The Risks and Opportunities in Changing Jobs
I take extensive notes on my readings to aid retention and share with my teams. In 2020, I decided to start publishing notes on my readings. These are less book/article reviews, and more reports or summaries of critical, interesting and insightful points in the cannon of business literature.
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My father started at a company in 1979 and retired from the same company thirty years later. My mother taught at a single elementary school for twenty-five years of her thirty-year career. Today it’s almost unheard of to stay at a company for a decade, much less an entire career.
I’ve made four job transitions in my career. Three were due to relocations (twice I relocated, once I was relocated but opted to leave the company instead of move) and one was due to burnout. These kinds of transitions are often fraught with risks, especially for senior leaders who are brought in with the expectations that they’ll be able to read the room, understand the culture and deliver on expectations with minimal direction.
As I look to my fifth transition — moving from my role at Sisense to Informatica – I decided to pick up a book that I’ve seen recommended a few times, Michael D. Watkins’ The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Smarter and Faster. The book lays out a methodical framework for leaders transitioning into new roles, that I’ll unpack below. I’ll focus my notes around what I understand my role at Informatica to be (ie. more about sustaining success and accelerating growth than a turnaround scenario).
Transitions Are High Risk
Transitions are risky times for professionals because you lack the relationships and information to truly understand the expectations, culture and politics of your new role. The purpose in your first 90 days must be to hit your break-even point ASAP.
To do this you need to avoid traps, the most obvious of which is just sticking with what you know. If you execute the same playbook that worked at your last job verbatim, you’ll probably fail at this one. Leaders in transition will also fall victim to the action imperative — pushing too hard to put your stamp on the organization too early, instead of taking the time to listen and learn (as it turns out, the drive to do that is almost always in the leaders head, due to insecurity).
“Leadership is ultimately about influence and leverage. You are, after all, only one person. To be successful, you need to mobilize the energy of many others in your organization.”
Finally, there is a tendency to focus on managing up and managing down (your team), but not nearly enough emphasis paid to the horizontal relationships you need to build with other leaders to get things done and to advance your ideas and agenda.
Watkins lays out a 9-step process to conquering your first 90 days at any new job:
Step 1: Prepare YOURSELF
First, you need to take the time to understand the business and the market so you can make a meaningful contribution. Then, focus on the biggest difficulty with moving to a new organization: adjusting to the politics and culture (ie. the shadow organization).
The culture and the politics include an understanding of how people get support for new initiatives, how the information flows in an organization, how ideas are ratified, how appropriate it is to take personal credit for wins vs. sharing that with the organization.
Prepare an onboarding checklist that includes:
Reviewing any business-related information from internal and public sources (analyst reports, etc).
Identify key stakeholders and meet with them ASAP, before you start if possible, focusing on lateral relationships.
Have explicit conversations with your boss about working style and expectations (no later than the first week).
Identify the people in the organization who can serve as cultural interpreters.
Be thoughtful about your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to evaluating how you should proceed in your new role. Even strengths can be dangerous. For example, if you’ve been successful in previous roles by focusing on process, you may look for process solutions (a solution in search of a problem) to score early wins.
Step 2: Accelerate Your Learning
If you try to move too quickly and make decisions without first learning about the organization, you’re destined to fail. Start by defining a learning agenda to help you understand questions about the past, present and future:
Past - How has the organization performed in the past? How were goals set? Why was performance good or bad? What sort of change has the organization been through?
Present - What is the stated vision or strategy? Who are the highly capable players? Who has influence and why? What are the key processes and how are they performing? In what areas can you achieve early wins?
Future - What are the most promising unexploited opportunities? What are the barriers to making change? Which elements of culture should be preserved and which need to change?
Answering these questions should give you a sense of the “soft” information that drives the organization. Identify different people, teams, groups and sources of knowledge in the company.
Develop a learning plan that includes time periods leading up to your first month:
Before entry - Learn all you can from your boss and external sources. Compile an initial set of questions for everyone.
Soon after entry - Review strategy and operational plans. Meet with your direct reports. Assess how things are going at key intersection points. Test strategic alignment up and down the organization. Test awareness of challenges and opportunities.
End of your first month - Gather your team and feed back preliminary findings. Analyze a couple of key processes. Meet with key integrators and stakeholders to identify problems and build alliances. Meet with your boss to discuss observations.
Step 3: Match Your Strategy to the Situation (Ie. the “stars” model)
The STARS model lays out several types of transitional imperatives, each of which needs to be approached differently. It’s an acronym for Startup, Turnaround, Accelerated Growth, Realignment, and Sustaining Success – the different types of business situations leaders often find themselves in when entering new positions.
Start Up - Trying to get a new business off the ground. Must build strategies from the ground up. Limited resources, but an eager team.
Turnaround - The business is in trouble and you need to help save it. Must re-energize demoralized employees and move quickly. This is a ready-fire-aim situation, where you need to act fast and iterate responses later.
Accelerated growth - Managing a fast-growing business. Building structures that scale. Potential for growth motivates your team.
Realignment - Reorganizing a successful org that faces new challenges. Must convince teams to change. This is a ready-aim-fire situation, where you need to evaluate first, then act. Requires slower, more deliberate moves.
Sustaining success - Playing good defense before embarking on new initiatives. Strong team already in place, often with a strong foundation in place, but more constraints on how you can act culturally. Must show that you understand what made the business successful in the first place before acting.
Importantly, different parts of your organization may be in different places on the STARS model. Your processes may need a turnaround, while culture may be sustaining. There will be differences in how you manage change in these areas. In a turnaround, for example, you need more support for your boss, while in a realignment, you’ll need better and stronger alliances sideways and down. In turnarounds you need to focus your strategic intent, while in realignments you need to keep the core working, while you stimulate innovation.
