www.tonicourtney.com

Copyright ©Toni Courtney 2014

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Hello and welcomeFirst of all congratulations on the new opportunity you’re about to embark on. I trust this quick guide will give you a great head start to your first 90 days in your new role.

A new job represents a perfect storm of opportunity and challenge within a new business, cultural and

political environment. Your transition approach must reflect the reality of what you’re stepping into,

regardless of how you’ve created success in the past.

You want to do your best and succeed. Having a 90 Day Plan means you can bring your best game – it’s all about setting yourself up for success and becoming fully productive much sooner.

This guide aims to give you a structured roadmap to guide your focus and energy on the things that will make the biggest difference in you getting up to speed fast. You don’t have to do it alone. Now you have a plan to help you accelerate the process.

I encourage you to think big - set goals for yourself in your first 90 days that if you were to achieve them would leave you feeling incredibly proud of your accomplishments. Also have a clear picture of what success looks like for you. Along the way, don’t be afraid to take a risk and make a mistake. Every result is simply feedback.

Your 90 Day Plan is a living breathing document. Update it monthly as part of your review process. In addition, integrate your 90 day plan into your daily and weekly planning.

Of course your success is up to you. Your willingness to do what it takes to succeed will define what you achieve. Reach out to others inside and outside your organisation who can help and support you through.

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I look forward to sharing in your new role journey and thank you for choosing this guide for your first 90 day success. Let me know if there is anything else I can do to help and support you.

Toni CourtneyLeadership and Performance Coach, Facilitator and Consultant0431 971 790toni@tonicourtney.comwww.tonicourtney.comhttp:au.linkedin.com/in/Toni Courtney

P.S – I’ve used the word ‘leader’ throughout this document. Whether your management journey has just begun or you’re a well-seasoned executive, you are a business leader creating business success.

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Table of Contents

Key 1 Create a transition mindset for success ............................ 6Key 2 Develop a transition approach that matches your business situation ......................................................................... 12Key 3 Determine your true role fundamentals and your ‘main game ........................................................................... 14Key 4 Develop a Structured Learning Plan .................................. 20Key 5 Focus on key relationships ................................................. 26Key 6 Build the brand “YOU” ........................................................ 28Key 7 Invest in creating quick wins .............................................. 30

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Your 90 Day Plan starts with your mindset. Why? Because your mindset is the first step in empowering you and creating success. Your mindset starts with knowing and understanding you. In reality, how you think, what you plan to do, and what you actually do is determining your success right now in every area of your life. Your role transition is no different.

In a new role transition, your mindset helps you face fear, embrace opportunity and ‘be’ the leader you want to be. Knowing your role purpose, values and beliefs, strengths, and blind spots are crucial.

Knowing who you are as a leader means being more certain of you. When you are more certain, you’re more self-assured, and others will in turn see you as being confident. The more self-aware you are the better leader you will be. It’s that simple.

Know your ‘why’ for success in this role

Here are some questions to ask yourself that aim to take your self-awareness to the next level.

Key 1

Create a transition mindset for success

What’s your big ‘why’ for why you want to create success in this role? What’s your own ‘bigger picture’ for what this role gives you? What will success in this role give you?

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What’s made you successful in previous roles? (eg: skills, capabilities, attitude, traits). Can you rely on those same strengths going into this role? How can you best leverage these strengths moving forward?

Our strengths usually lie where our preferences are (which are the things we like to do). What are your areas of less strength where you could be exposed? How will you compensate for these areas? What skills can you choose to develop?

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What are your key challenges in this role (eg: broader range of issues, more ambiguity and complexity, bigger deliverables, tougher politics, more people responsibility), and how will you address them in your 90 day plan?

What do you need to bring to this role to create the success you want? Who do you need to be?

Know who you are as a leader – your core vales

Knowing yourself as a leader is important. Particularly at the start of a new role which represents a fresh opportunity to create change.

Finding out who you are as a leader and what your leadership voice is, comes by knowing and understanding you. Knowing what your values are, in a work context, is a great place to start. Values are what we believe is important. We can have different sets of values for different areas in our life. Who you define

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yourself to be at work, as a function of your values as a leader, may be entirely different than who you are at home as a spouse, partner, friend, parent etc.

The set of questions below is aimed at getting you thinking about your core values as a leader at work. Often, people look at a list of words and come to short list of words they like and think they should value (which is the ‘ego’ talking).

These questions will help you get to the crux of what your values are in a work setting. Even if you only come up with (or confirm) one value from this exercise, it’s a great start. The questions are based on the work of Anthony Robbins. So begin by thinking about yourself in your current management or leadership role.

