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CHAPTER 10

Accelerate Everyone

The First 90 Days was conceived as a book for individual leaders in transition. It was written to help them diagnose their situations, define the core challenges, and design plans to create momentum. Hundreds of thousands of leaders have benefited from the approach, which independent research has shown reduces time to break-even by as much as 40 percent.1 When a new leader fails to thrive, it’s a severe, perhaps career-ending, blow to the individual. But what about the impact of transitions on companies? Every failed transition—whether outright derailment or less dramatic underperformance—exacts costs from the organization as well. The magnitude of these costs is such that a state-of-the-art transition acceleration system (hereafter “acceleration system”) can reduce enterprise risk, create competitive advantage, and speed up change implementation.

Think first about the risks posed by senior executive transitions, both onboarding of new hires and internal promotions. A single failure at the senior executive level can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct costs, never mind lost opportunities or damage to businesses. The independent study of the Genesis Advisers program and coaching processes mentioned previously yielded an assessed 1,400 percent ROI based on conservative salary assumptions. But beyond that, the following verbatim quotations from the study highlight the scope and dimensions of the potential impact of derailment or underperformance. “In one business, under a struggling new leader, growth slowed by half in one region. When you look at the after-tax impact, that amounted to $7 to 8 M U.S.”

“Initiatives were not undertaken, and results were not met. A new product launch was delayed. When new product development problems arise, the impact of a poor transition could be $100 M U.S.” “A key cost is loss of talent. There is a huge cost that goes beyond direct dollars. Hi-potentials are a scarce resource, and we’re tough on them. If they don’t make it, you’ve washed out a hi-potential.” Companies typically have systems in place to assess and manage other risks of comparable magnitude, and they should manage executive transition risk with equal rigor. An acceleration system is therefore an element of overall enterprise risk management.

Now consider the cumulative impact on performance of the many ongoing transitions occurring at all levels. Recall that about a quarter of all the leaders in typical Fortune 500 companies change jobs each year. Executives have even higher annual rates of transition—35 percent in the top three tiers of leadership in one study, with 22 percent moving internally and 13 percent being hired from the outside. And each transition materially impacts the performance of about a dozen people surrounding the leader—peers, direct reports, and bosses.

Imagine the value of accelerating all those transitions by only 10 percent, never mind 40 percent. Success in accelerating everyone contributes directly to improving company performance. It’s even a potential source of competitive advantage; if you can help everyone get up to speed faster, the business will be more nimble and responsive. An acceleration system is therefore a key element of a high-performance organization.

Finally, think about what happens when your business goes through a significant change event—a restructuring, a phase of rapid growth, or integration of an acquisition. Every major change creates a ripple of individual transitions that cascades through the organization. The important “hard side” work of getting in place the right structure and systems and staffing the key positions is only the first phase of change implementation. To achieve planned objectives, such as acquisition synergy targets, strategic direction must be driven down through the organization; clarity about roles, responsibilities, and decision rights must be established; and relationship building must be accelerated.

The 90-day framework described in this book has been applied very successfully to accelerate the second phase of organizational change in Rapid Rewire implementations. The focus typically is on team acceleration, and it begins with the top team and flows down through the organization. Teams at every level use the same methodology, language, and tools to create 90-day plans and build relationships and teamwork. Success in applying this approach can make the difference between achieving targets and failing miserably. That’s because, as many companies have learned painfully, the soft side of change is the hard side. An acceleration system is therefore an essential element of the organizational change management toolkit.

Whether the focus is on risk management, performance improvement, change implementation, or all three, companies have a big stake in accelerating transitions at every level—internally and externally, individually and organizationally. This means that they should manage leadership-transition acceleration as they would any critical business process—by putting in place the right framework, tools, and systems to accelerate everyone.

Given this, how should companies approach the design of acceleration systems? Following are ten design principles—guidelines you can apply to build the right solution for your business.

Identify the Critical Transitions

The starting point is to understand how many transitions are occurring in your organization and to focus first on accelerating the most important of them. It’s surprising how many companies are unable to answer basic questions about the number of people who are being hired, getting promoted, moving between units, and making lateral moves. Without good data on the frequency of transitions—and, critically, without awareness of when they are occurring—it’s difficult to design acceleration systems.

