Leadership enhancing the lessons of experience 8th by hughes curphy chap 03

The First Two Weeks: Lay the Foundation continued • One-on-one meetings with key team members should provide the leader with answers to critical questions.. • During these meetings, t

Skills for Developing Yourself as a Leader

• Your First 90 Days as a Leader

• Learning From Experience

• Building Technical Competence

• Building Effective Relationships with Superiors

• Building Effective Relationships with Peers

• Development Planning

Your First 90 Days as a Leader

Figure 3.1: New Leader Onboarding Road Map

Before You Start:

Do Your Homework

• Candidates should gather as much information

about their potential company as they can

• Some good sources of information include Web sites, annual reports, press releases, and

marketing literature.

• Use Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and other social networking sites to set up informational interviews with people inside the organization.

The First Day: You Get Only One

Chance to Make a First Impression

• New leaders have two critical tasks to accomplish the first day on the job: meeting their new boss

and meeting their new team

• The first meeting with the boss should happen in the boss’s office and be about an hour long Key topics to discuss include:

– Identifying the team’s key objectives, metrics, and

The First Two Weeks:

Lay the Foundation

• The first two weeks should be filled with meeting with many people both inside and outside the

team

• The key objectives for these meetings are:

– Learning as much as possible

– Developing relationships

– Determining future allies

The First Two Weeks:

Lay the Foundation (continued)

• One-on-one meetings with key team members

should provide the leader with answers to critical questions.

– What is the team member working on?

– What are the team member’s objectives?

– Who are the “stars” a level or two down in the

organization?

– What are the people issues on the team?

– What can the team do better?

– What advice do team members have for the new leader, and what can the new leader do to help team members?

The First Two Weeks:

Lay the Foundation (continued)

• New leaders should schedule one-on-one

meetings with all their peers to build rapport.

• During these meetings, the new leader should

discuss the following:

– Their peers’ objectives, challenges, team structure, etc.– Their perspectives on what the new leader’s team does well and could do better

– Their perspectives on the new leader’s team members

The First Two Months:

Strategy, Structure, and Staffing

• During this time period, the leader is gathering

more information, determining the direction, and finalizing the appropriate structure and staffing

for the team Tasks to be performed include:

– Gathering benchmarking information from other

organizations

– Meeting with key external customers and suppliers

– Meeting with the former team leader, if appropriate

The Third Month:

Communicate and Drive Change

• The two major events for the third month are to:

– Meet with the entire team

– Meet off-site with direct reports (if the team is large).

• The new leader should have developed a vision of the future Things to do now include:

– Articulating how the team will win

– Identifying the what, why, and how of any needed

Learning From Experience

• Leadership practitioners can enhance the learning value of experiences by:

– Creating opportunities to get feedback

– Taking a “10 percent stretch”

– Learning from others

– Keeping a journal of daily leadership events

– Having a developmental plan

Building Technical Competence

• Technical competence concerns the knowledge and repertoire of behaviors one can utilize to

complete a task successfully

• Followers with technical competence earn greater rewards, exert influence in their groups, and have greater say in decisions

• For leaders, technical competence is related to

improved managerial promotion rates, better

Building Technical Competence

(continued)

• Both leaders and followers can improve

technical competence by:

– Determining how the job contributes to the overall

mission and success of the organization– Becoming an expert in the job through education,

training, observation, and teaching– Seeking opportunities to broaden experiences by

working on team projects and visiting other parts of the organization

Building Effective Relationships

with Superiors

• Building an effective relationship with superiors

involves u nderstanding the superior’s world by:

– Learning the superior’s personal and organizational

Building Effective Relationships

with Superiors (continued)

• Building an effective relationship with superiors requires followers to adapt to the superior’s

Building Effective Relationships

with Peers

• Research suggests that a key requirement of

leadership effectiveness is the ability to build

strong alliances with others, such as peers

• Building effective relationships with peers

involves:

– Recognizing common interests and goals

– Understanding peers’ tasks, problems, and rewards

Development Planning

• Developmental planning is the systematic process

of building knowledge and experience or changing behavior Peterson and Hicks claim that there are

5 interrelated phases to developmental planning:

– Identifying development needs

– Analyzing data to identify and prioritize development

Conducting a GAPS Analysis

• The first phase in the development planning

process is to conduct a GAPS (goals, abilities, perceptions, standards) analysis which involves the following steps:

1 Identifying your career objectives

2 Identifying your strengths and development needs

related to your career objectives

3 Determining how your abilities, skills, and behaviors

are perceived by others based on 360-feedback or performance reviews

Identifying and Prioritizing Development Needs: Gaps of GAPS

Bridging the Gaps: Building a

Development Plan

• There are 7 steps to developing a high impact development plan:

Step 1: Career and development objectives

Step 2: Criteria for success

Step 3: Action steps

Step 4: Whom to involve and reassess dates

Step 5: Stretch assignments