situation and create action plans tailored to your needs, regardless of your level in the organization or the business situation you face. In the process you will build a 90-day plan that will accelerate you into your new role.
Assessing Transition Risk
The first step is to diagnose the types of transitions you’re going through. Whether you’re preparing to interview for a new position or have taken a new role, this is the starting point for applying the fundamental principles. Promotion and onboarding into new companies are the most frequent shifts.
However, most leaders taking new roles experience multiple transitions in parallel—for example, joining a new company and moving to a new location, or being promoted and moving from a functional to a cross-functional role. In fact, participants in the executive programs we studied reported on average experiencing 2.2 major shifts (such as getting a promotion, joining a new company, moving between business units, moving geographically) the last time they took new roles.7
This complexity adds to the transition challenge—and the risk of derailing—and it means it is critical for you to understand the types of transitions you’re experiencing and to identify which shifts you are finding most challenging. A simple way to do this is to complete the Transition Risk Assessment in table I-1.
Mapping Out Your First 90 Days
Your transition begins the moment you learn you are being considered for a new job (see figure I-4 for key transition milestones). When it ends depends very much on the situation you face. No matter what kind of transition you’re making, by roughly the three-month mark key people in the organization—your bosses, peers, and direct reports—typically expect you to be getting some traction.
Thus, you should use the 90-day period as a planning horizon. Doing so will help you confront the need to operate in a compressed time frame. If you’re lucky, you may get some lead time between learning you’re being considered and actually sitting in the chair. Use that time to begin educating yourself about your organization.
No matter how much preparation time you get, start planning what you hope to accomplish by specific milestones. Even a few hours of preentry planning can go a long way. Begin by thinking about your first day in the new job. What do you want to do by the end of that day? Then move to the first week. Then focus on the end of the first month, the second month, and finally the three-month mark. These plans will be sketchy, but the simple act of beginning to plan will help clear your head.
TABLE I-1
Transition Risk Assessment
To transition effectively, first identify the risks you face as you move into your new role using the Transition Risk Assessment. Start by checking off the types of transitions you are experiencing using the middle column. Then, for each item you checked, assess how challenging you are finding that particular shift on a 1–10 scale, where 1 means very easy and 10 means very difficult. Total the numbers in the right-hand column to get your Transition Risk Index (up to 100). The index gives you a sense of the magnitude of the challenge and the specific dimensions of your overall transition on which you most need to focus.
| Type of transition | Check each that applies | Assess relative difficulty for you (1–10) |
| Moving to a new industry or profession | ||
| Joining a new company | ||
| Moving to a new unit or group in the same company | ||
| Being promoted to a higher level | ||
| Leading former peers (assuming you have been promoted) | ||
| Moving from one function to another (e.g., sales to marketing) | ||
| Taking on a cross-functional leadership role for the first time | ||
| Moving geographically | ||
| Entering a new national or ethic culture | ||
| Having to do two jobs at the same time (finishing old role while starting new one) | ||
| Taking on a newly created role (as opposed to an existing role) | ||
| Entering an organization in which major change already is going on | ||
| Sum the numbers in the right-most column to calculate your Transition Risk Index | ||
FIGURE I-4
Key transition milestones
Hitting the Ground Running
This book is for new leaders at all levels, from first-time managers to CEOs. The fundamental principles of effective transition acceleration hold up well across all levels. Every new leader needs to quickly become familiar with the new organization, secure early wins, and build supportive coalitions. That’s why this book provides guidelines for translating principles into plans tailored to your own situation. As you continue through it, you should read actively, making notes about the applicability of specific points to your situation, as well as thinking about how the advice should be customized to your situation.
Acceleration Checklist
Lists like this one appear at the end of each chapter to help you crystallize the key lessons and apply them to your situation—both to prepare for interviews when you’re being considered for a new role and to speed your transition once you are in it.
1 What will it take for you to reach the break-even point more quickly?
2 What are some traps you might encounter, and how can you avoid them?
3 What can you do to create virtuous cycles and build momentum in your new role?
4 What types of transitions are you experiencing? Which are you finding most challenging, and why?
5 What are the key elements and milestones in your 90-day plan?
CHAPTER 1
Prepare Yourself
After