You need to understand transition frequencies in order to assess the costs and benefits of providing support at different levels and to efficiently allocate resources. Suppose, for example, that you anticipate a relatively high frequency of movement (greater than 30 percent) at the frontline leader level, perhaps because the business is growing rapidly. It’s a good rule of thumb that leaders at this level should participate in transition workshops (in person or virtually) within their first 60 days on the job (in addition, as described later, to getting immediate launch resources at the time they move into their new roles). These workshops tend to work best with fifteen to twenty participants. You can use this information to plan where and when transition support will be offered.

Beyond knowing transition frequencies, it’s valuable to know what the mix is of onboarding, inboarding (moves between units), promotion, and lateral moves. Knowing this allows you to tailor the support you’re providing. That’s because, as described later, support should be customized somewhat to the types of transitions leaders are experiencing.

Then you need to focus on critical transitions. Which are the most important transitions going on in your company? Suppose you’re a small, rapidly growing pharmaceutical company. You have just received approval for a promising new drug; you’re hiring a new sales force and need to get up to speed faster than a competitor. Your success in onboarding new salespeople may make the difference between great success and so-so performance. Your initial efforts therefore should focus on helping all those salespeople get up to speed as quickly as possible, as well as helping the sales organization as a whole to gel. Use the Transition Heat Map tool in figure 10-1 to summarize your assessments of which transitions are most critical in your organization.

Identify Set-Up-to-Fail Dynamics

As discussed in the introduction, there are common traps new leaders fall into. Examples include staying in your comfort zone or trying to do too much too fast. These can largely be avoided through implementation of acceleration systems based on the principles discussed in this book.

However, there also are systematic mistakes that organizations make when putting leaders into new roles that need to be addressed in the design of acceleration systems.3 Respondents to the HBR/IMD study highlighted classic ways that companies set up their leaders to fail. Reasons for unnecessary derailment or underperformance are summarized in table 10-1.

Table 10-1

Reasons for transition failures

Reasons that apply to all transitions

Insufficient clarity about expectations and mandates. Leaders are not given enough information or conflicting information about what they need to do to be successful.

Not taking the STARS situation into account in hiring and promotion. Leaders are selected without enough attention being given to whether their best suited for the challenges of the situation. For example putting a person who is graded turnarounds in a sustaining-success or realignment situation.

Pushing leaders to make leaps that are too big. Leaders are placed in new roles with very high levels of transition risk; they take on too much and fail.

Having a Darwinian leadership culture. Leaders are not provided with adequate support during transitions, perhaps because the culture misguidedly reinforces a sink or swim approach to leadership development.

Promotion-specific reasons

People are promoted only because they are good at their current jobs. Leaders are not evaluated adequately on their ability to be effective at higher levels.

Training is provided too late or not at all. Leaders do not receive training or receive it many months later, in the skills they need to be effective and so lose the opportunity to build credibility during their transitions.

Leaders are required to do their old jobs and their new ones. The company does a poor job of succession planning, causing newly promoted leaders to expend energy on their old roles of the most critical in their new ones.

Onboarding-specific reasons (also applies to moves between units)

Cultural fit is not taken into account in recruiting. Leaders are hired because they have certain capabilities whether or not they’re a good fit for the culture.

Support for cultural adaptation is not provided. Newly hired leaders are expected to figure out the culture on their own and make unnecessary early mistakes.

Support is not provided for identifying and connecting with key stakeholders. Newly hired leaders are expected to figure out on their own, who will have influence over their success and they don’t make the right connections early enough.

There is not much point in putting in place acceleration systems if your company is setting up leaders to fail in these ways. The implication is that you may need to address culture change as part of your broader effort to put a system in place. Suppose your company does a poor job of sizing the leaps that leaders are being asked to make. If it is, you may want to push for systematic use of the transition risk assessment discussed in the introduction. Likewise, if there are widespread problems with providing clarity about expectations, they can be addressed through disciplined use of the five conversations discussed in chapter 4.

Diagnose Existing Transition Support

Companies often have a patchwork quilt of existing systems for supporting transitions. One unit may do a good job of promoting lower-level leaders, another has an effective executive onboarding system, and yet another does a good job of supporting international moves. Because the benefits of having a companywide acceleration system based on a common core framework are great, however, this mosaic of existing systems usually needs to be modified substantially or even replaced.