1. Notice your hot buttons. What do you react to at work?

2. Notice your strengths (what are the consistent themes in your work life that are important to you eg: acknowledgement). What accurate feedback are you getting from your environment/ the people around you?

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3. What do you spend a lot of time talking about? (it might be obvious, or just a theme which is between the lines or an umbrella theme that ties lots of things together eg: sustainability)

4. What are your results? Your results are a clue of what you value (eg: discipline - some people consider a good working relationship at work to be based on consistently doing what it takes to keep it good, and this consistency requires discipline). Look at your environment and your relationships at work.

What you are attracted to is a function of your values. Once you know your key values, they can guide any business decisions you make.

How congruent are your values compared to the values of your organisation? What are the implications for you?

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What do you need to bring to this role to create the success you want? Who do you need to be as a leader?

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Key 2

Develop a transition approach that matches

your business situation

Whatever your new role opportunity is, you will be responsible for contributing to a growing and successful business. Specifically, your 90 day success depends on delivering the right actions to the business situation you are stepping into.

What is your business situation? (note: these 5 business situations are based on the work of (Michael Waktins).

Situation

Brand newbusiness

Turn-around

High growth

Realignment

Sustainingsuccess

Bringing together what is required to start a business. High uncertainty and high ambiguity as the strategy, systems, processes and people capability are developed simultaneously.

Building and creating a business from scratch

Characteristics Tick the AppropriateBox Below

Typically a poor performing business that has lost its way and needs turning around. Imperative to make dramatic change under pressure. Making tough decisions and getting on board

Creating the next level of business expansion. Having the production, systems, processes, structure, people resources on board for planned growth.

A solid performing business that faces issues. Requires repointing and changing some parts while leveraging strengths in other parts.

An already successful business where the requirement is to maintain momentum and identify ways to optimise.

Getting a business back on track

Building business scale for growth

Refocusing a solid business

Building sustainable success

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Being clear on your business situation will have implications for:

Who you need to be as a leader and how you define your leadership character

How you embrace the challenges and opportunities inherent in your role

What you focus on and decisions you make

The speed and degree of change you choose to implement

The people you need for a high performing team

What are your key considerations for your 90 Day Plan given your business situation?

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Key 3

Determine your true role fundamentals and your

‘main game

You must have an accurate assessment of your role and its real requirements. Not being clear can be a game changer. Too often, people base their first few months on conversations had during the interview process and high level conversations with their boss thereafter. They don’t get down to the nitty gritty that may not be written in their job description (if they have one).

Align with your boss on your role deliverables

The sooner you can engage with your boss on your role specifics the better. Even if you have a comprehensive job/position description, it’s vital that you spend time with your boss getting very clear on what your boss expects of you, what’s important to your boss, and what specific deliverables and outcomes you need to achieve.

Create a vision or your role and your ‘main game’

At the start of a new role, it’s easy to get caught up in the detail and not invest the time to create a vision for your role. Focusing on the process and not even knowing why you’re doing it is a trap. Creating a vision is simply about looking into the future and determining what you want to achieve. You need to be able to visualise and articulate a clear and concise picture of what success in your role look will look like.

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Once you’re clear on the fundamentals for why your role exists, and you have a role vision in place, then you can create your ‘main game’. Creating your game is all about setting your compass and charting the territory so that you know where you’re headed and you can keep your eyes focused firmly on your role vision.

Of course there will always be competing priorities and distractions, but even in rough seas and stormy weather you won’t be swayed off course if you have a clear direction set. The key is to ensure you stay focused and re-chart your course when necessary.

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Start with the end in mind.Here is a framework to help you

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Now it’s time to populate your 90 Day Plan template. This template is designed to help you prioritise and focus on the goals and activity that will set you up for success.

Remember that this template should be a living document that you reflect on, update, and use to set your direction. It’s also wise to align with your boss on this template and you may also like to share your plans with your key stakeholders.

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Create your 90 Day Plan template

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Self-progress review

Below are some questions to ask yourself to assess your progress @30, 60, 90 days

• How are you staying focused on your key priorities?

• Have you achieved what you wanted to at this point? If not, what specifically needs to change right now, and do you need to adjust your plan?

• How are you building and leveraging relationships from the value you are adding?

• What’s your proof you are integrating into the culture?

• How well are you managing your emotional states (EQ)?

• How are you celebrating and acknowledging your progress and achievements?

