performance organization.
Finally, think about what happens when your business goes through a significant change event—a restructuring, a phase of rapid growth, or integration of an acquisition. Every major change creates a ripple of individual transitions that cascades through the organization. The important “hard side” work of getting in place the right structure and systems and staffing the key positions is only the first phase of change implementation. To achieve planned objectives, such as acquisition synergy targets, strategic direction must be driven down through the organization; clarity about roles, responsibilities, and decision rights must be established; and relationship building must be accelerated.
The 90-day framework described in this book has been applied very successfully to accelerate the second phase of organizational change in Rapid Rewire implementations. The focus typically is on team acceleration, and it begins with the top team and flows down through the organization. Teams at every level use the same methodology, language, and tools to create 90-day plans and build relationships and teamwork. Success in applying this approach can make the difference between achieving targets and failing miserably. That’s because, as many companies have learned painfully, the soft side of change is the hard side. An acceleration system is therefore an essential element of the organizational change management toolkit.
Whether the focus is on risk management, performance improvement, change implementation, or all three, companies have a big stake in accelerating transitions at every level—internally and externally, individually and organizationally. This means that they should manage leadership-transition acceleration as they would any critical business process—by putting in place the right framework, tools, and systems to accelerate everyone.
Given this, how should companies approach the design of acceleration systems? Following are ten design principles—guidelines you can apply to build the right solution for your business.
Identify the Critical Transitions
The starting point is to understand how many transitions are occurring in your organization and to focus first on accelerating the most important of them. It’s surprising how many companies are unable to answer basic questions about the number of people who are being hired, getting promoted, moving between units, and making lateral moves. Without good data on the frequency of transitions—and, critically, without awareness of when they are occurring—it’s difficult to design acceleration systems.
You need to understand transition frequencies in order to assess the costs and benefits of providing support at different levels and to efficiently allocate resources. Suppose, for example, that you anticipate a relatively high frequency of movement (greater than 30 percent) at the frontline leader level, perhaps because the business is growing rapidly. It’s a good rule of thumb that leaders at this level should participate in transition workshops (in person or virtually) within their first 60 days on the job (in addition, as described later, to getting immediate launch resources at the time they move into their new roles). These workshops tend to work best with fifteen to twenty participants. You can use this information to plan where and when transition support will be offered.
Beyond knowing transition frequencies, it’s valuable to know what the mix is of onboarding, inboarding (moves between units), promotion, and lateral moves. Knowing this allows you to tailor the support you’re providing. That’s because, as described later, support should be customized somewhat to the types of transitions leaders are experiencing.
Then you need to focus on critical transitions. Which are the most important transitions going on in your company? Suppose you’re a small, rapidly growing pharmaceutical company. You have just received approval for a promising new drug; you’re hiring a new sales force and need to get up to speed faster than a competitor. Your success in onboarding new salespeople may make the difference between great success and so-so performance. Your initial efforts therefore should focus on helping all those salespeople get up to speed as quickly as possible, as well as helping the sales organization as a whole to gel. Use the Transition Heat Map tool in figure 10-1 to summarize your assessments of which transitions are most critical in your organization.
FIGURE 10-1
Transition Heat Map
The Transition Heat Map is a tool for summarizing the most important transition acceleration priorities in your organization, as shown in the example below. Start by listing the key organizational units or groups or projects in the left-hand column. Then identify any major change events that are occurring in each of these units, groups, projects. Finally assess the relative intensity of key types of transitions—onboarding, promotion, geographic moves, and lateral moves—that are occurring in each organization. The result is a summary that you can use to communicate about priorities.
Identify Set-Up-to-Fail Dynamics
As discussed in the introduction, there are common traps new leaders fall into. Examples include staying in your comfort zone or trying to do too much too fast. These can largely be avoided through implementation of acceleration systems based on the principles discussed in this book.
However, there also are systematic mistakes that organizations make when putting leaders into new roles that need to be addressed in the design of acceleration systems.3 Respondents to the HBR/IMD study highlighted classic ways that companies set up their leaders to fail. Reasons for unnecessary derailment or underperformance are summarized in table 10-1.
