40% of new leaders get fired, forced out, or quit within their first 18 months because they fail to fit, deliver, or adjust to changes down the road. The main problems through the seven stages of executive onboarding can be solved by thinking marketing, selling, buying, getting a head start, converging, evolving, and adjusting – in that order. Shame on you if you don’t leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) at every stage to do those better.
I Marketing before the first contact
Marketing solves the getting noticed problem.
- Know yourself. Think through your own five-step career plan: likes and dislikes, long-term goals, ideal job criteria, options, choices in light of your goals and criteria, and a gut check.
- Find your 90/10 losing positioning. Instead of being generally acceptable to 60% of the people, be the one 90% of people want nothing to do with and 10% have to have.
- Build awareness with people you know, people they know, and the mass market. Put yourself in opportunities’ way – one of the leadership lessons to learn from Garth Brooks.
Leverage AI to help understand the 10% who should have to have you and their problems; as well as to understand what’s top of mind for the people you know, and people they know.
II Selling between first contact and offer
Nobody cares about you. They care about what you can do for them. Thus, answer the only three interview questions by focusing on motivations you have in common with the organization, the strengths they need, and your personal preferences that most closely fit with their culture.
Leverage AI to help understand the people with whom you are interviewing – their motivations, the strengths they need, and their culture.
III Buying between offer and acceptance
Everything switches at offer. You go from selling to buying. If you’ve followed our advice and focused on selling, everything you’ve done and said – including your questions – has been geared to getting the offer. Don’t let your excitement about the offer temper the quality of your due diligence. Better to turn down the wrong offer than take it and fail.
Leverage AI to help understand the organization’s sustainable competitive advantage (or lack thereof) as part of your due diligence.
IV Jump-starting onboarding during the Fuzzy Front End between acceptance and start
Those taking advantage of the time between accepting and starting and embracing this Fuzzy Front End do dramatically better in the early days of their new role. The prescription is relatively simple. Get a head start. Plan. Get set up. Jump-start relationships and learning.
Leverage AI to help learn about the people you’re meeting to give you work-related and personal conversational handles with them.
V Converging in Early Days
A critical aspect of your personal 100-Day Action Plan is your organizing concept – essentially the strategy behind your best current thinking on a headline message. During your early days, test, learn about, and improve your organizing concept by asking questions generally getting at others’ view of:
- The organization’s mission
- Their own role or the mission’s impact on them
- How you can help
Continue to leverage AI to help learn about the people you’re meeting.
VI Pivot to evolving at the right time
There’s an art to timing your pivot from converging to evolving: too fast and people won’t follow you; too slow and they will have already set off in a different direction.
The pivot is the moment you switch from asking to answering questions. It works best if you and your leadership team co-create a burning imperative and the plan to deliver it.
- Telling yields compliance.
- Inviting contribution is better.
- Co-creating is required for commitment.
Having done that, you can reference all your answers back to “What we agreed together.”
Leverage AI to help understand the 6Cs that will feed into your imperative: Customers, Collaborators, Culture, Capability, Competitors, Conditions.
VII Adjusting on an ongoing basis
Respond appropriately to the changes that come your way.
- Manage through those with minor, temporary impacts.
- Deploy crisis management protocols for those with major, temporary impacts.
- Evolve through those with minor, enduring impacts.
- Push a restart button when hit below the waterline with a major, enduring impact.
After every adjustment, re-calibrate your influence and impact by making sure you’re focused on the mission-critical parts of your role within the culture of your organization – their job, their way.
Leverage AI to help you see and understand potential changes coming your way.
John Hall
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