Step 4: Negotiate Success
“Negotiating success means proactively engaging with your new boss to shape the game so that you have a fighting chance of achieving desired goals.”
From the outset, you should engage with your boss directly. Have a clear vision of what is most important in these meetings. This is your responsibility. Do not let yourself get caught up in firefighting before you’re ready.
There are five important conversations to negotiating success:
Situational diagnosis - Agree on the STARS model aspects of your portfolio. How did the org reach this point? What makes this a challenge to solve?
Expectations - Understand and negotiate expectations. Identify early wins that will matter to your boss and your organization. Make sure you clarify these expectations and then clarify again.
Resources - What do you need to be successful? In realignments you need the consistent support of your leadership to reiterate the need for change. In a sustaining situation you need financial and technical resources to sustain your business and innovate. In turnarounds, on the other hand, you need authority backed by political support.
Style - A discussion about communication methods and working styles. Remember it is your job to adapt to your boss’s working style. If there are difficult issues, surface them early.
Personal development - Seek honest feedback. This will set you apart. Begin to discuss your development priorities after several months in the role.
Your outputs at 30 and 60 days should be:
At 30 days - A diagnosis of your situation with key priorities, and a plan for what to do the next 30 days, and what early wins to seek.
At 60 days - Review progress against your 30 day plan, and discuss what to spend the next 30 days on.
Step 5: Secure Early Wins
“By the end of the first few months, you want your boss, your peers, and your subordinates to feel that something new, something good, is happening. Early wins excite and energize people and build your personal credibility.”
When seeking early wins, don’t fall victim to the low-hanging fruit trap; focus instead on your boss’s and stakeholders key priorities. Not what is easiest for you or what is within your comfort zone.
The goal should be to first identify behavior patterns that need to change, to identify the ones that make sense to change in your first 90 days, then to focus on how to change them.
Identifying problem behavior patterns - Identify a lack of focus, discipline, innovation, teamwork or sense of urgency.
Getting wins the right way - Focus on a few promising opportunities that matter to your boss. Don’t use methods that ruin your reputation.
Build credibility - Credibility comes from having the steadiness to make tough decisions; from being demanding but reasonable; accessible but not overly familiar; active but without causing commotion.
Focus on three to four areas, max, that will have the biggest impact on the business.
Step 6: Achieve Alignment
Achieving alignment means ensuring your efforts correspond to the organizations structure. This section unpacks organizational design and how it impacts new leaders.
A few things to avoid: Do not create a new structure just to create one, and if you do, don’t create structures that are overly complex. An org structure is a complex system, and changing the part will change the whole (ie. will impact your overall strategy).
Begin by diagnosing misalignment. Do you have the skills to deliver on strategy? Are core processes helping or hurting your strategic initiatives.? Are you correctly aligning your people with the right groups (ie. internal customers or stakeholders).
Alignment should begin with the strategic direction and work backward. Evaluate structure, processes and skills; are they well suited to the strategic direction? If you need to make strategic change, be thoughtful about how and when, and in what order.
Understand that there are tradeoffs to different structures, summed up well by this quote:
“Complex reporting arrangements, such as matrix structures, broaden information sharing, and reduce compartmentalization but can diffuse accountability.”
Step 7: Build Your Team
There are a few common traps that new leaders fall into when joining a new organization:
Criticizing previous leadership
Keeping an existing low performing team too long
Not balancing stability and change
Not retaining the best people
Not working on organizational alignment and team development in parallel
Trying to implement new initiatives before you have the buy-in of your team
Trying to do too much yourself.
Assess your team by asking similar questions to all of your reports, so you can compare across without bias. Ask genuine questions about how the organization can be improved, challenges and opportunities, and what resources we can leverage more effectively. Evaluate your team’s existing processes and look for areas of improvement. Dig into roles, meeting cadence, how decisions are made, and leadership style.
There are two decision styles that will come into play with new leaders: consult-and-decide and build consensus.
In a consult-and-decide style, leaders lean on their team for information but ultimately make the call themselves. In a build consensus style, leaders make sure they get a critical mass of people aligned behind a decision, and the remaining people agreeing that they can live with it, before making a call.
Here, again, we find tradeoffs. If a decision is highly divisive — ie. if there are winners and losers — you’re better off using consult-and-decide. Consensus building will often create strife on the team. If your decision requires full-throated support from a large group of people, then build consensus. Use consult-and-decide for more junior teams, and consensus-building with more senior teams. Consult-and-decide can often work to establish authority early on.
Step 8: Create Alliances
To succeed as a leader you need to lead by both authority and influence. In roles like mine — in marketing — nothing is accomplished through authority alone. Every move of any significance requires tight alignment with other marketing leaders and with people in other parts of the business. Watkins talks about this as building up your relationship bank account, which is empty upon joining a new company.
New leaders should craft an alliance-building plan for each of their early win initiatives. Start by focusing of key points of intersection between your team and other teams inside and outside of the business, then begin meeting with people at those intersection points. Get your boss to connect you with other key stakeholders. Try to focus on the source of power for each; is it expertise, control of information, access to resources?
Natural supporters will share your vision for the future. You may need to convince people who are comfortable with the status quo, who fear moving because of looking incompetent, or who feel like you and your ideas are a threat to their power. Understands what motivates people (need for recognition, control or power? Relationships? Personal growth?).
In today’s increasingly interconnected business landscape, the alliances you build early on will be essential to how effective you will be as a leader throughout your tenure.