Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

George B. Bradt (AB, Harvard; MBA, Wharton) is founder and Managing Director of PrimeGenesis, the premier executive transition consultancy. He was previously an executive at Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Disney, Coca-Cola, and J.D. Power and Associates. Jayme A. Check (BS, Syracuse; MBA, Anderson School at UCLA) is a founder of PrimeGenesis and President of Quantum Leap Associates. His experience includes executive roles in sales, business development, and strategy at firms such as JP Morgan, Brice Manufacturing, and Guidance Solutions. He is a recognized expert in leadership development and serves a broad base of clients worldwide. Jorge E. Pedraza (BA, Cornell; PhD, Yale) has led startups and reinvented established businesses at Concrete Media, Le Monde Interactive, and as one of the founding partners of PrimeGenesis. He helped found and is currently Managing Director of Origination at Unison, a wireless lease acquisition firm.

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A revised and expanded edition of the step-by-step success plan for every new leader?with downloadable forms and worksheets

Moving into a new leadership position is one of the toughest challenges an executive can face. Nearly half of new leaders fail in their first eighteen months. Often, that failure is the result of crucial mistakes made in the first 100 days. If that happens to you, your first 100 days on the job could be your last.

Whether you're a veteran leader taking over a new organization or a novice moving into your first leadership role, this practical guide will help you manage your leadership transition so you can take charge, build your team, and deliver results. The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan, Second Edition presents proven solutions and cutting-edge techniques for getting started successfully in your new role.

You'll find a comprehensive, easy-to-follow plan that comes with real-world examples, downloadable forms and worksheets, and other handy resources. You'll master your new job?and the art of leadership?with proven tools and techniques for:

• Making a powerful first impression on your first official day

• Turning key stakeholders and direct reports into your allies

• Building your new team with early wins

• Fitting into a new corporate culture?and shaping its evolution

• Creating, communicating, and implementing a new strategic direction

• Avoiding common mistakes and pitfalls

• Building loyalty, trust, and commitment with new colleagues

This expanded edition includes new resources, updates on today's technology and global business environment, and three new chapters that show you how to position yourself to be offered new leadership roles, land them, and stay successful after your first 100 days. This is the ultimate guide to getting ahead?and staying there.

Aus dem Klappentext

A revised and expanded edition of the step-by-step success plan for every new leader?with downloadable forms and worksheets

Moving into a new leadership position is one of the toughest challenges an executive can face. Nearly half of new leaders fail in their first eighteen months. Often, that failure is the result of crucial mistakes made in the first 100 days. If that happens to you, your first 100 days on the job could be your last.

Whether you're a veteran leader taking over a new organization or a novice moving into your first leadership role, this practical guide will help you manage your leadership transition so you can take charge, build your team, and deliver results. The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan, Second Edition presents proven solutions and cutting-edge techniques for getting started successfully in your new role.

You'll find a comprehensive, easy-to-follow plan that comes with real-world examples, downloadable forms and worksheets, and other handy resources. You'll master your new job?and the art of leadership?with proven tools and techniques for:

• Making a powerful first impression on your first official day

• Turning key stakeholders and direct reports into your allies

• Building your new team with early wins

• Fitting into a new corporate culture?and shaping its evolution

• Creating, communicating, and implementing a new strategic direction

• Avoiding common mistakes and pitfalls

• Building loyalty, trust, and commitment with new colleagues

This expanded edition includes new resources, updates on today's technology and global business environment, and three new chapters that show you how to position yourself to be offered new leadership roles, land them, and stay successful after your first 100 days. This is the ultimate guide to getting ahead?and staying there.

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The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

There are two dimensions to activating your leadership potential. The first is understanding and declaring your own leadership qualities and capacities. The second is interacting effectively with others in such a way that it becomes part of an organization's or a market's perception of you. Know yourself, and then help others know you. We have mapped out concrete steps you can take to position yourself for leadership roles and promotions.