There is not much point in putting in place acceleration systems if your company is setting up leaders to fail in these ways. The implication is that you may need to address culture change as part of your broader effort to put a system in place. Suppose your company does a poor job of sizing the leaps that leaders are being asked to make. If it is, you may want to push for systematic use of the transition risk assessment discussed in the introduction. Likewise, if there are widespread problems with providing clarity about expectations, they can be addressed through disciplined use of the five conversations discussed in chapter 4.
Diagnose Existing Transition Support
Companies often have a patchwork quilt of existing systems for supporting transitions. One unit may do a good job of promoting lower-level leaders, another has an effective executive onboarding system, and yet another does a good job of supporting international moves. Because the benefits of having a companywide acceleration system based on a common core framework are great, however, this mosaic of existing systems usually needs to be modified substantially or even replaced.
TABLE 10-1
Reasons for transition failures
Before designing a companywide acceleration system, you must first make a thorough assessment of existing systems, as well as identify areas where no support is currently provided. To do this assessment, follow these guidelines:
Identify and assess the status of your company’s existing acceler
ation support frameworks and tools. What approaches have been used, and why? To what degree do they represent best practice?
Examine the approaches (coaching programs, virtual workshops, self-guided materials) your organization currently uses to deliver transition support at all levels of the leadership pipeline. Evaluate the associated costs and benefits.
Assess the overall coherence of your organization’s approach to supporting different types of transitions—onboarding, promotion, and lateral and international moves. Is there a common core model for accelerating all transitions?
Identify the key stakeholders (bosses, peers, direct reports, HR generalists, learning and development personnel) who do or could provide support during transitions.
Assess the adequacy of your company’s HR information systems (for example, websites) in directly supporting transitions and in providing the data about where and when transitions are occurring, so that you can provide support on a just-in-time basis.
Adopt a Common Core Model
Given the frequency with which people take on new jobs and the impact of each transition on others, it makes sense to have everyone—bosses, direct reports, and peers—employ the same common core model to support transition.
The foundation of an acceleration system is a unified, companywide framework, language, and toolkit for talking about and planning transitions. This probably is the single most important step your organization can take to build an acceleration system. Imagine that every leader in transition were able to converse with bosses, peers, and direct reports about the following:
The STARS portfolio of challenges they had inherited—the mix of start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, or sustaining success—and the associated challenges and opportunities
Their technical, cultural, and political learning and the key elements of their learning plan
Their progress in the five conversations—situation, expectations, style, resources, and progress—with their boss and direct reports
Their agreed-upon priorities and plans for where they will secure early wins
The alliances they need to build
A common core model makes discussions of these issues dramatically more efficient. Perhaps more importantly, it means that conversations will happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. It also makes people more forthcoming, more likely to share confidences and information, and more tolerant of others’ transition struggles. This kind of systematic support helps move the organization beyond sink or swim.
Deliver Support Just in Time
Transitions evolve through a series of predictable stages. New leaders begin their transitions with intensive diagnostic work. As they learn and gain increasing clarity about the situation, they shift to defining strategic direction (mission, goals, strategy, and vision) for their organizations. As the intended direction becomes clearer, they are better able to make decisions about key organizational issues—structure, processes, talent, and team. In tandem, they can identify opportunities to secure early wins and begin to drive the process of change.
The type of support that new leaders need, therefore, shifts in predictable ways as the transition process unfolds. Early on, support for accelerating learning—technical, cultural, and political—is key. As the leader’s understanding grows, the focus of support should shift to helping him define strategic direction, lay the foundation for success, secure early wins, and so on.
Critically, leaders need to be offered transition support in digestible blocks. Once they are in their new roles, they are rapidly immersed in the flow of events and can devote only very limited time to learning, reflecting, and planning. If support is not delivered just in time, the new leader is not likely to use it.
A corollary is to leverage the time before entry to the maximum extent possible. Transitions begin with recruiting or selection, and not when leaders formally enter their new positions. This is a priceless period when new leaders can begin to learn about their organizations and plan their early days on the job.
