Know that you can’t go back. You may think it’s the same role, but the situation has changed. The stakeholders have changed. You have changed. You need to take re-boarding into a role you held before every bit as seriously as you take onboarding into a new role. Converge. Then evolve.
- Get a head start
- Manage the message
- Build the team
Get a head start
Take the time to craft your 100-Day Plan, assessing the new, ever-changing situation, re-mapping the key stakeholders, crafting a new message for your new circumstances, and thinking through what you’re going to say and do before your re-start on day one, and through your early days.
Get yourself professionally and personally physically, mentally, and emotionally prepared. Learn or relearn what you need to know.
Jump-start new relationships and re-kindle old relationships during the Fuzzy Front End between your announcement and first day.
Manage the message
Everything communicates – everything you say and do and don’t say and don’t do. And, when re-entering an organization or role, everything you said and did and didn’t say and didn’t do the last go around communicates even louder. You have history. You have baggage. Take that into account as you craft your message.
Leadership is about inspiring, enabling, and empowering others to do their absolute best together to realize a meaningful and rewarding shared purpose. The strongest messages inspire. It’s not about you. It’s never about you as a leader. It’s about inspiring others. It’s about a message that helps them envision themselves in a better place to which they believe you can help them get. It’s the answer to the only question everyone has when confronting a new or renewed leader, “What does this mean for me?”
In most cases, while converging, new leaders can best seed their messages with three questions:
1) Tell me about what you and your team are doing?
2) What would be required to [deliver the message]?
3) How can I help?
Build the team
You have to reconverge into the team before you can evolve it. You left. Some celebrated your departure. Some grieved it. In either case, do not under-estimate the impact of that separation. In leaving – whether or not it was your choice – you betrayed their trust. And trust lost is much harder to rebuild than is initial trust.
Invest the time to reconnect with key individuals. Learn about their journeys since you last worked with them. Answer their questions about your journey – so you tell them what they want to know, when they want to know it, how they want to know it, instead of what you want to tell them, when and how.
Then deploy the appropriate tools to evolve the team culturally, strategically, and tactically. Remember, these nest.
Culture is the stickiest. Who we are and what we stand for evolves slowly.
Ultimately, strategy is about the creation and allocation of resource – where to play and how to win. Start by understanding the current situation and strategic choices and which of those you need to implement, influence, or own – implementing others’ set choices, influencing others’ choices open to change, owning the choices you need to make.
By definition, you’ll have the most degrees of freedom tactically. But, before you try to make anything happen, re-look at your team’s tactical capacity – its ability to translate strategies into tactical actions decisively, rapidly, and effectively, with high-quality responsiveness under difficult, changing conditions:
- Confirm or evolve the team’s imperative – ideally co-created with the team.
- Confirm or evolve the team’s operating cadence to manage milestones and deliver a whole new set of early wins to renew the team’s confidence in itself.
- Confirm or evolve the organization, making sure the right people are in the roles to deliver the imperative together.
And, in more complex organizations leverage Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Teams ideas to get information flowing down and across so those closest to the ground truth can interpret, coordinate and act. As McChrystal explains, this requires a common purpose and clarity of mission and intent, trust and credibility based on confidence and familiarity, a shared consciousness of the ever-evolving situation, and empowered execution with decentralized decision-making.
