Success Strategies for New Leaders

Why is so little good advice available about accelerating transitions? In part, the answer is because there are many different kinds of transitions; thus, it is not enough to come up with general rules or one- size -fits-all advice. Consider the following pairs of transition situations. How do the definitions of success and the imperatives for making effective transitions differ in these cases?

Promotion to a more senior role in marketing versus moving from marketing to a position as general manager of a business unit
Moving to a new position within your existing organization versus moving to a new company
Moving from a staff position to line management versus moving from line to staff
Taking over a group facing very serious problems versus taking over a group widely and accurately viewed as very successful

The point? The challenges of transition acceleration vary depending on situational factors. It matters a great deal whether you are making a key career passage in terms of level in the organization, whether you are an insider or an outsider, whether you have formal authority, and whether you are taking over a successful or troubled group. ^[11] Thus, it is essential that you match your strategy to the situation you face.

Practical advice has to be tailored to the situation, the level of the new leader, his or her experience with the organization, and the condition of the business. That is the fundamental goal of this book: to provide new leaders with practical frameworks for diagnosing their situations and developing their own customized transition acceleration plans.

To illustrate the power of a systematic approach to transition acceleration, consider the challenge a new leader faces in diagnosing his new organization s business situation. How does he characterize the challenges and opportunities? How does he reach consensus with his new boss and direct reports about what actions need to be taken? Without a conceptual framework to guide diagnosis and planning, this turns out to be a lot of work. It is also easy to blunder into dangerous misunderstandings with bosses or direct reports about what needs doing. Even if the new leader achieves the necessary shared understanding, he is likely to have consumed significant time and energy in the process and might have missed some important opportunities and failed to identify some ticking time bombs .

Now suppose instead that the new leader is counseled to figure out early on whether his new job is a start-up, turnaround , realignment , or sustaining -success situation. Suppose too that he has clear descriptions of the challenges and opportunities typical of each of these situations and actionable guidelines for establishing priorities in each one. What changes?

This diagnostic tool, called the ST _A RS model (for Start-up, Turnaround, Realignment, and Sustaining success), is developed in detail in chapter 3. It powerfully accelerates the new leader s diagnosis of his new organization and his development of effective action plans. It also helps the new leader to more rapidly reach a shared understanding of the situation with other key players, including his boss and direct reports. Whether he is taking over an entire organization or managing a group or a short- term project, he can use this tool to accelerate his transition.

So take heart. There are structural similarities in challenges and opportunities, and corresponding guidelines ”must do s and don t do s ”for different types of transitional situations. The key is to engage in careful diagnosis and then adapt some general principles to the demands of the situation.

^[11] For a discussion of key passages in the lives of managers, see Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel, The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership-Powered Company (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001).