Surviving the Rip Current: Your first 90 days!
Swoosh! The current grabs your legs and starts to drag you out to sea. You thrash violently as you try to keep your head above water and fight your way back to shore. Your mind races and you breathe heavily as you quickly make calculated decisions and try to chart a course to safety.
If you just took your first leadership role or stepped up to new more challenging role, you may feel like you are stuck in a rip current. Stretch leadership roles are rarely a relaxing day at the beach. The first few days and months as a new leader are usually chaotic, fast-paced, overwhelming, and even intimidating. The first few months will push your boundaries and break you from your comfort zone. To be completely honest, it’s not a bad thing if you have a few moments when you wonder: “WTF am I doing here?” or “You know maybe my old role was not that bad?”.
In order to get through those moments, it’s good to have a plan. Prior to entering a new role or in the first few days, you should start preparing your 30, 60, and 90 day plans. This plan will help you to navigate the uncertainty and anxiety that comes with the new territory. The ability to navigate these first 90 days will help you be more resilient and your resilience is what characterizes who you are and what you will be able to achieve.
Any role comes down to understanding and mastering the four pillars: The Players, The Machine, The Data, and The Deliverables.
So, let’s get right into it…The first 30 Days:
The first 30 days is about setting expectations for future change while maintaining status quo.
The Players: Get to Know People
Who are your direct reports, peers, stakeholders, or managers? Go out of your way to engage, interact, and listen? Get to know them; get to know their roles, and how you can help them.
The Machine: Keep the Crank Turning
You need to keep the day to day going. If it’s not there, you need to quickly define the acceptable day-to-day operational status quo. What does it take to keep the machine running and the people on board?
The Data: Fuel to the Flames of Innovation
Get access and get acquainted with the available baseline datasets. Invest your time liberally in understanding the data and verifying the quality of the data. If your goal is to drive change, then you will need data to substantiate those decisions. Data is the great facilitator at the table of change.
The Deliverables: Why are we in this business?
If you are entering a new business, you need to figure out what are the key drivers. For most, we focus on the measurables: Orders, Revenue, Profit, Contribution Margin, Innovation, or Customer Satisfaction. What’s important to your business?
The 30 to 60 Days:
The next 30 days is about collecting input on the past and present to plan for the future.
The Players: Get their Insights
What’s going well? What’s not going well? At some point, you’re going to quantify what “well” means, but for now it’s about collecting information. Ask lots of questions and makes sure you are taking notes.
The Machine: Know Every Part and Piece
Invest enough to keep things going, but make sure you have time to inspect every inch of the machine and invest in understanding the details of the system.
The Data: Plant New Seeds of Innovation
If you parse data streams that were pre-existing, you can usually achieve incremental gains and sometimes find a rare nugget that people missed (rare, in big businesses). If you want to make step changes, you need to create new data streams & data flows that were previously not considered or consider merging datasets that were previously standalone.
The Deliverables: What Should People Care About?
You know what people expect you to deliver today. Now, what’s missing and how do you show others that value that it can create. Business is about continuous evolution, you need to innovate and change. Try new things; experiment and share the results with your customers and stakeholders.
The 60 to 90 Days:
The 60 to 90 days is about figuring out the future state and shifting in that direction.
The Players: Invite Others to Get on Board
By this time, you should have an idea who’s in and who’s out. You should invite others to join, contribute, challenge you, and share their ideas to progress the organization forward. The bigger the challenge, the greater the team required and the higher performing the team needs to be.
The Machine: Start the Wheels of Change
As the wheels begin to move, hopefully, you will get some early wins. Chug. Chug. Chug. (like a train, not a beer drinking contest) The machine will slowly gain speed and become self-sustaining. Don’t expect it to be all smooth sailing, it will probably be more like “Hell on Wheels” at first.
The Data: Power your Decision Making
Every business I have been in struggles to get to real time data, but it’s an absolute must in the world today. If you have to leave a meeting and wait a week for someone to get you the data you need to make a decision, then you need to evolve.
The Deliverables: What will people care about in the future?
The world is changing quickly and as leaders we need to be at the fore-front. Use intuition to set direction and data to verify your heading. If the data conflicts with your intuition, ask yourself if you have the right data. If you do, data wins. Be flexible and prepared to change directions.
By now, the machine should be in full motion. Keep in mind, that you still need to steer and don’t get too comfortable. The rate of change in the world is accelerating, new challenges face us everyday, and there is a constant need for innovation: keep taking risks, challenge the status quo, and think revolution.
