Armed with an understanding of your A-item priorities and objectives for behavior change, you can proceed to create detailed plans for how you will secure early wins during your first 90 days and beyond. You should think about what you need to do in two phases: building credibility in the first 30 days and deciding where you will focus your energy to achieve early performance improvements in the following 60 days.
Building Credibility
In your first few weeks in your new job, you cannot hope to have a measurable impact on performance, but you can score small victories and signal that things are changing. Your objective at this early stage is to build personal credibility.
Because your earliest actions will have a disproportionate influence on how you are perceived, think through how you will get “connected” to your new organization. What messages do you want to get across about who you are and what you represent? What are the best ways to convey those messages?
Identify your key audiences—direct reports, other employees, key outside constituencies—and craft a few messages tailored to each. These need not be about what you plan to do; that’s premature. They should focus instead on who you are, the values and goals you represent, your style, and how you plan to conduct business.
Think about modes of engagement too. How will you introduce yourself? Should your first meetings with direct reports be one-on-one or in a group? Will these meetings be informal get-to-know-you sessions or will they immediately focus on business issues and assessment? What other channels, such as e-mail and video, will you use to introduce yourself more widely? Will you have early meetings at other locations where your organization has facilities?
As you make progress in getting connected, identify and act as quickly as you can to remove minor but persistent irritants in your new organization. Focus on strained external relationships and begin to repair them. Cut out redundant meetings, shorten excessively long ones, or improve physical-space problems. All this helps you to build personal credibility early on.
When you arrive, people will rapidly begin to assess you and your capabilities. Your credibility, or lack of it, will depend on how people in the organization would answer the following questions about you:
- Do you have the insight and steadiness to make tough decisions?
- Do you have values that they relate to, admire, and want to emulate?
- Do you have the right kind of energy?
- Do you demand high levels of performance from yourself and others?
For better or worse, they will begin to form opinions based on little data. Your early actions, good and bad, will shape perceptions. Once opinion about you has begun to harden, it is difficult to change. And the opinion-forming process happens remarkably quickly.
So how do you build personal credibility? In part it is about marketing yourself effectively, much akin to building equity in a brand. You want people to associate you with attractive capabilities, attitudes, and values. There’s no single right answer for how to do this. In general, though, new leaders are perceived as more credible when they are
- demanding but able to be satisfied. Effective leaders press people to make realistic commitments and then hold them to those promises. But if you are never satisfied, you’ll sap people’s motivation.
- accessible but not too familiar. Being accessible does not mean making yourself available indiscriminately. It means being approachable, but in a way that preserves your authority.
- decisive but judicious. New leaders communicate their capacity to take charge without jumping too quickly into decisions that they are not ready to handle. Early in your transition, you want to project decisiveness but defer important decisions until you know enough to make them.
- focused but flexible. Avoid setting up a vicious cycle and alienating others by coming across as rigid and unwilling to consider multiple solutions to a problem. Effective new leaders establish authority by zeroing in on issues but consulting others and encouraging input.
- active without causing commotion. There’s a fine line between building momentum and overwhelming your group or unit. Make things happen, but avoid pushing people to the point of burnout.
- willing to make tough calls but humane. You may have to make tough calls right away, including letting marginal performers go. Effective new leaders do what needs to be done, but they do it in ways that preserve peoples’ dignity and that others perceive as fair.