Picking the Right Transition Strategy

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Hello, I'm Roberta Passaro, Associate Editor at Harvard Business Review. I'm here today with Michael Watkins of Genesys Advisors, a leadership development consulting company. Michael, your Harvard Business Review article Picking the Right Transition Strategy starts with a simple A leader in transition who uses strategies that have worked for him in the past may actually be making a big mistake. Can you start by telling our listeners why falling back reflexively on the tried and the true can be dangerous? And what do you see as a better approach?

Sure, Roberta, I think you have to step back a little bit, though, first and just sort of recognize that transition periods are really crucial times. You know, they're times of both great opportunity for new leaders, but also times when they have a certain vulnerability. It's just like going to high school. You know, the things you do in those first crucial few days, weeks, months, can really influence everyone's perception of who you are. And so, beginning with the book the first 90 days that I wrote, I was really trying to focus a lot of attention on how do you help people navigate that crucial early period and get up to speed more effectively? More recently, though, it's become ever more evident to me that the way you transition really depends a lot on the situation into which you're transitioning. And my concern, and indeed my observation, is that people develop certain approaches to transitioning early in their careers that may work well for them up to a certain point, but they may then come to a transition. It may be to a new level, it may be to a new company, it may be internationally, where those very same strategies turn out not to to be all that productive. And so much of the work I've been doing lately, as reflected in the article, is really about how do you effectively match the transition strategy to the particular kind of situation you're facing?

You've developed a useful framework for helping leaders transition effectively in this way. Can you outline it for us?

Sure. So one observation I had fairly early was that the business situation into which the leader is going matters a lot. As a simple example, you can imagine there's a big difference between going into a kind of crisis situation, a turnaround situation where everything is a disaster in progress, money is being lost, sirens are going off, as opposed to a situation where problems are beginning to develop but maybe haven't fully become evident to everybody yet. The critical mass of support for doing things isn't necessarily there yet. And so I sort of built off that observation that those two situations, for example, are very different to build a bit of a broader framework for thinking about the kinds of business situations into which leaders transition. And this led to what's known as the STARS framework. Startup turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, sustaining success, Startups obviously taking something from scratch, building it, taking it off the ground. Turnarounds. We've already talked about the crisis in progress. Accelerated growth are situations where you've got a business that's hitting that crucial point where it's really taking off, and all of a sudden you need to put in place more structure and systems to make it grow. Realignments are what I think of as these proactive change challenges where there's emerging problems and you've really got to deal with them. And then sustaining success is that rare situation where you've got a very successful business and you need to really do things to keep sustaining it. Although even there, it's not simple. And it's not simply about playing good defense. It's about how do you make growth happen in a more mature market? How do you really sustain something that has a long history and legacy associ.

Now, why is it so important for a leader to figure out which of these five business situations he or she is entering?

Well, because if you sort of misassess the kind of situation you're going into, the kinds of early actions you take can really have very negative consequences. And let me give you an example. Suppose you're someone that loves to come in guns blazing and take dramatic action, and thrives on crisis, and thrives on that sort of action orientation that could work great in a turnaround situation where people are aware there's a crisis, there's a sense of urgency built into it. People are hungry for solutions, they're hungry for answers. You could be very well matched to that situation. On the other hand, if you're in this more proactive change challenge kind of situation, you can easily have people that are really in denial about the need for change, or not really acknowledging at some basic level the magnitude of the change that's required. You come in guns blazing, you know, and it's obvious to you that there's these problems, right? And you start doing things, what's going to happen? Well, you're going to provoke what I think of as an organizational immune system reaction. That is, people will mobilize. You know, killer T cells will clump around you, you will be either digested or expelled by the organization. And so you have to do some calibration of the kind of situation you're in, because it really affects the way you do a variety of important things. How do you go about learning about a new role and a new organization, and what do you focus on? What kind of team do you need to put in place, and how much change are you going to make on the team? What are you going to do to secure early wins? So the basic principles of transition really hold up very well, but the way you operationalize them really varies dramatically from business situation to business situation.

So once you understand the business situation, what can you do to make the transition work for the organization that you're starting to lead?

Well, this is a really crucial point, and I think that one very simple thing you can do is make sure that people really do see the situation the way you do and that the whole organization is grounded in reality about what the real challenges are. This is another reason why I recommend people use this particular framework, as it can be a very productive way of having a conversation with your boss. Right. Is this a turnaround or a realignment? Right. Or a startup or accelerated growth? What is it that I'm here to do? What's my mandate? We sometimes run versions of this kind of framework in group strategy exercises involving the new team. So suppose you're my team, right. And you and I have to do something with this business. We'd want to be on the same page about what we're really grappling with here. And so you can use the framework as a basis for having that sort of consensus conversation about what situation are we in? What are the key priorities here?

That's obviously a lot of tough work. What changes does the leader have to make in managing himself then to make sure that these organizational changes can be achieved?

Well, this goes back to sort of what your leadership reflexes are and what you've tended to gravitate towards over time. I believe that every serious general manager has to be able to handle the full range of star situations, because virtually any business that you're going to take over is going to have different people in different states. There's going to be stuff that's being started up and stuff that's being realigned and stuff you need to sustain the success of. So I don't think companies can afford to build specialists, you know, turnaround specialists or realignment specialists. I think you really need to build people that have a broad range of capability. That said, you're going to have certain preferences and certain reflexes, right? You may be reflexively a turnaround person. And so you're going to tend to gravitate towards turnarounds. You're going to tend to gravitate towards the part of your responsibility that looks like a turnaround. At the risk of potentially neglecting some of that, you're likely to have what I think of as a heroic leadership style. You're going to sort of love to run charging into breaches and walls, sword in hand, screaming loudly. You know, which if you're in a turnaround situation, is terrific, right? If you're in a realignment situation, it's really not what's required. What's required typically, is a quieter and more diplomatic leadership, a kind of almost educational approach, because the first job in a realignment scenario is really to begin to the consciousness of everybody about what's required and what the problems are. And the heroic kind of impulse is not necessarily that productive. I have a joke about this, by the way, which is I know people that can turn anything into a turnaround, and if it isn't when they start, it sure is by the time they're done.

It's very much an integrated approach, it seems. Shape the organization, but shape yourself so that you find the right match, so to speak. Well, you can read Picking the Right Transition Strategy, as well as the rest of the article in the January special issue on leadership transitions@www.hbr.org. michael, thank you for being with us today.

My pleasure, Robert.