TABLE 10-1

Reasons for transition failures

Before designing a companywide acceleration system, you must first make a thorough assessment of existing systems, as well as identify areas where no support is currently provided. To do this assessment, follow these guidelines: Identify and assess the status of your company’s existing acceleration support frameworks and tools. What approaches have been used, and why? To what degree do they represent best practice?

Examine the approaches (coaching programs, virtual workshops, self-guided materials) your organization currently uses to deliver transition support at all levels of the leadership pipeline. Evaluate the associated costs and benefits.

Assess the overall coherence of your organization’s approach to supporting different types of transitions—onboarding, promotion, and lateral and international moves. Is there a common core model for accelerating all transitions?

Identify the key stakeholders (bosses, peers, direct reports, HR generalists, learning and development personnel) who do or could provide support during transitions.

Assess the adequacy of your company’s HR information systems (for example, websites) in directly supporting transitions and in providing the data about where and when transitions are occurring, so that you can provide support on a just-in-time basis.

Adopt a Common Core Model

Given the frequency with which people take on new jobs and the impact of each transition on others, it makes sense to have everyone—bosses, direct reports, and peers—employ the same common core model to support transition.

The foundation of an acceleration system is a unified, companywide framework, language, and toolkit for talking about and planning transitions. This probably is the single most important step your organization can take to build an acceleration system. Imagine that every leader in transition were able to converse with bosses, peers, and direct reports about the following: The STARS portfolio of challenges they had inherited—the mix of start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, or sustaining success—and the associated challenges and opportunities Their technical, cultural, and political learning and the key elements of their learning plan

Their progress in the five conversations—situation, expectations, style, resources, and progress—with their boss and direct reports

Their agreed-upon priorities and plans for where they will secure early wins

The alliances they need to build

A common core model makes discussions of these issues dramatically more efficient. Perhaps more importantly, it means that conversations will happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. It also makes people more forthcoming, more likely to share confidences and information, and more tolerant of others’ transition struggles. This kind of systematic support helps move the organization beyond sink or swim.

Deliver Support Just in Time

Transitions evolve through a series of predictable stages. New leaders begin their transitions with intensive diagnostic work. As they learn and gain increasing clarity about the situation, they shift to defining strategic direction (mission, goals, strategy, and vision) for their organizations. As the intended direction becomes clearer, they are better able to make decisions about key organizational issues—structure, processes, talent, and team. In tandem, they can identify opportunities to secure early wins and begin to drive the process of change.

The type of support that new leaders need, therefore, shifts in predictable ways as the transition process unfolds. Early on, support for accelerating learning—technical, cultural, and political—is key. As the leader’s understanding grows, the focus of support should shift to helping him define strategic direction, lay the foundation for success, secure early wins, and so on.

Critically, leaders need to be offered transition support in digestible blocks. Once they are in their new roles, they are rapidly immersed in the flow of events and can devote only very limited time to learning, reflecting, and planning. If support is not delivered just in time, the new leader is not likely to use it.

A corollary is to leverage the time before entry to the maximum extent possible. Transitions begin with recruiting or selection, and not when leaders formally enter their new positions. This is a priceless period when new leaders can begin to learn about their organizations and plan their early days on the job.

Acceleration systems should therefore be designed to help new leaders get the maximum possible benefit from whatever preentry time is available to them. This means supporting new leaders’ learning processes by providing them with key documents and tools that help them plan their early diagnostic activities, as well as helping them connect with key stakeholders as early as possible. For executives, it may be beneficial to have transition coaches engage in preentry diagnosis, including interviews with key stakeholders, and distill this knowledge into an actionable assessment that provides the basis for early discussions.

Use Structured Processes

The paradox of transition acceleration is that leaders in transition often feel too busy to learn and plan their transitions. They know they should be tapping into available resources and devoting time to planning their transitions, but the urgent demands of their new roles tend to crowd out this important work.

Although it helps to leverage the time before entry and to provide just-in-time support, transition processes also need to have action-forcing events. These include preset coaching meetings at each stage of the process or scheduled cohort events that take leaders out of the fray to engage in reflection and create or refine their 90-day plans.

