As a newly hired business leader within an organization, the first 6 to 18 months should be a learning period. You should be spending the majority of your time getting to learn the company, your team, the culture, & your customers. Avoid making any major decisions during this time until you’ve had a chance to survey the landscape of this organization – this requires patience. As a leader, you’ve become a steward of the organization’s assets, primarily its people. Unless you were hired with a specific mandate with an aggressive timeline to achieve a set of goals, the agenda should be to understand the business and forge alliances within your team. This does not happen on your first day.
For any leader who is going through the interview process, one of your primary questions to the CEO or President of a company should be:
What is your vision for this position within the first year?
If that goal is cost-cutting centric for instance, then I’d question that. There’s a lot that you don’t know about the company and won’t know until the completion of your first year, in some cases longer. You may discover through your own exploration that there are issues that require a different approach that will ultimately lead to the same end goal.
One of my most tragic placements came with a company that I had served for several years. I built a great relationship with one of their key executives and became a trusted partner for him in the development of his engineering team. Through that relationship, I was able to break into other areas of the business, culminating in a conversation with the CEO to help him find a new VP of Operations. I sifted the marketplace to find someone who had served in a similar capacity in his previous role. He was young, energetic, communicated well, had great references, and he genuinely hit it off with the team.
He was hired!
Shortly thereafter however, things took a weird turn…
Hidden within his briefcase was a sledgehammer (not a literal one) and he wasn’t timid about using it. He made his primary agenda to find and expose problems, rather than formulating solutions. He alienated members of the leadership team, rather than leaning on their expertise and experience to understand the business and its direction. Granted, there were issues within the company, but as a new leader and someone who had been hired to drive new processes and procedures, his first course of action should’ve been to get to know the people by watching what they do and learning how they do it. Along that growth path, some people will be weeded out, but that should be handled delicately, not with a shotgun as one of the team members shared.
He was ultimately fired by the CEO, and his departure came as a sigh relief to those within the organization.
Lessons for newly hired leaders…
- Walk before you run
- Take your time
- Understand that you don’t know anything about the inner workings of that company, and whatever you think you know, is probably not the reality
- The quickest way to lose credibility with your team as a new leader is to not ask questions to understand the business
- Embrace the fact that you are new and use that to your advantage
- Communicate your message clearly so that your team knows your agenda
- Don’t be afraid to push back on things that don’t make sense to you even if it creates conflict with your upper management