Evolve Your Leadership

Take a three-step approach to evolving your leadership. First, assess your effectiveness as a leader, defining specific areas you need to adapt to be more effective. Second, prepare a concrete leadership development plan that specifies not only what to focus on to drive results, but also how you need to be communicating with and leading the members of your team to drive engagement. And, third, identify a support partner to help you refine your plan and stay on track.

Start with self-assessment. Refer to whatever documents you have available—your original 100-day plan, your milestone management document, or your recent financial results—and assess how you have performed so far versus the goals that you (and your board and your boss) set. Rate yourself green if you are on track, yellow if you are at risk (yet have a solid plan to get back on track), and red if you will miss (and do not have a solid plan to get back on track).

Next, have someone collect 360-degree feedback on your performance from your critical stakeholders up, across, and down. (Answer the same questions yourself so you can compare your own thoughts to others'.) Doing this will help you (1) see how others feel, (2) highlight disconnects between how you and others see you, and (3) model the behavior of seeking and considering personal input from others. Questions:

• What is it that the new leader does that is particularly effective? What should he or she keep doing?
• What does the new leader do that gets in the way of his or her effectiveness? What should he or she stop doing?
• What else could the new leader do to be even more effective? What should he or she start doing?

Now, you are ready for leadership development planning. With the outputs from the self-assessment and 360-degree feedback processes, you have a list of items to consider as you create your own development plan. Bracket them into key deliverables (across strategic, operational, and organizational matters) and key leadership habits in terms of the behaviors you need to strengthen to become even more effective.

It is likely the items that emerge during your self-assessment and 360-degree feedback processes are ones that you know how to manage. You'll understand the feedback, the actions, the changes, and the adjustments that are required to evolve to where you need to be. In many cases, for both key deliverables and key leadership habits, you may benefit from having a partner to support your own development efforts.

You'll certainly want to invest in the relationship with your boss. Establish a rolling agenda with the right balance of fixed and changeable items, and establish a regular communication cadence. In addition to your boss, you will benefit greatly from finding a partner to support you as you build and implement your leadership development plan. The criterion? Someone you trust. This could be a mentor or former boss, a board member, your human resources partner, an external coach, or a consultant.

In any case, find the support to help you turn your desire into action and your action into habits. You will evolve and become an even better leader for the effort.

Evolve Your Practices

The 100-day mark is a good time to begin thinking about evolving your practices around people, plans, performance tracking, and program management. It's useful to set up a predictable rhythm. This allows people to spend less time worrying about the process and more time figuring out how to react and capitalize on the inevitable changes around them.

Evolve Your Culture

Now that you are 100 days into your new role, it is a good time to implement steps to evolve the organization even more assertively to your target culture.

As described in the executive summary, think about the new leader's role in building culture as a five-phase process:

1. Identify your cultural preferences (Prepare yourself for success).
   1. At this stage you evaluated the degree of cultural fit from your perspective, before accepting and starting the job.
2. Observe the organization's defined and undefined cultural identity (Leverage your Fuzzy Front End).
   1. At this stage you purposefully gathered information to prepare yourself for the culture you were about to enter.
3. Craft your own cultural engagement plan (before Day One).
   1. At this stage:
      • You determined your level of assertiveness in entering the organization (shock, assimilate, or converge and evolve) based on your assessment of the organizational need for change versus its readiness for change.
      • You identified your stakeholders as detractors, supporters, or watchers to help focus your relationship-building efforts.
      • You built and refined your going-in messaging, reflecting the platform for change and call to action for the team.
4. Begin to influence and drive the culture during your first 100 days.
   1. At this stage:
      • You sent messages early and often signifying what was important to you (your values) by what you said and where and with whom you spent time.
      • You co-created a Burning Imperative that was a huge step in defining the culture, by gaining alignment on mission, vision, values, strategies, actions, and operating cadence.
      • You established a milestone management tool and pushed for early wins to set a cultural tone.
      • You made decisions on people and structure and communicated them in a way to support changing the culture toward your vision.
5. Evolve the culture after Day 100.

Think Differently

Succeeding a legend is one of most difficult transitions a chief executive officer can make because the scrutiny is far more intense and every move is magnified. No one knows this better than Tim Cook, who took the role as Apple's CEO in 2011, following one of the most celebrated leaders of all time, Steve Jobs. Cook inherited a company that was on top of its game, with a strong culture that was forged by Jobs's dominant personality. Many assumed that Cook would mind the shop and change as little as possible, hoping to continue along the same path to success. But Cook realized that he could not run the company as Jobs had, because he wasn't Jobs.

Despite the company's astronomical success, Cook's first message upon coming on board was that “our best days are ahead of us.” A bold statement that sent a signal to shareholders and customers that he expected to lead Apple to even greater success in the future.

