The New Leader’s Playbook

The basis of Forbes.com's New Leader's Playbook and a guide to all its articles.

Anyone that thinks the next 100 days will be like the last 100 days is in for a terrible surprise. The world is changing too fast; and survival of the fittest means survival of those best able to adapt*. Thus, we are all new leaders all the time and must treat the next 100 days as though they were the first 100 days of the rest of our careers. They are.

[Click here to request an executive summary of The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan, the book upon which this article is based.]

Leadership is about inspiring and enabling others to adapt.  In particular, leadership transitions are crucible events and some of the toughest challenges people face. Nearly half of new leaders fail in their first 18 months**. In that light, three things make a big difference: Get a head start – Manage the message – Build the team.  The components of those are your playbook for the next 100 days, the framework for this article, and the keys to your BRAVE leadership (Behaviors, Relationships, Attitudes, Values, Environment).

• Live The Five Most Important Questions for BRAVE Leaders
• Leverage Executive Onboarding: The Key to Accelerating Success and Reducing Risk in a New Job

GET A HEAD START

1) Position yourself for success. Start by connecting your values and goals, strengths and communication.  Know yourself.  Know your audience. Know and deliver your message in your own voice. Leadership is personal. Your message is the key that unlocks personal connections. The greater the congruence between your own values, attitudes, behaviors, the environment you create, and the way you relate to other individuals, the stronger those connections will be. This is why the best messages aren’t crafted; they emerge.  Great leaders live their messages not because they can, but because they must. As Martin Luther said at the Diet of Worms in 1521,“Here I stand, I can do no other.”

First, get the job with A BRAVE New Approach to Finding a Job,

understanding that Top Executive Recruiters Agree There Are Only Three True Job Interview Questions

• Know what you’re getting into: Be Like Zappos’ Tony Hsieh – Answer Three Key Onboarding Due Diligence Questions
• Remember things are different when you're promoted: Promoted From Within — Thoughts For Google’s New CEO Larry Page
• Manage through the interim: Why Apple is Doing Well Without Steve Jobs

2) Choose the Right Approach for the Business Context and Culture you Face.  Context is a function of the business environment, organizational history and recent business performance, informing the relative importance and urgency of change. Culture underpins “the way we do things here” and is made up of Behaviors, Relationships, Attitudes, Values, and the Environment feeding into readiness for change. Crossing context and culture helps you decide whether to Assimilate, Converge and Evolve (fast or slow), or Shock. Choose your way. Then map contributors, detractors, and convincible watchers so you can move each of them one step by altering their balance of consequences.

Lead with Attitude: Corporate Culture: The Only Truly Sustainable Competitive Advantage

• Follow the Survival Guide for Avon CEO Sherilyn McCoy and Other Change Agents
• Don't Lead Until You Have Earned the Right to Lead in a New Job
• Get help converging and evolving: The Cure for Incompetent Onboarding

3) Embrace and Leverage the Fuzzy Front End Before Day One. The time between acceptance and start is a gift you can use to rest and relax or to get a head start on your new role or next 100-days. Our experience has shown that those who use this fuzzy front end to put a plan in place, complete their pre-start preparation, and jump-start learning and relationships are far more likely to deliver better results faster than those who choose to rest and relax. Five important steps:

1. Identify the most important stakeholders up, across, and down – both inside and out.
2. Plan your message, fuzzy front end, and first or next 100-days.
3. Manage your personal setup so you have less to worry about after you start.
4. Conduct pre-start meetings and phone calls to jump-start important relationships.
5. Gather information and learning in advance to jump-start learning.

MasterCard’s Ajay Banga did this well. He leveraged the time after he had been announced as CEO but before he started by casually, but pointedly, interacting with key stakeholders with a simple introduction:  “Hi, I’m Ajay. Tell me about yourself". See Forbes: Why Preparing in Advance is Priceless: How MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga Planned Ahead for His New Leadership Role

MANAGE THE MESSAGE

4) Take Control of Day One: Make a Powerful First Impression. Everything is magnified on Day One, whether it’s your first day in a new company, or the day of a big announcement. Everyone is looking for hints about what you think and what you’re going to do. This is why it’s so important to seed your message by paying particular attention to all the signs, symbols, and stories you deploy, and the order in which you deploy them. Make sure people are seeing and hearing things that will lead them to believe and feel what you want them to believe and feel about you and about themselves in relation to the future of the organization.