Acceleration systems should therefore be designed to help new leaders get the maximum possible benefit from whatever preentry time is available to them. This means supporting new leaders’ learning processes by providing them with key documents and tools that help them plan their early diagnostic activities, as well as helping them connect with key stakeholders as early as possible. For executives, it may be beneficial to have transition coaches engage in preentry diagnosis, including interviews with key stakeholders, and distill this knowledge into an actionable assessment that provides the basis for early discussions.
Use Structured Processes
The paradox of transition acceleration is that leaders in transition often feel too busy to learn and plan their transitions. They know they should be tapping into available resources and devoting time to planning their transitions, but the urgent demands of their new roles tend to crowd out this important work.
Although it helps to leverage the time before entry and to provide just-in-time support, transition processes also need to have action-forcing events. These include preset coaching meetings at each stage of the process or scheduled cohort events that take leaders out of the fray to engage in reflection and create or refine their 90-day plans.
The implication is that transition support should not be designed as a free-flowing process in which the leader sets the pace. It’s better to create a series of focused events—coach meetings or cohort sessions—at critical stages. After undertaking preentry diagnosis of the situation and helping the leader engage in self-assessment, for example, the coach and client are well positioned to have a highly productive launch meeting to jump-start the process.
When transition coaching is provided, it’s critical that the new leader and the coach connect early on in a focused and engaged way. One reason it can be beneficial for coaches to engage in intensive preentry diagnosis is that they have a precious resource—knowledge about the situation—that they can convey to the new leader. Their insight, offered in the critical early phases of the transition, can help cement the coach-client relationship.
Match Support to Transition Type
The 90-day framework and toolkit can be applied in all types of transition situations. However, the importance of different activities—for example, focusing more or less attention on learning about the culture—varies significantly, depending on the types of transitions leaders are experiencing. Therefore, it’s often helpful to identify the most important types of transitions the company needs to support and to develop specific, targeted supplemental resources to support them.
In particular, there often are good reasons to provide new leaders with additional resources for dealing with two common types of transitions:
Promotion. As discussed in chapter 1, when leaders are promoted they face a predictable set of challenges. The competencies required to be successful at the new level may be quite different from the skills that made them successful at their previous level. They also may be expected to play different roles, exhibit different behaviors, and engage with direct reports in different ways. So focused sets of resources should be provided that help newly promoted leaders understand what success looks like at the new level, assess themselves, and create a personal development plan.
Onboarding. Likewise, when leaders join new organizations or move between units with distinct subcultures, they face major challenges in aligning expectations, adapting to new cultures, and building the right sorts of relationships. Focused, accessible resources for helping them understand what it takes to get things done and assistance in identifying and connecting with key stakeholders can help reduce derailment and can speed time to high performance.
Match Transition Support to Leader Level
If cost were not an issue, every transitioning leader would get intensive, highly personalized support. In an ideal world, a new leader would be assigned a transition coach who would undertake an independent diagnosis and brief the person on the resu
lts before entry. The coach would help the leader engage in self-assessment and identify key transition risk factors. The coach also would help support diagnostic planning and goal setting, assist with team assessment and alignment, gather feedback on how the leader was doing, and, of course, be available to the new leader as needed to talk through specific issues.
Because the impact of executives on the business is great, it often makes sense to provide them with transition coaching. (If you do, be sure to understand that transition coaching is very different from development coaching. See the box, “Transition Coaching and Developmental Coaching.”) But it typically doesn’t make economic sense to provide it to leaders at lower levels. The solution is threefold. First, identify alternative modes for delivering transition support (for example, coaching versus cohort sessions versus virtual workshops and self-guided materials). Second, assess the relative costs and benefits of the support, and third, match its delivery mode and extent to key levels in the company’s leadership pipeline in order to maximize the return on investment.
Transition Coaching and Developmental Coaching
Transition coaching is very different from developmental coaching. It’s essential that transition coaches have the business acumen necessary to act as trusted advisers to leaders in transition. In addition, a thorough knowledge of the organization and its culture is a prerequisite for effectiveness. For this reason, it can be dangerous for newly hired leaders to bring in their own coaches, as they may lack experience with transitions as well as an understanding of the culture and political system the leader is entering.
TABLE 10-2
Transition versus developmental coaching
The First 90 Days, Updated and Expanded_Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter Page 20