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Key 4

Develop a Structured Learning Plan

The biggest investment you can make at the start of new role is in learning. Relearn now to learn if you need to.

The best way to accelerate your learning curve is to have a structured learning agenda. Start by building a helicopter view of your business and then build a learning plan to focus your learning. If you don’t do this, you’ll instead build one big ‘information pot’ in your head and you’ll run the risk of having information overwhelm. An ad-hoc “I want to know everything” approach is a mistake.

Having an effective structure for information gathering and learning will pay off when it comes to retrieving information quickly when you need it. The ripple effects are large. Climbing the learning curve quickly will allow you to contribute and add value early on.

Develop a whole systems or aerial view of your business

The first step in your learning agenda is to gain a helicopter view of the external market, your business and the internal cultural and political environment. This view is simply a high level snapshot of your business. Completing this initial whole system diagnostic will help you develop a robust transition approach. Your 90 day plan will be based on an evaluation of strengths, opportunities and risk related to your new role and situation, rather than applying the same formula you’ve used in the past to create role success.

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Not taking time to correctly diagnose the business situation and environment could result in missed opportunities, poor judgment and decisions made that are misguided. Often times, new hires start a role thinking their perceptions about their role and new organisation that were formed during the selection process will be accurate - they are usually far from accurate.

How quickly you adapt and integrate into your new environment will impact the speed by which you can create early success.

This tool is a guide to help you build insight and perspective as you develop an aerial view of your business and undertake initial business diagnostics.

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Note - Complete your business diagnostics by:

1. Leveraging Hard Data (physical material to read)

Review business scorecard results, strategy plans, operational plans, performance data, HR data and surveys, industry reports etc

2. Leveraging Soft Data (from conversations):

Pick a selection of people to engage with: key stakeholders, customers/prospects, suppliers, peers, direct team, influencers, and mentors. Remember the quality of information you get will be a function of the quality of the questions you ask.

What are your key learnings and opportunities from your analysis and diagnostics?

Where are your key knowledge gaps?

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Build your Learning Plan

Once you have completed your initial diagnostics and identified areas where you have knowledge gaps, you can then build your Learning Plan. Having a structured learning approach will help you learn more effectively so you can climb your learning curve quickly.

Think of your Learning Plan as a tree. From the main base of the tree, determine the main branch categories of the learning agenda you want to focus on. Off these main categories, then define the key sub-categories (smaller branches) of information that want to learn.

Identify your knowledge gaps, prioritise them and focus on filling them in that order. Fill your knowledge gaps efficiently by asking “Who has it, who knows it, who knows where I can get it?” Remember that you don’t need to know everything right now. Focus on learning what’s going to make the difference to you achieving your 90 Day Plan.

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Key 5

Focus on key relationships

As a starting point, you want to feel socially comfortable and accepted. Leaders who fail often list failure to establish working relationships as a reason for their results.

Identifying and investing in key relationships and alliances from the get go must be a locked and loaded part of your transition strategy. Determine whose support is critical to your success and prioritise those relationships first. Have a 360 lens as you develop your priority list – look upward, downward, sideways, and outside your organisation. Know the relationships that will be politically savvy, for example, who’s important to your boss and where the underlying power bases lie.

Build an effective relationship with your boss

Ultimately there is no more important relationship than the one you have with your boss. Take responsibility for the relationship and ensure it’s built on mutual respect, trust and transparency.

Find out what’s important to your boss, that is, what their perception of the opportunities, risks, and concerns are as they relate to your role, and what the expectations for your performance are. When the time is right, negotiate and align with your boss on your 90 Day Plan. This conversation needs to include resources you need and the support you require.

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Earn the right to lead your team

Your ability to engage with your team, assess it systematically, and then earn the right to lead your team is integral to your first 90 day success. Your team will be seeking clarity on your mandate and what your presence means for them. To build a high performing team, your initial objective assessments about what you have and what you need will be critical. Be prepared to make tough calls early on. Delaying action on these decisions and putting off the inevitable could jeopardise your overall success.

Prioritise stakeholder relationships

Prioritise listening, observing, questioning, and learning over the need to look good, get it right, and know it all. Your opinions and viewpoints should be shaped by many perspectives.

Prepare for stakeholder meetings ahead of time by crafting a few high quality questions that will position you well. Give yourself permission to be vulnerable – it will allow you to show genuine warmth and humility when making new connections. People will respect and gravitate toward you.

When you’re ready, communicate your intentions and be transparent and open about what you’re aiming to achieve. Align and enlist support upfront. Be proactive and establish a communications platform early on for your change agenda.

