Inspiring and enabling others to do their absolute best, together, to realize a meaningful and rewarding shared purpose is the never-ending job of a leader. Because everything is always changing around you and your team, you can’t stand still. It’s not about mastery. It’s about the pursuit of mastery. That requires not just the new leader’s 100-day action plan during onboarding, but an ongoing series of team 100-day action plans building on the accomplishments of the previous 100-days’ actions. Think about these in terms of context, stakeholders, message and building blocks.
CONTEXT
Pause to accelerate. Start with a re-look at the context for your team’s actions.
- What is the situation/mission?
- Why is this the right team?
- What is the team’s motivation?
STAKEHOLDERS
Map stakeholders and their biases looking at:
- Supporters who are particularly interested in the team achieving its mission
- Watchers who have not yet made up their minds.
- Detractors who are biased against the team achieving its mission
Think of these stakeholders as target audiences for your messages.
MESSAGE
You can’t get anyone to do anything different unless they believe that there is:
- a reason for them to do that (platform for change),
- they can picture themselves in a better place (vision) and
- know what to do to be part of the way forward (call to action).
These are the basic points you’ll be driving over and over again in your communication campaign.
BUILDING BLOCKS
Context, stakeholders and message set up the main work: setting the building blocks of the team’s next 100-day action plan. This is as much a 100-day communication plan with actions in place to drive the message with stakeholders as it is a 100-day action plan with accompanying communication points. Whichever way you look at it, think through and then implement preparation, launch, cascade, celebrate, reinforce and institutionalize.
- Prepare and seed
- Launch: Get the imperative in place: sell – tell – test – consult – co-create (by day 30)
- Cascade: Role out the imperative and getting milestone management in place (by day 45)
- Celebrate: ID, deliver and celebrate early wins and behaviors in line with mission (by day 60)
- Reinforce: Sort/re-sort roles (by day 70)
- Institutionalize: Embed strategic, operational and organizational process changes (by day 100)
George Bradt – PrimeGenesis Executive Onboarding and Transition Acceleration