The Sierra Club’s Executive Director, Michael Brune did a particularly good job of managing his Day One.  He thought through his message in advance and then communicated it live, face-to-face, and via social media on his first day so everyone would know what was on his mind.  He smartly utilized several communication methods to reach a wide range of people in their own preferred way of communication.  See Forbes: Powerful First Impressions: Michael Brune’s Day One at The Sierra Club and

• Inspire others by connecting an idea or vision with a hope or a need as did HOPEHIV's Phil Wall
• Approach day one from your front foot: Meg Whitman's Day One Itinerary as CEO of Hewlett-Packard

5) Motivate and Focus Your Team with Ongoing Communications (including social media). Where the emphasis used to be on logical, sequential, targeted, ongoing communication campaigns, the communication revolution has made it essential to manage multiple, concurrent, ever-evolving conversations across an ever-changing network of stakeholders. Leverage your core message as the foundation for those conversations by seeding and reinforcing communication points through a wide variety of media with no compromises on trustworthiness and authenticity. 

The American Red Cross’s head of Disaster Services, Charley Shimanski does this as well as any.  His message flows from every pore of his being.  Before his first major conference with 140 disaster relief directors from around the country, Charley asked himself: “What I want them to feel when they’re done hearing from me?” He knew the answers: “…I wanted them to feel that they are at the core of what we do, that that our success is on their shoulders.  I wanted them to feel proud.   See Forbes: How the Red Cross’s Charley Shimanski Inspires Others with Communication at the Heart of the Mission or:

• Get your message right by following Three Steps to a Compelling Message
• Prepare, deliver, and follow through to drive enduring change: True Value Hardware Deploys Three Keys to Successful Culture Change
• Everything communicates: Procter & Gamble’s John Pepper Votes With His Feet

BUILD THE TEAM

6) Embed a Burning Imperative. The burning imperative is a sharply defined, intensely shared, and purposefully urgent understanding from each of the team members of what they are “supposed to do, now.” Get this created and bought into early on—even if it’s only 90 percent right. You, and the team, will adjust and improve along the way.

Sam Martin has a lot of experience in this area. As he describes his early days as CEO of supermarket chain A&P, “It was essential to have an articulated plan available to share robustly around the organization and with all our stakeholders…If our employees are not properly armed with the right information, they will give the wrong message…they’re going to give a message anyway.  So getting the right message in the right hands quickly is important and essential to getting off on the right foot and having any chance of success in the outcome."  See How CEO Sam Martin is Driving the Imperative to Overhaul A&P

• Focus: Steve Jobs and the Power of a Passionate Focus
• Help others see: Ron Krueck’s Vision of a More Welcoming Michigan Avenue Facade in Chicago
• Agree the new imperative even when promoted from within: IBM CEO Virginia Rometty’s New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan

7) Exploit Key Milestones to Drive Team Performance. Milestones map and track what is getting done by when by whom. Leaders of high-performing teams take that basic tool to a whole new level, exploiting it to inspire and enable people to work together as a team!

Want culture change to stick? Change the operations. – Equifax's Andy Bodea

• Manage milestones as a team: Royal Caribbean’s CEO Exemplifies How to Leverage Milestones
• Manage Through Complexity as Producer, Director, Stage Manager – Swedbank's Anki Ahrnell

Over-invest in Early Wins to Build Team Confidence. Early wins are all about credibility and confidence. People have more faith in people who have delivered. You want your boss to have confidence in you. You want team members to have confidence in you, in themselves, and in the plan for change that has emerged. Early wins fuel that confidence.

The head of IBM’s alliance with Oracle, Sue Hed, gets the early win concept. Sue over-invested in a few early pilot programs by going out into the field to better understand her teams’ challenges, make key contacts, establish relationships, close deals, and oversee the implementation of the programs.  She proved that the programs worked locally and her efforts gave the team confidence and momentum to extend the programs elsewhere. As Sue describes it, “The buy-in has been great in other countries because they saw the success and had testimonials from their peers ."  See Forbes: IBM’s Sue Hed Shows How Early Wins Get You Ahed of the Curve

• Warning: Early Wins for New Leaders Can Be Counterproductive
• Take the first step: Leading by Example with Flames of Giving
• Leverage early wins to build confidence beyond the stated objective: Positive Misdirection Instills Confidence

9) Secure ADEPT People in the Right Roles and Deal with Inevitable Resistance. Acquire, Develop, Encourage, Plan, and Transition talent to strengthen the team over time:

