7 tips on how to approach a new leadership role
The actions you take during your first few months in a new role will largely determine whether you succeed or fail. Therefore, you need to plan and prepare yourself. Ideally you begin to define your learning agenda before you formally enter the organization. If you fail to plan you plan to fail.
1. The general plan
I recommend dividing the 90 days into three blocks of 30 days which is literally a month. Set up a review meeting with your line manager at the end of each month to talk about the progress and the next steps. Based on the status you will define how you will spend the next 30days. This plan should address where and how you will begin to seek some early wins.
The first 30 days are to listen and learn and build your personal image.
In the second 30 days, your review meeting should focus on assessing your progress toward the goals. From there on, you should identify your business focus, perform first assessments of your strategy and structure and share some first high-level feedback of your team deep dive.
At the end of the 90 days plan, it´s time to review, a kind of after-action-report with different parties, your leadership, your business partner(s) and your team and most importantly with yourself.
2. The Process
As a process proposal, I recommend setting weekly goals for yourself and establishing a personal discipline of weekly evaluation and planning. At the end of each day, spend ten minutes evaluating how well you met your goals and then plan for the next day. Do the same thing at the end of each week. Don´t loose sight of the bigger picture. BY using this routine you can establish better for the next 90 days. Again, the first 90days are mostly to learn and listen!
3. Your leadership style
Before you get started let´s look into your leadership:
The first step is to manage yourself and review your leadership style. Who are you as a leader? Once you have clarity you can bring this to life in your new role. The first step is your entry talk where you will be informing your team about yourself.
4. Your role
Now that you are getting started let’s look at your role: No matter how well you think you understand what you need to do, schedule a conversation with your boss about expectations in your first week.
The first task in making a successful transition is to accelerate your learning. Planning to learn means figuring out in advance what the important questions are and how you can best answer them. Simply displaying a genuine desire to learn and understand translates into increased credibility and influence. Secure early wins. Understand how your role fits into the bigger picture.
30 days check-in: Now, after thirty days, conduct a check-in with your boss and with other important stakeholders to gather some initial feedback that you can incorporate in your further steps, this will help tremendously to understand culture and politics.
5. Your Stakeholders
Now let´s dive deep to understand your stakeholders. It is important to focus as well on lateral relationships (peers, others) and not only vertical ones (line manager, direct reports). Ask your leadership to identify and introduce you to the key people you should connect with early on. You need to figure out what people are expecting from you and your role. Once you are aware of this you can make conscious decisions whether you will focus on these expectations or confound them.
6. Your team
Now let´s look deeper at your team. Who is on your team? How do they tick? How will they help you to achieve the goal? There are two important steps when looking at the team. The first step is to meet them during your onboarding phase. Ask them to present themselves and their area of responsibility. I am always amazed at how much you can learn about a person with these presentations. Besides their presentation try to get their SWOT analysis of the area and ask a clear question: If you were me, what would you focus on? Later when you have much more understanding of your area you need to go more in-depth to understand your team.
7. Refine, Review, Repeat
It is important throughout the whole process to lead yourself. Review your mindset take care of your learnings, understand the environment is key. It is content but as well and politics. Ensure that you are not falling back to known behavior stay open: learn and listen.
Review your soft skill tools and implement them in the team, I am talking about basics such as communication, feedback, delegation and time management. Do not forget to put focus on these supposedly neglectable skills. They will help you to become aware of and manage team dynamics.
At the end of the 90 days plan it´s time to review, a kind of after-action-report with different parties, your leadership, your business partner and your team and most importantly with yourself. This plan will help you to set your focus for the next 90days.
With this blog article I have shared more or less the structure of my course MOVE UP! To apply feel free to reach out to me and set up a discovery call.
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You cannot know everything there is to know about how to get where you want to be in life. While it’s possible to learn the needed skills, this will take time and likely a lot of money. Instead, what if you had someone (or a group of people) who can help guide you to success?
A mentor is someone who currently is where you want to be. The relationship you have with a mentor can be an official one, or it can be informal such as following in the footsteps of someone you admire. Mentors have experience and have gone through growing pains towards success. They will know what kinds of training you may need or skills to develop.