Seven Rules for Meeting the Challenge

As you transition into your new leadership role, seven rules can provide a framework for orienting yourself and setting goals.

Rule 1: Leverage the time before entry

Use the time between selection and formal entry to jump-start the transition process.  Assess the organization and formulate ideas about who to connect with, key issues, what needs to be done.  Learn as much as you can about your new organization’s strategy, strengths, and weaknesses and develop some hypotheses for testing.

Rule 2: Organize to learn

Entering a new organization can be like sailing in a dense fog.  Coping with limited visibility, you must exercise caution while you get your bearings.  Because expectations are high and time is precious, you must organize to learn as rapidly as possible about the organization, especially about its culture and politics.

Rule 3: Secure early wins

It is crucial for employees to perceive that momentum is building during the transition.  Within six months, you must have noticeably energized people and focused them on the organization’s most pressing problems, using techniques that have immediate and dramatic impact.  Early wins are a powerful way to get people pumped up.

Rule 4: Lay a foundation for major improvements

Early wins can help you get off to a good start, but they are not sufficient for continued success.  To meet your boss’s and your own expectations, you must also lay a foundation for the deeper cultural changes needed to sustain improvement in the organization’s performance.  The process is like launching a two-stage rocket into orbit; early wins lift you off the ground, and foundation-building provides the thrust necessary to avoid falling back to earth.

Rule 5: Build winning coalitions

However much you learn and plan, you can achieve little alone.  Powerful individuals and groups inside and outside the organization must perceive it as in their interest to help you realize your goals, and they must act accordingly.  Building supportive coalitions and either reorienting or weakening unsupportive, existing coalitions alters the power structure to favor implementation of change initiatives.

Rule 6: Create a personal vision of the organization’s future

Whether or not visioning comes naturally to you, you have to engage in imaginative visualization in order to know where you want to take the organization.  More encompassing and unified than goals, a personal vision of the organization as it could be can organize your thoughts and observations and can eventually evolve into a shared vision.

Rule 7: Manage yourself

Give the amount you need to learn about new products, markets, and the organization, a clear head is a must.  Above all, you must find ways to maintain perspective and avoid isolation.  Self-diagnosis and reflection are important tools for achieving these goals.  You can gain additional perspective by soliciting appropriate advice and counsel.