Acquire: Recruit, attract, and onboard the right people

Develop: Assess and build skills and knowledge

Encourage: Direct, support, recognize, and reward

Plan: Monitor, assess, plan career moves over time

Transition: Migrate to different roles as appropriate

As a case in point, Chiquita’s CEO, Fernando Aguirre, met an employee, Leo Urzua, during his stint on CBS’s show “Undercover Boss”. Leo was a harvest coordinator who tried to teach Fernando how to pick and prune lettuce.  Through the process, Fernando learned of and was inspired by Leo’s quest to become a U.S. citizen. Fernando committed to helping Leo Achieve his goal. When Leo got sworn in as a citizen in Yuma Arizona several months later, the keynote speaker at that ceremony was…Fernando Aguirre.  See Forbes: Chiquita CEO Fernando Aguirre on Inspiring and Enabling Others or:

• Conference Board Onboarding Lab recap: New Ideas in Onboarding Thought Leadership
• Play to strengths: Lessons from The Animal School Fable in Leveraging Strengths
• Move quickly where required: Leading Those That Would Undermine Your Leadership

10) Evolve People, Plans, and Practices to Capitalize on Changing Circumstances. By the end of your first or next 100-Days, you should have made significant steps toward aligning your people, plans, and practices around a shared purpose. Remember, this is not a one-time event but, instead, something that will require constant, ongoing management and Darwinian improvement because we're all new leaders all the time.

Walmart’s CEO, Mike Duke knows that we are all new leaders all the time.  That’s why organizational change management is an on-going part of his life. When Walmart’s merchandising failed to deliver the expected results over the 2010 holiday season, Mike replaced his head merchandiser and completely revamped their holiday merchandising approach in time to be able to announce the changes in their next quarter’s earnings call. See Forbes: Walmart CEO Mike Duke Shifts Approach

• Adapt to your boss’s changes: Five Keys to Managing an Unpredictable Boss
• Invest to rejuvenate your team on a regular basis: QlikTech CEO Galvanizes Team, Delivers 50% Growth
• Take the long view: GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s Long-term View 10 Years In

Questions to consider:

What inspires the people you lead?

What enables them to do their best together?

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These steps are described in more detail in The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan and its accompanying downloadable tools – and played out in the New Leader's Smart Tools iPad app. 

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*Attributed to Charles Darwin

**As Anne Fisher pointed out in New job?  Get a head start now – Fortune, 17-February, 2012, the failure rate for new executives "research shows has stood at about 40% for at least 15 years now" – "About 40% of executives who change jobs or get promoted fail in the first 18 months".  (In contrast, over 90% of the executives PrimeGenesis has helped since 2003 were either still in place or promoted at the 18 month point.)

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Full list of New Leader's Playbook articles:

• Live The Five Most Important Questions for BRAVE Leaders
• Utilize our executive onboarding framework: Executive Onboarding
• Follow Gabrielle Giffords BRAVE Leadership example

GET A HEAD START

1) Position yourself for success.

• A BRAVE New Approach to Finding a Job
• Top Executive Recruiters Agree There Are Only Three True Job Interview Questions
• Will Robert Gibbs Find a Friend in Facebook?
• Be Like Zappos’ Tony Hsieh – Answer Three Key Onboarding Due Diligence Questions
• Cusack Capital CEO’s Second Act Disaster (Onboarding Done Wrong)
• Yahoo! CEO Scott Thompson's New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan
• Promoted From Within — Thoughts For Google’s New CEO Larry Page
• Why Apple is Doing Well Without Steve Jobs
• What Greece’s Interim Prime Minister Lucas Papademos Must Do
• Follow Three Imperatives in Starting a Successful Service Business
• Kim Jong Un's Challenges in Taking Over the Family Business (North Korea)
• Prepare for the unlikely, but possible: Leadership Lessons from Bloomberg, Christie, Katrina and Irene

2) Choose the Right Approach for the Business Context and Culture you Face.

• Corporate Culture: The Only Truly Sustainable Competitive Advantage
• Don't Lead Until You Have Earned the Right to Lead in a New Job
• The Cure for Incompetent Onboarding
• To Be One of the "Best Places to Work," Build a BRAVE Culture
• Survival Guide for Avon CEO Sherilyn McCoy and Other Change Agents
• New Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Shifts from Commanding to Advising
• Despite Bleak Housing Market, Toll Brothers CEO Isn’t Panicking
• Steve Jobs’ Wake Analysis
• How John Smale Changed the Business Environment for Procter & Gamble
• A Shocking Approach by New UK Prime Minister David Cameron
• What We Can Learn About Negotiating From the Great Compromiser
• The Los Angeles Urban League’s Blair Taylor Follows the Only Possible Path to Success

3) Embrace and Leverage the Fuzzy Front End Before Day One.