The implication is that transition support should not be designed as a free-flowing process in which the leader sets the pace. It’s better to create a series of focused events—coach meetings or cohort sessions—at critical stages. After undertaking preentry diagnosis of the situation and helping the leader engage in self-assessment, for example, the coach and client are well positioned to have a highly productive launch meeting to jump-start the process.

When transition coaching is provided, it’s critical that the new leader and the coach connect early on in a focused and engaged way. One reason it can be beneficial for coaches to engage in intensive preentry diagnosis is that they have a precious resource—knowledge about the situation—that they can convey to the new leader. Their insight, offered in the critical early phases of the transition, can help cement the coach-client relationship.

Match Support to Transition Type

The 90-day framework and toolkit can be applied in all types of transition situations. However, the importance of different activities—for example, focusing more or less attention on learning about the culture—varies significantly, depending on the types of transitions leaders are experiencing. Therefore, it’s often helpful to identify the most important types of transitions the company needs to support and to develop specific, targeted supplemental resources to support them.

In particular, there often are good reasons to provide new leaders with additional resources for dealing with two common types of transitions:

Promotion. As discussed in chapter 1, when leaders are promoted they face a predictable set of challenges. The competencies required to be successful at the new level may be quite different from the skills that made them successful at their previous level. They also may be expected to play different roles, exhibit different behaviors, and engage with direct reports in different ways. So focused sets of resources should be provided that help newly promoted leaders understand what success looks like at the new level, assess themselves, and create a personal development plan.

Onboarding. Likewise, when leaders join new organizations or move between units with distinct subcultures, they face major challenges in aligning expectations, adapting to new cultures, and building the right sorts of relationships. Focused, accessible resources for helping them understand what it takes to get things done and assistance in identifying and connecting with key stakeholders can help reduce derailment and can speed time to high performance.

Match Transition Support to Leader Level

If cost were not an issue, every transitioning leader would get intensive, highly personalized support. In an ideal world, a new leader would be assigned a transition coach who would undertake an independent diagnosis and brief the person on the results before entry. The coach would help the leader engage in self-assessment and identify key transition risk factors. The coach also would help support diagnostic planning and goal setting, assist with team assessment and alignment, gather feedback on how the leader was doing, and, of course, be available to the new leader as needed to talk through specific issues.

Because the impact of executives on the business is great, it often makes sense to provide them with transition coaching. (If you do, be sure to understand that transition coaching is very different from development coaching. See the box, “Transition Coaching and Developmental Coaching.”) But it typically doesn’t make economic sense to provide it to leaders at lower levels. The solution is threefold. First, identify alternative modes for delivering transition support (for example, coaching versus cohort sessions versus virtual workshops and self-guided materials). Second, assess the relative costs and benefits of the support, and third, match its delivery mode and extent to key levels in the company’s leadership pipeline in order to maximize the return on investment.

Transition Coaching and Developmental Coaching

Transition coaching is very different from developmental coaching. It’s essential that transition coaches have the business acumen necessary to act as trusted advisers to leaders in transition. In addition, a thorough knowledge of the organization and its culture is a prerequisite for effectiveness. For this reason, it can be dangerous for newly hired leaders to bring in their own coaches, as they may lack experience with transitions as well as an understanding of the culture and political system the leader is entering.

TABLE 10-2

Transition versus developmental coaching

Transition coaching

Coach helps leader to

-Assess both the business situation and himself in his new role

-Create a strategy to build momentum

-Create a strategy for managing himself

-Develop an action plan

Coach’s business acumen ensures right mix of advice and behavioral coaching.

Developmental coaching

Coach helps leader to

-Assess existing competencies and behaviors

-Identify gaps in competencies as well as dysfunctional behaviors

-Correct these challenges and build key competencies

Clarify Roles and Align Incentives

Transition support is a team sport. For any given new leader, typically there are many people who potentially can impact the success of the transition. Key players may include bosses, peers, direct reports, HR generalists, coaches, and mentors. Although primary responsibility for supporting a transition may be vested with one individual—typically a coach or HR generalist—it is important to think through the supportive roles that others could play and to identify ways to encourage them to do so.

