The First 90 Days (58 page)

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With whom have you failed to connect? Why?

Of the meetings you have attended, which has been the most troubling? Why?

Of all that you have seen or heard, what has disturbed you most? Why?

What has gone well or poorly?

Which interactions would you handle differently if you could? Which exceeded your expectations? Why?

Which of your decisions have turned out particularly well? Not so well? Why?

What missed opportunities do you regret most? Was a better result blocked primarily by you or by something beyond your control?

Now focus on the biggest challenges or difficulties you are facing. Be honest with yourself. Are your difficulties situational or do their sources lie within you? Even experienced and skilled people blame problems on the situation rather than their own actions. The net effect is that they are less proactive than they could be.

Recognize When to Quit.
To adapt an old saw, transitions are marathons, not sprints. If you find yourself going over the top of your stress curve more than occasionally, you have to discipline yourself to know when to quit. This is easy to say and hard to do, of course, especially when you are up against a deadline and one more hour might make all the difference. It may, in the short run, but the long-run cost could be steep. Work hard at recognizing when you are at the point of diminishing returns and take a break of whatever sort refreshes you.

Pillar 3: Building Your Support Systems

The first two pillars of self-efficacy are systematic planning and disciplined execution; the third is solidifying your personal support systems. This means asserting control in your local environment, stabilizing the home front, and building a solid advice-and-counsel network.

Assert Control Locally.
It is hard to focus on work if the basic infrastructure that supports you is not in place. Even if you have more pressing worries, move quickly to get your new office set up, develop routines, and clarify expectations with your assistant, and so on. If necessary, assemble a set of temporary resources—files, references, information technology, and staff support—to tide you over until the permanent systems are operational.

Stabilize the Home Front.
It is a fundamental rule of warfare to avoid fighting on too many fronts. For new leaders, this means stabilizing the home front so you can devote the necessary attention to work. You cannot hope to create value at work if you are destroying value at home. This is the fundamental mistake that Kipp Erikson made.

If your new position involves relocation, your family is also in transition. Like Irene Erikson, your spouse may be making a job transition too, and your children may have to leave their friends and change schools. In other words, the fabric of your family’s life may be disrupted just when you most need support and stability. The stresses of your professional transition can amplify the strain of your family’s transition. Also, family members’ difficulties can add to your already heavy emotional load, undermining your ability to create value and lengthening the time it takes for you to reach the breakeven point.

So focus on accelerating the family transition too. The starting point is to acknowledge that your family may be unhappy, even resentful, about the transition. There is no avoiding disruption, but talking about it and working through the sense of loss together can be helpful.

Beyond that, here are some guidelines that can help to smooth your family’s transition:
Analyze your family’s existing support system.
Moving severs your ties with the people who provide essential services for your family: doctors, lawyers, dentists, babysitters, tutors, coaches, and more.

Do an inventory, identify priorities, and invest in finding replacements quickly.

Get your spouse back on track.
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new one after relocating. Unhappiness can fester if the search is slow. To accelerate it, negotiate up front with your company for job-search support or find such support shortly after moving. Above all, don’t let your spouse defer getting going.

Time the family move carefully.
For children, it is substantially more difficult to move in the middle of a school year. Consider waiting until the end of the school year to move your family. The price, of course, is separation from your loved ones and the wear and tear of commuting. If you do this, however, be sure that your spouse has extra support to help ease the burden. Being a single parent is hard work.

Preserve the familiar.
Reestablish familiar family rituals as quickly as possible and maintain them throughout the transition. Help from favorite relatives, such as grandparents, also makes a difference.

Invest in cultural familiarization.
If you move internationally, get professional advice about the cross-cultural transition. Isolation is a far greater risk for your family if there are language and cultural barriers.

Tap into your company’s relocation service, if it has one, as soon as possible.
Corporate relocation services are typically limited to helping you find a new home, move belongings, and locate schools, but such help can make a big difference.

There is no avoiding pain if you decide to move your family. But there is much you can do to minimize it and to accelerate everyone’s transitions.

Build your Advice-and-Counsel Network.
No leader, no matter how capable and energetic, can do it all. You need a network of trusted advisers within and outside the organization with whom to talk through what you are experiencing.

Your network is an indispensable resource that can help you avoid becoming isolated and losing perspective. As a starting point, you need to cultivate three types of advice givers: technical advisers, cultural interpreters, and political

counselors (see table 9-3
).

Table 9-3: Types of Advice Givers

Type

Roles

How They Help You

Technical advisers

Provide expert analysis of

They suggest applications for new

technologies, markets, and

technologies. They recommend strategies for

strategy

entering new markets.

They provide timely and accurate information.

Cultural interpreters

Help you understand the

They provide you with insight into cultural

new culture and (if that is

norms, mental models, and guiding

your objective) to adapt to

assumptions. They help you learn to speak the

it

language of the new organization.

Political counselors

Help you deal with political

They help you implement the advice of your

relationships within your

technical advisers. They serve as a sounding

new organization

board as you think through options for

implementing your agenda. They challenge

you with what-if questions.

You also need to think hard about the mix of internal and external advice-givers you want to cultivate. Insiders know the organization, its culture and politics. Seek out people who are well connected and who you can trust to help you grasp what is really going on. They are a priceless resource.

At the same time, insiders cannot be expected to give you dispassionate or disinterested views of events. Thus, you should augment your internal network with outside advisers and counselors who will help you work through the issues and decisions you are facing. They should be skilled at listening and asking questions, have good insight into the way

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organizations work, and have your best interests at heart.

Use
table 9-4
to assess your advice-and-counsel network. Analyze each person in terms of the domains in which they assist you and whether they are insiders and outsiders.

Table 9-4: Assessment of Your Advice-and-Counsel Network

Technical

Cultural Interpreters

Political Counselors

Advisers

Internal Advisers and

Counselors (inside your new

organization)

External Advisers and

Counselors (outside your new

organization)

Now take a step back. Will your existing network provide the support you need in your new situation? Don’t assume that people who have been helpful in the past will continue to be helpful in your new situation. You will encounter different problems, and former advisers may not be able to help you in your new role. As you attain higher levels of responsibility, for example, the need for good political counsel increases dramatically.

You should also be thinking ahead. Because it takes time to develop an effective network, it’s not too early to focus on what sort of network you will need in your
next
job. How will your needs for advice change?

To develop an effective support network, you need to make sure that you have the right help and that your support network is there when you need it. Does your support network have the following qualities?

The right mix of technical advisers, cultural interpreters, and political counselors.

The right mix of internal and external advice-givers. You want honest feedback from insiders
and
the dispassionate perspective of outside observers.

External supporters who are loyal to you as an individual, not to your new organization or unit.

Typically, these are long-standing colleagues and friends.

Internal advisers who are trustworthy, whose personal agendas don’t conflict with yours, and who offer straight and accurate advice.

Representatives of key constituencies who can help you understand their perspectives. You do not want to restrict yourself to one or two points of view.

[5]For a discussion of “going to the balcony” in the context of negotiation, see chapter 1 of William Ury,
Getting Past
No: Negotiating Your Way from Confrontation to Cooperation
(New York: Bantam Doubleday, 1993).

[6]W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne, “Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy,”
Harvard Business
Review,
July–August 1997.