Begin with the first dimension-know and declare yourself a leader. The "declaring" part is important since this is what best enables you to commit to your career path. Start by declaring this to yourself. Commit yourself. Your commitments become more real, however, when you share them with others. Select a listener or buddy or two and declare your intentions and your commitments to them. They are suddenly that much more real.

Next, build a career plan. Great leaders are not made in a day. Leadership is built. We have developed a tool called the Five-Step Career Plan that can help you know yourself professionally, stake out your career path, and set yourself in motion.

The Five-Step Career Plan

This tool provides a quick and effective way to help you understand what makes you tick professionally and design a career trajectory for yourself. Use it to learn your strengths, values, and interests, and to help you align your professional choices and behavior with those qualities.

There is a downloadable, printer-friendly copy of this tool (and of many of the tools in this book) at www.onboarding-tools.com. You may find it more effective to write notes on your copies than to write in the book.

Let's walk through the main steps.

1. Likes and dislikes: This is your raw data. Go through your past activities and jobs and lay out everything you liked and didn't like. This is about specifics, not generalities. It may help to use the third person, as in the following examples, when making your list. She liked: planning, thinking, getting a sense of accomplishment, working with people she liked, having some freedom, relying on the support system of a big company, having a short commute, not working on weekends. He didn't like: being pushed too hard, not being able to take Sunday off, dealing with things that didn't work right, having colleagues let him down, feeling as if he worked at a company of second-class citizens. People tend to enjoy doing things they are naturally strong in. This exercise will help you understand your strengths. Dig underneath to pull out the values that underlie some of your likes and dislikes.

2. Ideal job criteria: With these values in mind, lay out your ideal job criteria. If you could wave your magic wand, what would that your dream job look like? Explore what features of these criteria are meaningful or important to you. Test, challenge, and shape your answers. Make sure the criteria line up with your strengths, values, and interests.

3. Long-term goals: Next, consider your long-term goals. It may help to start at the end, say retirement, work back 10 years, then 5 years, then 3 years. What do you want to achieve? Think about your professional life and about your personal life, and especially about the ways these are connected. Throughout all this, you should be connecting your strengths, motivations, and criteria for fitting your goals. You may feel you have a good sense of these before you start. Or you may feel that these are too removed from the practical job at hand. Either way, go through this exercise, and open yourself to these questions: What matters to you now? What will matter to you over time?

4. Options: The idea of options triggers widely different responses in people. Some people become oddly passive, or even fatalistic. "What will be will be." And then, "Well, it was meant to be." Others panic, get jumpy. We urge a different approach. We are convinced that the mindset that generates a sense of possibilities and options is the mindset that creates opportunities and fosters success. We encourage you to read Appendix I-Leadership. This should enrich your sense of how to create leadership options for yourself.

And not just one option! Options energize potential. Create parallel options for yourself. Real ones. Even if your second option is not nearly as attractive as the main option at hand, having a viable alternative is crucial to your success in negotiating the first option and can help you see the apparently preferred option in a better light.

5. Choice: If you follow these suggestions, sooner rather than later an opportunity will come your way. If you've done your homework, you will have at least two real options to choose from when the moment comes to make a decision. Go back to your list of ideal job criteria and long-term goals. Look at your options. Think through what they are really likely to bring you. Compare options by weighting your criteria and evaluating each option's results.

6. Gut check: Once you've made your choice, write it down and go to sleep. If you wake up in the morning feeling good, then you've probably made a good decision. If you wake up in the morning with your gut indicating that you have made a mistake, you misled yourself. Most likely, you erred in weighting your ideal job criteria. It's okay to mislead yourself, as long as you have the maturity and mechanism to make you aware of it. Your gut is that mechanism.

The basic steps are (1) understand yourself and your goals, (2) create options, (3) select the best option. You can run this over a short-term, mid-term, or long-term time frame.

