Month: June 2022

Categories
Leadership Success Leadership Transition Onboarding Leaders

Leadership Transition Plans: Core Elements

Leadership Transitions
an plans are a critical element in helping new leaders transition into their role

Leadership transitions into new roles and organizations can be fraught with hidden landmines and potential career derailers. A surprisingly number of newly hired leaders don’t survive in their roles beyond 18 months. To ease this transition, forward-thinking organizations establish onboarding programs that include three critical elements including a leadership transition plan, internal mentors, and executive coaching. 

What is a transition plan?

A leadership transition plan is a valuable document that outlines success outcomes and other factors that could impact a leader’s ability to function well in their new role. As an executive coach, I have partnered with clients to help them create a draft plan.

Once developed, it is critical for a new leader to align the plan with their boss initially and throughout the following 6-9 months. In essence, the plan becomes a working document revised as conditions change and the new leader becomes more grounded in their new role.

Elements of a transition plan

There are seven components of a well-considered leadership transition plan. 

1. Key priorities and success outcomes for a new leader 

New leaders must clearly understand and align priorities and associated success outcomes with their bosses. Steven, a new Chief Financial Officer, is accountable for implementing a new financial accounting system and upgrading key business processes. 

2. Time-bound goals and milestones

Time-bound goals delineate expectations for 30, 60, 90, and 120 days that map to the new leader’s key priorities. This element for a leadership transition plan helps ensure a new manager is on-track. Steven set the 30-day goal of assessing his organization’s readiness for transformational change. 

3. Decision authority

New leaders need to understand their authority to make decisions. This authority could consist of decisions they can make unilaterally and those where they must consult their boss or peers. With Steven, he ultimately owns many decisions but is expected to engage a steering committee, including some of his peers, given the far-reaching impact of a new financial system.

4. Risk factors

Risk factors include issues new leaders face that could derail their efforts to achieve their priorities. For example, Steven’s efforts to implement a new financial system could fail based on a series of failed software implementations in the past ten years in his organization. His new organization is in the process of launching three other change efforts that could distract his stakeholders from supporting the new financial system implementation.  

5. Leader strengths and weaknesses

A well-designed leadership transition plan also identifies the skills needed by a leader in light of their risk factors and goals, along with their strengths and weaknesses. Steven realized that his priority in implementing a new financial system would require him to manage resistance and make presentations. His aversion to public speaking and tendency to become overly directive when faced with opposition represented developmental opportunities for him. He and his new boss talked this through, including developmental actions he could take to function more effectively.

6. Key stakeholders 

Key stakeholders represent important people a new leader must engage to achieve success. In consultation with his manager, Steven identified ten key stakeholders that could significantly impact the success of his system implementation efforts. They discussed the personalities and interests of each stakeholder, along with strategies to engage each.

7. Mentors and other resources

A vital component of a transition plan is a list of supportive resources available to a new leader. Steven identified several needed resources, and his boss helped him identify individuals who could play a role in his success. For example, Steven’s resource list included well-regarded cultural mentors who understood how to implement change in his organization and various organizational process experts. 

 

An essential component of a comprehensive onboarding process is a leadership transition plan jointly developed between a new leader and their boss. This plan is often a working document revisited periodically in the first six months of a new leader’s tenure. A transition plan as part of a well-designed onboarding process can help new leaders speed their transition to their new roles to feel confident and produce tangible results. 

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Additional resources on leadership transitions and transition plans:

The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter, Updated and Expanded

The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan: How to Take Charge, Build or Merge Your Team, and Get Immediate

Dr. Kevin Nourse has more than 25 years of experience coaching leaders who are experiencing transitions to thrive in their new or expanded roles. He is the founder of Nourse Leadership Strategies, a coaching and leadership development firm based in Southern California. For more information, contact Kevin at 310.715.8315 or kevin@nourseleadership.com

(c) 2022 Kevin Nourse

 

Categories
Executive Coaching Leadership Success Time Management

Leadership Effectiveness: Breaking Free of the Shiny Object Trap

Steven, an experienced CEO, was very effective in his role but wanted to explore ways to take his productivity to the next level. Specifically, he described how he was subject to what I refer to as the shiny object trap – losing sight of his daily priorities and getting distracted with a less critical task or time waster. 