First, to underscore stability, he signaled early on that he would keep most of the existing management team in place and that he would guard and defend the distinct Apple culture with vigor.

Cook then quickly gave the executive team more control over decisions. Under Jobs, the team had become used to a CEO management style that was overpowering and burdened with micromanagement. Cook let team members know that his style was to be an active coach who inspires and trusts them to make more decisions on their own.

He then moved to make Apple more open by allowing his executives more freedom to speak with the press and outside the organization. He also shared the success spotlight outside the CEO's office.

He's also made Apple more reflective of its culture. A historically private and low-key leader, he decided to announce publically that he was gay in an effort to be more transparent himself and demonstrate leadership outside the organization. He's used the spotlight to speak out on other societal issues, many of which reflect important values held internally by Apple. Along the way he has donated millions to charity and has encouraged Apple employees to do so as well, a distinct departure from Jobs.

Cook has also changed Apple's growth and financial approach by using its large cash stores to complete large-scale buybacks of Apple stock, issue regular dividends to shareholders, make large-scale acquisitions, and bring some production back to the United States, all strategies that Jobs either opposed or avoided.

By keeping what worked and slightly adjusting in key areas that would better position Apple for the future, Tim Cook has been able to do what many thought was impossible—keep and improve upon Apple's momentum. Under his leadership, Apple's market capitalization has dramatically increased, worldwide market share has increased, and he's had two very successful product launches. His meaningful adjustments to an already-fantastic organization and culture have allowed Apple to continue to provide inspiration and deliver even better financial performance.

Adjust to the Inevitable Surprises

John Wooden, the legendary coach of University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) basketball, whose teams won an astounding 10 U.S. National Collegiate Athletic Association championships, said: “Things turn out the best for the people who make the best of the ways things turn out.” As a leader, it is up to you to make the best of how things turn out. No matter how well you have planned your transition over the first 100 days, no matter how disciplined you are in your follow-up, some things will be different than you expected. Often your ability to keep moving forward while reacting to the unexpected or the unplanned will be the determining factor in whether your transition is deemed a success or failure.

One of the main advantages to starting early and deploying the building blocks of tactical capacity quickly is that you and your team will be ready that much sooner to adjust to changing circumstances and surprises. Remember, the ability to respond flexibly and fluidly is a hallmark of a team with tactical capacity. The preceding annual/quarterly/monthly meeting schedule will enable your team to recognize and react to the changes that might impact your team over time.

Not all surprises are equal. Your first job is to sort them out to guide your own and your team's response. If it is a temporary, minor blip, keep your team focused on its existing priorities. If it is minor, but enduring, factor it into your ongoing people, plans, and practices evolution.

Major surprises are a different game. If they're temporary, you'll want to move into crisis or incident management. If they're enduring, you'll need to react and make some fundamental changes to deal with the new reality. When you're evaluating change, use Table 8.2 to help guide you to an appropriate measured response.

Keep Building: Summary and Implications

Your leadership: Assess your own leadership and put in place a plan to make it even better. Get support to implement that plan.

People: Invest in future capability development planning, succession planning, and contingency planning; performance management; and talent reviews annually.

Plans: Conduct strategic reviews, refreshes, and planning as well as operational reviews, refreshes, and planning annually.

Practices: Conduct business reviews and plan updates quarterly and milestone updates and adjustments monthly.

Program management: Invest in this skill set when the sheer volume of change is stretching the organization beyond its capacity to manage with existing processes.

Culture: Close the gap between today's culture and your target culture by engaging your leadership team and deploying tools that will reinforce and accelerate the change program.

Surprises: Adjust to the inevitable surprises based on the degree and length of their impact.

Finis origine pendet (the end depends on the beginning)—so says the first-century Latin poet Marcus Manilius. In a transition into a new leadership role or team merger, if you do not get the beginning right, the end will be ugly.

Conversely, if you follow this book's framework and take advantage of its advice and tools, you will lead your team to the right place, in the right way, at the right times. If you do this, you will develop trust, loyalty, and commitment—and your team will follow.

By using the proven onboarding methodologies presented in this book to enhance and synchronize your people, plans, and practices, you will build the tactical capacity to inspire and enable others to do their absolute best together, to realize a meaningful and rewarding shared purpose that delivers better results faster than anyone thought possible.

Additional Articles and Tools on www.onboardingtools.com

8A.1 Leading a Start-Up Team (less than 10 people)

8A.2 Leading an Extended Family Team (10-30 people)

8A.3 Adding Appropriate Hierarchy to a Larger Team (over 30 people)

8A.4 BRAVE Operating Principles for HATCHing a Better Team