Find a mentor

Proactively asking for a mentor/buddy can also help, particularly if it’s someone who is well connected who leverages their own internal networks well.

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Key 6

Build the brand “YOU”

Peoples judgements about you will form quickly as an indicator of your worth and potential.

Your level of self-awareness will be the single biggest contributor to the impact and influence you’ll have in your first 90 days.

Be self-aware

Everything communicates - whether you like it or not. Remember your non-verbal communication is communicating more than your verbal communication. Your first 90 days is like being on a stage where your audience is watching your every move. Perception is reality, so be aware of what perceptions you are creating!

The initial interactions people have with you will be answering for them – do they like you, are they happy to work with you, and do they think you’ve got what it takes? Others will be forming opinions based on:

• your leadership character – who you are ‘being’ for others

• your leadership style – how you show others rather than telling them

• your leadership standards – how well you hold the line on what you expect of yourself and others

• what direction you set and how you bring others along

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• how you make decisions – can you make tough decisions when required?

• how well you communicate, interact and engage with others.

Being contextually and emotionally self-aware (not self-focused) will help you integrate and adapt into your new environment faster. The more self-aware you are, the more you will trust yourself to find a way and the more willing you will be to continually reassess things based on the feedback you are getting. How responsive you are will make an enormous difference to how you and others perceive your ‘fit’ into the organisation. Facing uncertainty, having sound judgement, remaining calm and being resilient all rely on self-awareness.

Craft a leadership mantra

A smart way to build your brand and elevate your leadership potential is to seed a leadership mantra early on and bring it to life over time. Depending on your business situation, think of a bold strategic ‘breakout’ disruptive message that you can become known for by shaping conversations and shaking peoples thinking. A message where it’s execution requires you, your team and your organisation to embrace uncertainty, failure, and learning to create opportunity and results. To potentially move your organisation forward in a significant way and create positive cultural change over time. Examples include: “Innovation is our future”, “We create excellence”, “We make the extraordinary ordinary”.

What could your leadership mantra be?

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Key 7

Invest in creating quick wins

Identifying the right tactical opportunities and getting quick wins on the board will help you build early momentum and credibility. These achievements will lay the foundation for your longer term success.

As soon as you begin in your role, start to differentiate between tactical (short term) and strategic (longer term) opportunities. It’s easy to take on too much during your transition and doing this will be to your detriment. In reality, you cannot hope to achieve more than a few key results in a few areas. Therefore, it’s essential that you identify the most promising opportunities to add value, and then focus on executing them into your quick win projects/initiatives. Identify quick wins by identifying problems that you can initiate a solution for or opportunities you can leverage where you can demonstrate real value in a short amount of time.

The below template is designed to quickly guide you to create your quick wins list.

The steps are:

1. Identify quick win potentials

2. Rank and prioritise opportunities based on the stack-up criteria below

3. Determine next steps

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CHECKLIST SUMMARY TO GET OFF TO A FLYING START

• Learn as much as you can about your market, organisation and business area before you officially start. Also leverage the opportunity to meet with key people and stakeholders. Being proactive is a great way to build early profile and credibility.

• Self-awareness is one of your most critical assets. Know your ‘why’, that is, for what purpose is the role important to you and what will creating success in your role give you.

• Forget the perceptions of what you expected your new role and organisation to be like based on what you were told during the interview process. Respect that it’s going to be different – even vastly different - and accept the reality of the business and cultural situation you step into.

• Start with the end in mind. Have a clear picture of what success looks like and what you want to achieve. Create your success based on the opportunities and challenges in this role, regardless of how you’ve created success in the past.

• Set your direction early and align with your boss on your goals and priorities regularly.

• Your 90 Day Plan must reflect the business situation you are heading into. Your strategies to get up to speed and deliver must reflect the requirements of that business situation.

• Create a structure for learning to climb your learning curve.

• Invest time in building effective relationships and alliances and seek alignment early. Learn the culture as a priority or it will manage you.

• Manage your time effectively. Know the difference between being busy and being effective.

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• Being effective means you have focus and clarity on what you are choosing to do. Being busy by taking on everything that’s handed to you is a pitfall. Prioritise goals, activity and quick win opportunities so you don’t become distracted by lots of other things and fire fighting.

• Build your high performing team as quickly as you can. Be objective and be prepared to make hard calls in order to build the team you need.

• Remember to have fun and enjoy the journey. Take time to acknowledge and celebrate the effort and progress you are making. Don’t be your harshest critic unless the feedback is accurate and you need to make changes – quickly.