While most of my clients are senior leaders in roles they expect to hold for the foreseeable future, over the years I've also worked with many people through the process of navigating a professional transition. And most of my clients who aren't in transition themselves hire new executives regularly, so as a result much of my writing involves helping people get off to a good start. Here's a compilation of posts I often share with executives as they begin a new role:
1. A Checklist for Someone About to Take On a Tougher Job
A New Culture: New opportunities often require us to step into a new organizational culture where the formal signs and artifacts look the same, but their informal meanings and interpretations are quite different.
Stretching: Just as we can miss the subtleties of a new organizational culture and fail to adapt, we can mistakenly assume that we’re being asked to do more of what led us to succeed in the past and miss opportunities to stretch.
Onboarding: Typically the more senior the role, the less structured the onboarding process. The key is to think like an organization and take responsibility for our own onboarding.
Self-Care: At more senior levels optimum performance is about being in the best possible mental, emotional and physical condition to maximize our focused attention and to support effective decision-making and interpersonal interactions.
Professional Development: Finally, stepping up means taking ownership of our long-term development as professionals. The higher we rise, the less we can depend on someone more senior to guide us.
2. Conform to the Culture Just Enough
You're in a new leadership role, you see some room for improvement, and you want to make some changes. Unless it's a turnaround in which the intent is to radically transform a dysfunctional culture, your success will hinge on your ability to conform just enough. If you conform too much, you'll miss opportunities to influence positive change and make a difference. And if you don't conform enough, your efforts will be ignored or rebuffed, and eventually you'll burn out or be rejected.
The critical thing to notice early on in a relationship is the extent of the vacuum that surrounds us, reflecting how little we know about each other. What are your intentions? What are your capabilities? Are you trustworthy? Will you have my back? Who ARE you?
4. Role Clarity and Role Confusion
A theme in my practice is the vital importance of a sufficient degree of role clarity--a shared understanding among colleagues that allows them to answer a set of questions that are rarely made explicit and yet are ever-present in organizational life:
- Who are we to each other?
- What are our relative positions in this environment?
- In what ways are our roles similar? In what ways do they differ?
- And how might any of this change over time, or in certain settings?
5. Capacity, Methodology, Innovation (On Hiring)
The leader who seeks to hire an innovator must be prepared to face resistance throughout the organization and to help the innovator navigate around it--or overcome it. This gets much harder when the innovator begins to challenge some of the leader's own preferences and prerogatives--as they inevitably will.
6. Necessary Friction (CEOs and Product Leaders)
(Although aimed at Product leaders, the ideas discussed here pertain to other functions as well.) Determining the right level of involvement by your CEO will benefit both you and them, and one way to gauge this is by striving for the right amount of friction.
7. Better Working Relationships
A set of steps you can take to begin to address a working relationship that's faltering or didn't get off to a good start.
8. Better Conditions for Working Remotely
Given that many of us will continue to work remotely at least part-time, it's worthwhile to consider how investments in better working conditions might pay off in the long run.
9. Open Space, Deep Work and Self-Care
A theme that emerges consistently in my practice is the importance of open space, deep work, and self-care. What do I mean by these terms, and what’s their significance for effective leadership?
10. Newbie Goggles
When we're in a new role, in a new environment, we are the proverbial fish out of water. Because we haven't fully internalized the surrounding culture, we don't yet take it for granted. Because we're wearing newbie goggles, we can suddenly see it in ways that the current members cannot.
Photo by Ashley Coates.