He realized the magnitude of the problem when he received feedback from direct reports about their frustration with his reactivity and distracted state of mind, which prevented him from making timely decisions. 

As an executive coach, Steven’s experience is surprisingly common among my leadership clients who are trapped in a reactive mindset and get derailed on advancing strategic priorities. In this era of endless emails, texts, and other social media interactions, there is no lack of distractions that limit leader effectiveness. Neuroscientists have taught us how our nonstop reaction to technological disruptions creates new unproductive habits, similar to Pavlov’s dogs salivating at the sound of a bell. 

Building Awareness

The cost of these distractions can be substantial in terms of reduced sense of personal achievement and delayed or mismanaged change efforts. Most managers could easily spend their whole day on their computers or cell phone and not advance any strategic priorities.  

In coaching Steven, I explored the underlying causes and factors that limited his effectiveness as a first step before helping him design experiments to try new behavior.

Steven recently completed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, revealing that he was a perceiver on the judging-perceiving scale. As a perceiver personality type, he likes to remain open and flexible in emergent situations. However, it was evident to Steven that his personality strength had become a liability due to being overused. 

Steven tried three strategies to build awareness of the current state before determining how to change it:

  • We explored how Steven’s preference served him and when it did not and clarified what it would feel like if he over-functioned with his perceiving preference. 
  • Steven took notes in his journal when the shiny object phenomenon occurred for two weeks and his emotions; this allowed us to understand better the situational factors that triggered his behavior.  
  • He asked his direct reports to provide feedback about the impact of his unfocused and reactive style on their productivity.

As a result of these awareness-building activities, Steven realized how his reactivity to email and texts triggered an adrenaline rush. This experience, combined with his boredom with strategic planning and visioning, created the perfect conditions for this bad habit to persist. He realized the magnitude of the problem when he received feedback from direct reports about their frustration with his reactivity and distracted state of mind, which prevented him from making timely decisions. 

Moving Into Action

Steven developed four initial strategies in our coaching sessions to manage his distraction. I suggested he frame these options as experiments he could try and upgrade over time.

Clear goals and accountability

Steven began setting clear priorities for each week and communicating these priorities to his team to enhance his accountability. With this accountability and clarity, he reduced his temptation to get caught in distractions, including email, texting, and social media.

Triage the situation

He learned to assess and triage the incoming emails and texts to quickly screen out hot issues associated with critical stakeholders (e.g., an issue raised by a board member) that did need his focus. For those that were not urgent, he added them to a list to review later in the week.

Timeout periods

Steven began experimenting with timeout periods on social media and text messaging, where he closed his email application and muted his cell phone for 30-minute blocks. He let his administrative assistant know about this experiment so that if truly critical situations emerged, she could notify him. This experiment was challenging at first, but he began to establish a useful new habit as he practiced it. 

Weekly reflection

Steven blocked out his calendar on Friday afternoons and revisited the list he created of potential issues and problems during the week. Through this more in-depth review, he chose which topics needed action in the next week and the extent to which he could or should delegate them downward.

He also considered the underlying issues prompting urgent emails and text messages from various stakeholders to assess how to prevent future crises. For example, Steven began scheduling regular informal calls and breakfasts with board members to stay in touch with emergent issues or concerns they had before it became a crisis prompting urgent emails and text messages.  

Many leaders struggle with the shiny object trap, where unanticipated emails and text messages cause them to lose focus on their highest priorities. The secret sauce for improved leadership effectiveness begins by building self-awareness to identify mindsets and habits that diminish your impact and then take action with bold experiments. 

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Dr. Kevin Nourse has more than 25 years of experience coaching leaders who are experiencing transitions to thrive in their new or expanded roles. He is the founder of Nourse Leadership Strategies, a coaching and leadership development firm based in Southern California. For more information, contact Kevin at 310.715.8315 or kevin@nourseleadership.com

(c) 2022 Kevin Nourse

Categories
Coaching Case Study Executive Coaching Leadership Frameworks Leadership Transition

Case Study: Evolution of a Newly Promoted Leader

Successful executive coaches draw upon evidence-based theories to achieve tangible results for their clients. One helpful framework recognizes how leaders evolve according to predictable stages. Consider the case of a newly promoted leader who nearly derailed and how leadership stage theory informed our coaching approach.

