The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels

Many new leaders stumble when it comes to building a winning team. The result may be a significant delay in reaching the breakeven point, or it may be outright derailment. These are some of the characteristic traps into which they fall:

• Keeping the existing team too long. Some leaders clean house too precipitously, but it is more common to keep people longer than is wise. Whether because of hubris ( These people have not performed well because they lacked a leader like me ) or because they shy away from tough personnel calls, leaders end up with less-than -outstanding teams . This means they will either have to shoulder more of the load themselves or fall short of their goals. One experienced executive put it this way: You always feel you can fix anything. But you can t. And you can t let [personnel issues] fester. If [some people on the team] are not performing, their peers know it and your peers know it. A good rule of thumb is that you should decide by the end of your first 90 days who will remain and who will go. By the end of six months, you should have communicated your planned personnel changes to key stakeholders, especially your boss and HR. If you wait much longer, the team becomes yours and change becomes increasingly difficult to justify and carry out. Naturally, the time frame depends on the ST _A RS situation you are confronting : It may be shorter in a turnaround and longer in a sustaining -success situation. The key is to establish some deadlines for reaching conclusions about your team and taking action within your 90-day plan, and then to stick to them.

• Not repairing the airplane. Unless you are in a start-up, you do not get to build a team from scratch: You inherit a team and have to mold it into what you need to achieve your A-item priorities. The process of molding a team is like repairing an airplane in midflight. You will not reach your destination if you ignore the necessary repairs . But you do not want to crash the airplane while trying to fix it. This situation can present a dilemma: It is essential to replace people, but some of them are essential to help run the business in the short run. What do you do? You develop options as quickly as you can. This may mean hiring people into temporary positions so they learn the ropes , or exploring whether people further down in the organization can meet the challenge.

• Not working organizational alignment and team restructuring issues in parallel. A ship s captain cannot make the right choices about his crew without knowing the destination, the route, and the ship. Likewise, you can t build your team before reaching clarity about changes in strategy, structure, systems, and skills. Otherwise, you could end up with the right people in the wrong jobs. As figure 7-1 illustrates, your efforts to assess the organization and achieve alignment should go on in parallel with assessment of the team and necessary personnel changes.

  Figure 7-1: Synchronizing Architectural Alignment and Team Restructuring

• Not holding onto the good people. One experienced manager shared some hard-won lessons about the dangers of losing good people. When you shake the tree, she said, good people can fall out too. Her point is that uncertainty about who will and will not be on the team can lead your best people to make moves elsewhere. Although there are real constraints on what you can say about who will stay and who will go, you should look for ways to signal to the top performers that you recognize their capabilities. A little reassurance goes a long way.

• Undertaking team building before the core team is in place. It is tempting to launch team-building activities, such as joint problem solving, brainstorming, and visioning, right away. New leaders with a consensus-building style often are eager to tap the insights of their direct reports . But this approach poses a danger: It strengthens bonds in a group , some of whose members may be leaving. So avoid explicit teambuilding activities until the team you want is in place. This does not mean, of course, that you should avoid meeting as a group.

• Making implementation-dependent decisions too early. When successful implementation requires buy-in from your team, you should judiciously defer making decisions until its core members are in place. There will be decisions you cannot afford to delay. But it can be especially difficult to implement decisions that commit new people to courses of action they had no part in defining. So carefully weigh the benefits of moving quickly on major initiatives against the lost opportunity of gaining buy-in from the people you will bring on board later.

• Trying to do it all yourself. Finally, keep in mind that the process of restructuring a team is fraught with emotional, legal, and company policy complications. Do not try to undertake this on your own. Find out who can best advise you and help you chart a strategy. The support of a good HR person is indispensable to any effort to restructure a team.