• Why Preparing in Advance is Priceless: How MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga Planned Ahead for His New Leadership Role

MANAGE THE MESSAGE

4) Take Control of Day One: Make a Powerful First Impression. 

• Powerful First Impressions: Michael Brune’s Day One at The Sierra Club
• HOPEHIV's Phil Wall
• Meg Whitman's Day One Itinerary as CEO of Hewlett-Packard

5) Motivate and Focus Your Team with Ongoing Communications (including social media). 

• How the Red Cross’s Charley Shimanski Inspires Others with Communication at the Heart of the Mission
• Three Steps to a Compelling Message
• True Value Hardware Deploys Three Keys to Successful Culture Change
• Procter & Gamble’s John Pepper Votes With His Feet
• Which Way to Run? Lessons from 9/11 Choices
• Why RIM’s New CEO Needs to Change the Platform for Change
• The Power of a Consistent Message Illustrated by WNET’s CEO, Neal Shapiro
• Job #1 of a Leader: Show Up
• How Leaders' Communication Styles Impact the Delivery of Results
• Reaching Consensus: Lessons from the Iowa Caucus
• JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s Public Lambasting of the Bank of Canada

BUILD THE TEAM

6) Embed a Burning Imperative.

• How CEO Sam Martin is Driving the Imperative to Overhaul A&P
• How Merkel Can Lead the Euro Zone Out of Crisis
• Follow the Money to Understand Last Week's European Summit
• Steve Jobs and the Power of a Passionate Focus
• BMW’s Focus on Sustainability Drives Record Q1 Profits
• Are Obama, Boehner, and Cantor going to follow their principles off the cliff?
• Ron Krueck’s Vision of a More Welcoming Michigan Avenue Facade in Chicago
• Intuit’s Current and Former CEO Drive Value Proposition In Sync
• IBM CEO Virginia Rometty’s New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan

7) Exploit Key Milestones to Drive Team Performance.

• Want culture change to stick? Change the operations. – Equifax's Andy Bodea
• Royal Caribbean’s CEO Exemplifies How to Leverage Milestones
• Manage Through Complexity as Producer, Director, Stage Manager – Swedbank's Anki Ahrnell

Over-invest in Early Wins to Build Team Confidence.

• IBM’s Sue Hed Shows How Early Wins Get You Ahed of the Curve
• Warning: Early Wins for New Leaders Can Be Counterproductive
• Leading by Example with Flames of Giving
• Positive Misdirection Instills Confidence

9) Secure ADEPT People in the Right Roles and Deal with Inevitable Resistance.

• New Ideas in Onboarding Thought Leadership
• Chiquita CEO Fernando Aguirre on Inspiring and Enabling Others
• Lessons from The Animal School Fable in Leveraging Strengths
• Leading Those That Would Undermine Your Leadership
• The Secret to Jets Coach Rex Ryan Winning Record is His “Whole Team” Approach
• Plum Builders’ CEO Rights Roles to Deliver Better Results for Its Customers
• When to Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way: Leadership Lessons from the Greek Bailout

10) Evolve People, Plans, and Practices to Capitalize on Changing Circumstances.

• Evolutionary, Revolutionary or Blended Innovation:  Which is Right For Your Organization?
• Walmart CEO Mike Duke Shifts Approach
• Five Keys to Managing an Unpredictable Boss
• QlikTech CEO Galvanizes Team, Delivers 50% Growth
• In Selling Commodity Products, Zig When Your Competitors Zag
• GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s Long-term View 10 Years In

Extra: Put it all together

• Caryn Lerner’s 100-Day Action Plan as New CEO of Daffy’s
• Leadership Lessons from the World's Top Companies: 2011 Year in Review

Extra: For Acquisitions

• How Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan Is Making the Salary.com Acquisition Work
• Merging Cultures Post-Acquisition at Fujitsu America
• Three Priorities in Ensuring a Smooth M&A Deal

Leader's Perspective Articles:

• Choosing Between Henry VIII and Suleiman the Magnificent's Approaches to Succession Management
• Intentional Leaders are not Victims of Circumstances
• Perspective on The Importance of Non-Monetary Ways of Value Capture