Susan is a newly promoted healthcare leader to her role in revenue reporting with four staff members. As a new manager, she felt overwhelmed trying to learn all she needed to know about her role, manage her team, and respond to her boss’s demands. In her role only a couple of months, Susan damaged many key relationships because of her overly assertive communication style. Her manager, the CFO, voiced his desire for her to delegate more downward to join his strategic planning meetings with the CEO. Susan started to doubt the wisdom of taking the promotion and feels exhausted as she works most weekends trying to learn more about the technical aspects of her direct reports roles.

Overview of Stage Theory

Numerous theories explain the process of how one becomes an effective change leader. Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs developed an agility framework that explores leader evolution based on developmental stages. This type of model provides a valuable roadmap for executive coaches support the growth of their clients based on predictable stages of development. As leaders evolve through these stages, they are better able to lead increasingly complex change initiatives successfully.

The five stages include expert, achiever, catalyst, co-creator, and synergist.

  • Expert level managers focus on the subject-matter competence and solo efforts to get things done. As a result, they are generally capable of leading simple change projects. Approximately 45% of managers are functioning at this level.
  • Achiever-level managers are attuned to strategic views of their role and organization, as well as producing results. Research suggests that 35% of managers function at this level.
  • Catalyst-level managers can build capacity by developing and empowering people, building innovative organizational cultures, and adaptive communication capabilities. Approximately 5% of managers function at this level.
  • Co-creators are skilled at building shared purpose, collaborative relationships, and service to others. Researchers estimate that only 4% of managers function at this level.
  • Synergists embrace a holistic perspective that integrates their life purpose with their vocation. Only 1% of managers reach this stage of development. Synergists are capable of navigating the most complex types of organizational change and transformation.

Susan as an Expert Stage Manager

Through initial conversations with Susan it became apparent she was functioning at the expert stage of leader development. Susan experienced limits to her ability to lead change projects – mostly incremental process improvements. These limitations stem from her limited ability to think strategically, over-reliance on her capabilities versus leveraging others’ talents, and limited self-awareness.

Coaching Approach with Susan

As her executive coach, I began with a 360-degree assessment to help Susan understand how others perceived her. We then created a development plan and met with her manager to align on coaching’s successful outcomes. Our goal was to help Susan begin advancing toward the next stage of development: Synergist.

My approach to working with Susan included:

  • Enhancing self-awareness, including her assumptions, self-beliefs, emotional triggers, and unproductive patterns.
  • Reframing what it means to be a leader from subject-matter expert to building relationships with others and leveraging their talents to augment her weaknesses.
  • Building her skills in learning how to enlist and engage her stakeholders instead of overusing assertive advocacy skills and talking at them.
  • Adopting a broader view of her role to examine interdependencies with peers and the organization’s broader direction, including strategic priorities that could influence her focus.
  • Leveraging her talent better by explaining her expectations, providing feedback, and helping team members step up more so she could delegate more.

Coaching Outcomes

After working with Susan for six months, she achieved some notable improvements:

  • She became more aware of her emotional triggers and learned to avoid reacting at the moment, helping improve trust with others.
  • Focusing her efforts more on creating successful outcomes instead of overemphasizing her technical expertise.
  • Developing trusting relationships with her peers and building greater alignment, enabling her to break down silos that limited her department’s effectiveness.
  • More successful outcomes from change projects she was managing since she leveraged others’ talent and skills to augment her capabilities.

Stage theory is a valuable way for executive coaches to support leader growth by defining critical developmental milestones on the journey to the top. These frameworks can be a big difference in helping new managers accelerate their growth and impact as highly effective leaders.


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Dr. Kevin Nourse has more than 25 years of experience developing transformational change leaders in healthcare and other sectors. He is the founder of Nourse Leadership Strategies, a coaching and leadership development firm based in Southern California. For more information, contact Kevin at 310.715.8315 or info@nourseleadership.com.

(c) 2021 Kevin Nourse