Rating: 7.7/10.
Book for those who are promoted or hired into leadership positions, managing large teams, and what they need to do in their first 90 days to establish credibility in the organization and set themselves up for future success. It’s non-technical and applicable to any field, as long as it involves management and leadership. As a leader entering a new organization, your early actions have a significant impact, and you can lose momentum quickly if you do not learn the right things or make poor early decisions, and this can lead to a vicious cycle.
Chapter 1. What previously led to promotion may not be effective at a new level after being promoted – doing the same thing would be considered micromanaging at the new level. Need to plan a gradual transition away from old responsibilities and establish new relationships with subordinates who were previously your peers. When joining a new company, the culture may differ significantly in terms of hierarchy, and it is necessary to be mindful of that.
Chapter 2. During the first 30 days, focus on learning about the organization before taking action – learn about its history, successes, failures, issues, challenges, and political landscape. Begin by asking each person what they believe are the biggest challenges and opportunities.
Chapter 3. It is crucial to recognize what phase the team is in. In the startup phase, when the project is just beginning, you should take quick and decisive action. The same applies to turnaround phase when it is widely recognized that failure is imminent unless drastic action is taken. On the other hand, projects in the realignment phase have issues but lack consensus that immediate changes are necessary, so it is important to move more slowly and deliberately while building alignment first.
Chapter 4. Managing your relationship with your boss — you need to learn your boss’s working style and take ownership of the relationship to ensure alignment of expectations, resources, and communication styles. Address problems early and present solutions, rather than having your boss come up with solutions. Understanding your boss’s priorities and delivering on them, along with securing early wins, will help gain trust.
Chapter 5. Secure early wins relatively quickly to build trust and confidence, while ensuring these wins align with your long-term plans. However, avoid taking on too many initiatives simultaneously, as this will slow down your efforts. Avoid issues that could potentially escalate during the early days of your leadership and derail your plans.
Chapter 6. Identify misalignments between your team’s goals, skills, and resources; identify and restructure problematic setups, such as knowledge silos, decisions that have been made at the wrong level, incorrect incentives that cause people to take inappropriate actions, and issues with processes that fail during cross-team handoffs.
Chapter 7. Part of leadership is building your team by assessing how each member is performing, then working to retain high performers, coach or move to different roles those with medium performance, and remove low performers. Since you cannot change too much too quickly, it is important to prioritize the changes. You can motivate your team either with push tools, such as incentives, rewards, or consequences, or pull tools, like a shared vision. Team decision-making can be done by consulting everyone and decide (if the decision is likely to be divisive), or if a consensus-building process that would better build team trust.
Chapter 8: Advancing an agenda often involves forming an alliance of support, since key decision makers don’t act in isolation. It is necessary to understand each team’s motivation or reasons for resistance, as well as who they listen to, in order to strategize order of operations and push the initiative forward.
Chapter 9: Transition can be a difficult time personally, so it’s important to know yourself and pace yourself to avoid burnout. If a family is also moving, then you need to be aligned with them to avoid conflicts that will impact your work. It is essential to tap into your support network, both internally and externally, on matters technical and non-technical.
Chapter 10: From the company’s perspective, a lot of leadership transitions happen in organizations every year, and each unsuccessful one costs millions to the company. Therefore, it’s important to set leaders up for success by having structured processes, managing expectations, providing the needed resources, and avoiding common traps such as having them perform their previous role simultaneously.
