40% of new leaders fail in their first 18 months mostly because of poor fit, poor delivery or a poor ability to adjust to changes down the road. New leaders like Brian Niccol at Starbucks can mitigate the risks that led to his predecessor stepping down after 17 months by pausing to converge into the organization before pivoting to evolve and accelerate it, leveraging five tools along the way during the seven stages of executive onboarding:
- Converging assimilation – New leader assimilation session
- Inspiring direction – Imperative mission and vision
- Enabling resources – Core focus and strategy
- Empowering authority – BRAVE culture
- Credible accountability – Milestone management
Converging Assimilation – New leader assimilation session
New leaders like Niccol must converge into their new organization and team before deliberately and intentionally pivoting to evolving them. A new leader assimilation session aids the assimilation or converging by creating a forum for a critical mass of people to hear the same answers to the same questions all at the same time. Hastings et al, do a nice job describing the research behind new leader assimilation sessions and one approach.
An alternate approach is to run a new leader assimilation session on or close to your first day in a new role and focus on five areas: Questions about you 1) personally, 2) as a team leader and 3) as a senior executive, and then 4) things you should know and 5) what you should do first.
Inspiring Direction – Imperative mission and vision
Leadership is about inspiring, enabling and empowering others to do their absolute best together to realize a meaningful and rewarding shared purpose. It’s not about you as a leader. It’s about your influence and impact on others. This requires mastering the art of delegating which starts with inspiring direction and a mission and vision.
- Mission: What called to do and why it matters
- Vision: What – Picture of success in which all can envision themselves
Some don’t take mission and vision seriously, considering them basic and not worth a lot of time and effort. The most effective leaders know they are foundational building blocks for everything else that follows and tackle them at their moment of pivoting from converging to evolving either by reconfirming the existing mission and vision or co-creating new ones with their first team at the start of an imperative workshop or the like.
Enabling Resources – Core focus and strategy
Strategy is about the creation and allocation of the right resources to the right place in the right way at the right time over time. Thus, there are wrong resources, places, ways and times. Start by agreeing on your core focus – design, produce, deliver or serve. For example, Starbucks seems to have lost its focus on service and the need for all to hold themselves accountable for the delivery of a high-quality experience that makes people feel welcome.
You can’t make something a priority without making other things less of a priority and choosing to allocate financial, information, technical or operational, people, and time resources in line with that focus differentially to be:
- Predominant – top 1%
- Superior – top 10%
- Strong – top 25%
- Above average/competitive – top 50%
- Good enough/scaled – below average
- Outsource or not do at all
Empowering Authority – BRAVE culture
As I wrote in the art of delegating, the right level of boundaries and guidelines empowers those to whom you’ve delegated authority to make different choices than you would have made with you being confident that their choices will help achieve your shared objectives in a different way than you had imagined. This is one of the cultural choices you need to make either as part of your imperative workshop or soon thereafter.
Ultimately, culture is the only truly sustainable competitive advantage. There’s a whole range of ways of looking at culture from Seth Godin’s definition “people like us do things like this” to highly sophisticated and complex analyses. Niccol gets this. He’s been called a culture carrier with a stewardship attitude. For a middle of the range approach look at dimensions of Behaviors, Relationships, Attitudes, Values, Environment (BRAVE) to lay out the desired state and current state, identify the gaps and then work to bridge those gaps.
For example, this graphs possible differences in dimensions for an service, customer-focused culture like Starbuck’s versus an accountability-focused culture more appropriate for production-focused organizations.
Credible Accountability – Milestone management
At one level, milestone management is simple. Lay out what’s going to get done by whom by when. Track and manage.
But doing just that completely misses the point. Milestone management done well is a communication tool, allowing different people, groups or teams to understand what the others are doing, help each other, and integrate their work to build credible accountability. We suggest:
- Track the milestones in a shared file or folder.
- At periodic meetings let all share their wins, learning and requests for help.
- Discuss the requests for help in priority order.
It’s not about individual accountability so much as individuals, groups and teams doing their absolute best together to realize a meaningful and rewarding shared purpose.