A boss, for example, has an obvious stake in getting the new leader up to speed quickly but also may be dealing with other pressing demands. Careful thought must be given to providing bosses and other key players with guidelines and tools that allow them to be highly focused and efficient in supporting their new direct reports. HR generalists likewise can provide invaluable support to leaders who are onboarding by helping them navigate the new culture. But once again, they both need to know what to do and have incentives to do it.

Integrate with Other Talent Management Systems

Acceleration systems work best when they’re linked with the company’s recruiting and leadership development systems. This need for integration seems obvious on the face of it, because the best onboarding systems can’t compensate for the sins of poor recruiting. If the company hires people who aren’t likely to fit with the culture, then little can be done to reduce the risk of derailment through onboarding.

It’s surprising, therefore, that many companies still do not do a good job of integrating recruiting and onboarding. Often, people in these functions report up through different parts of the organization and are led by people with different, perhaps even divergent, goals, measures of success, and incentives. A necessary first step is to have them under the same organizational umbrella and align their goals and incentives.

Beyond that, the company should think about transition risk when it engages in recruiting. Doing so means, as illustrated in figure 10-2, making transition risk tolerance part of the process of setting up searches. Often, businesses practice “best athlete” recruiting—hiring people because they have a needed set of capabilities and not paying enough attention to fit. It’s fine to take a significant risk in bringing in someone from a very different culture, as long as you have been thoughtful about the trade-offs between individual capabilities and cultural fit, and as long as transition risk is explicitly evaluated during recruiting. Of course, doing this requires the company to have a good understanding of its culture and the reasons people might struggle to assimilate. This understanding can be refined, as illustrated in the figure, by feedback from successes and failures in onboarding.

There also is great value in feeding information about potential risks from recruiting to the onboarding process. Recruiting typically involves multiple forms of assessment, including psychometric instruments and in-depth interviews. The instruments can provide transition coaches and workshop facilitators with valuable insight into leaders’ styles and ways they might struggle in adapting to the culture. Interviews likewise can provide rich information about likely transition risks, as long as interviewers are explicitly asked to make assessments and develop a transition risk profile for new hires.

Then there is the relationship between leadership development systems and transition acceleration systems. Leadership development systems prepare talent to go to the next level. Transition acceleration systems should help them make the leap. Although this description makes the two seem distinct, in reality there are opportunities for connecting development and acceleration.

One example is including familiarization with the organization’s core transition acceleration model in development programs. Doing so helps leaders take on a transition state of mind and think about how they will enter their next roles when the time comes. It also provides a foundation on which to build during the transition, a foundation that is valuable given the high demands that new leaders typically experience.

A second example is strengthening leadership development by assessing leaders’ experience with different types of transitions using the STARS model. This model provides a basis for charting the progression of high-potential leaders through a series of positions that build their capability to manage a broad range of business situations. It also identifies potential development gaps—for example, that a leader has mostly managed turnarounds and needs to be channeled into experiences that provide exposure to a broader range of business situations.

To illustrate, think of your own job history. Take time to fill out the development grid, a tool for charting professional development shown in table 10-3.

Putting It All Together

Given the many transitions that occur in organizations and the substantial impact they have, it makes sense to evaluate the costs and benefits of designing and deploying companywide acceleration systems. Best-in-class systems are founded on a core transition acceleration framework and toolkit, provide support just in time, are customized to some degree for types of transitions, and are deployed in cost-effective ways throughout the organization. They also take the organizational context into account by aligning and incentivizing key stakeholders and by linking to recruiting and leadership development systems.

ACCELERATE EVERYONE—CHECKLIST

What are the most important transitions in your organization, and how often do they occur?

Is the organization able to identify where and when transitions are occurring?

Is there a common core transition acceleration framework, language, and toolkit?

Do leaders have the support they need, when they need it, and throughout their transitions? What could be done to provide focused resources for onboarding and promotion transitions?

Are the company’s systems for recruiting and accelerating transitions linked in appropriate ways?

Should transition acceleration be part of your organization’s curriculum for developing high-potential leaders?

How might the 90-day framework be used to accelerate organizational change—for example, restructuring or post-acquisition integration?