Over the short-term, you can't change your strengths. You are what you are and should focus on creating options that can take advantage of your existing strengths. This means you should concentrate on understanding your own strengths and then helping others understand them. If communicating is not one of your strengths, start working on that skill right away. Leadership and communication are inextricably related. Buying a lottery ticket might give you a better chance at winning leadership opportunities than trying to succeed with poor communication skills.

Over the mid-term, you can sharpen your existing skills and knowledge and take a slower approach to bringing them to others' attention. Get yourself involved in projects both inside the company and outside the company that stretch you so you can learn and practice. If you are proactively building your strengths, people often take it as a sign that you are meant for leadership. Finally, help others who might advance into positions down the road where they can help you.

Over the long-term, decide what strengths you'll need to achieve your long-term goals. As Charon and Drotter discuss in The Leadership Pipeline, different strengths are required to manage yourself, manage others, manage managers, manage functions, or manage an entire business. Virtually all the leaders we've ever talked to readily admit that, along the way, they learned a lot that they needed to know, even-believe it or not-newly minted MBAs with pedigrees that suggest they are ready-made leaders. Thus, if you want to move to different levels of leadership over time, you will need to supplement your existing talents with new strengths, knowledge, and skills. With a long-term view, you can and should invest in appropriate learning and in getting yourself into positions and assignments that allow you to practice new leadership skills.

Communicating Leadership

Now, the second part: "Help others know you." Once you've gotten a good handle on your strengths and your goals, you are ready to think through positioning in a proactive and methodical way. The simple exercise of knowing your strengths and goals will set in motion a leadership dynamic whereby you signal your leadership qualities to others, they attribute these qualities to you, and opportunities for leadership emerge. The point here is to make this make this a deliberate and conscious plan.

We have broken down the components of communicating leadership into a set of six basic elements that you should deploy deliberately and consistently. Here are the headlines. See Appendix I for more discussion.

1. Listen first.

2. Talk in order to listen and connect better.

3. Imagine the leaders' or key stakeholders' perspective.

4. Identify potential areas for leadership.

5. Lead through:

a. Work,

b. Insight,

c. Reliability,

d. Judgment,

e. Energy,

f. Humor,

g. Conflict,

h. Crisis,

i. Inspiration.

6. Carpe diem.

Position Yourself-Summary and Implications

Start by understanding your existing strengths and talents that you can be turn into strengths appropriate to meet your long-term goals (see Tool 1.1).

Short-term: You can't change your strengths. Do things to let others know about your strengths.

Mid-term: You can sharpen existing skills and knowledge. Do projects that stretch you.

Long-term: You can build new skills and knowledge. Look for assignments that allow you to learn and practice new things.

Then communicate your readiness for leadership by leading something, whether it's a major project or the team outing.

Downloadable TOOL 1.1

Five-Step Career Plan

____________________________________________________________________________

1. List your likes and dislikes:

Activities ____________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________

Jobs ____________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________

Situations ____________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________

Lifestyle ____________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________

Other ____________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________

2. List your ideal job criteria categorized as follows:

Good for others (impact on others, match with personal values, influence on organization) ____________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________

Good for me (enjoyable work/activities, fit with life interests, reward, recognition, respect) ____________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________

Good at it (match between activities and strengths, learning, development, resume builder) ____________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________

Life interests: Application of technology Quantitative analysis Theory development, conceptual thinking Creative production Counseling and mentoring Managing people and relationships Enterprise control Influence through language and ideas

3. Identify your long-term goals: ____________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________

4. Build a broad range of options that meet your long-term goals: ____________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________

5. Make choices by evaluating your options against your criteria: ____________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________

Finally, perform a gut check.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The New Leader's 100-Day Action Planby George B. Bradt Jayme A. Check Jorge E. Pedreza Copyright © 2009 by George B. Bradt, Jayme A. Check and Jorge E. Pedreza. Excerpted by permission.
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