New Role, New Challenges
By Declan Noone
Transitioning to a new role is an exciting time. It brings with it many positive emotions, but also some negative ones, such as fear and anxiety over what this new challenge will bring. It can be a period of increased personal and professional change.
Your leadership style, personality and technical skills have enabled you to achieve a new level of success; and many of us believe that we can replicate our performance levels from our previous role in our new role, because that success led to this new opportunity. So we think, ‘keep doing what you have been doing’; it plays to our confirmation bias and fixed mental model of how we see ourselves as ‘outstanding leaders and performers’.
Therefore, there is little or no period of introspection as we transition between roles, but rather a tendency to diffuse and relax for a short period before we once more launch ourselves into the next stage of our professional journey. But has everything we have done before been successful? Have we really been outstanding leaders? And is what you have done before really sufficient to succeed in your new role?
The challenges you will face are varied and significant, as they will affect your capacity to engage your new team and colleagues quickly and start delivering on the expectations placed on you by the business. Some of those challenges include:
- A new workplace culture and values;
- New people with different relationships and dynamics;
- New practices and ways of doing business; and
- New performance expectations on both personal and organisational levels.
Other issues include the length of time the team has been without a leader, legacy issues, diversity of the workforce, leadership expectations from team members and employee engagement levels.
In Serrano 99 we have developed the 4L process to enable both new leaders and experienced hires to hit the ground running and make a positive impact in just 99 days. Why 99 days? Well, in an increasingly competitive talent market-place, leaders are no longer afforded the normal 6 to 9-month transition period to get settled. Furthermore, you want to ensure that people form positive opinions of the new leader, as opinions tend to be formed pretty quickly and have a tendency to stick. Negative opinions can adversely impact productivity, sales, performance, and engagement levels.
Consequently, as Mary Shapiro states in the HBR guide to Leading Teams, ‘If you don’t take time upfront to figure out how to get the team working well, problems are always going to come up […] You either pay upfront or you pay later’. So a new leader needs to identify early what they can influence, impact and measure.
Our 4 L’s are Learn, Land, Listen, and Lead (IMAGE REQUIRED)
LEARN: SELF-DISCOVERY & AWARENESS
This stage can take place up to 4 weeks before a new leader assumes their role, once contracts are signed and no legal barriers prevent the new employer from engaging with the individual. New hires are eager to get involved early and to prepare themselves for the new challenge.
During this stage we engage with the leader to help them identify and understand their personal expectations and vision for their new role, and their own behaviours and workplace habits that may have a negative impact on team performance. This then helps the leader to develop a behavioural fitness plan to aid them in addressing behaviours that are destructive in nature.
LAND: TEAM & CULTURE DISCOVERY
Joining a new company consumes a new leader’s time in the first month in their new role. Facilitating the on-boarding process and aiding the leader in understanding the new workplace culture, values and practices is important in building a strong relational foundation with the business.
It is also a time where identifying their own strengths and how to work with them in this new team and organisational culture helps the leader to identify opportunities and challenges.
LISTEN: CONNECTION & ANALYSIS
Now in Stage 3, generating a closer connection to members of the team and peers is critically important. One effective way to do so is to engage them in a manner that draws on their knowledge and experience. This generates a sense of being valued and respected, while enabling the leader to quickly develop and enhance their situational awareness.
We usean asset-based approach (insert image): what works well (Strengths) and on what can we build on to solve our current and future internal Challenges? We take this solid groundwork and look at Opportunities, matched with our strengths, and examine any external Challenges that might come along with an open, positive mind-set.
Insights gathered at this stage will inform the next stage of the process.
LEAD: VISON ALIGNMENT & EXECUTION
Finally, bringing together the insights from all the previous stages, the leader hosts a half-day workshop specifically designed for their unique context. Its purpose is to engage the team and align them around a shared vision and purpose, establishing a positive and inclusive team culture, focused on individually and collectively delivering on their performance objectives.
OVERALL:
The leader is coached throughout the 4-stage process, ensuring clarity of purpose and providing leadership development opportunities and tools.
The 4Ls is built on the Fundamentals of Positive leadership and adoption of a strengths-based approach in order to enable leaders, transitioning to new roles, to:
- Embrace cognitive diversity;
- Lead diverse teams;
- Create positive and inclusive work cultures;
- Achieve ‘buy in’;
- Improve personal and team wellbeing; and
- Improve engagement and performance levels.
