Advice For New Managers – Understand The Players and Make Tangible Progress

To transform the total organization or their little part of it, new managers must gain the support of internal and external groups. This means identifying and understanding key players, recruiting support, making quick tangible progress, and creating momentum. Understanding The Players: Influential players must perceive it to be in their own best interest to help you realize your goals. Begin to identify those individuals and groups and start to gain their support during the transition period. Doing so lays the groundwork for building coalitions to drive key initiatives. Recruit: Understanding the players also enables you to decide who you can count on; who you need to invest time in winning over, and who you need to confront. Typically, a relatively small percentage of others will be either very supportive or very opposed at the outset. Most will be between these extremes. Neither strong supporters nor staunch opponents, they will be undecided and therefore persuadable. Seek out the support of those influential players that can benefit your goals, especially if it benefits them as well. Even if you don’t need something from them right away, having them on board will help down the road. If some of the key players are not in your company and you are able to hire, see if they are willing to submit their professional resumes or executive resumes to H.R. and hire them. Make Tangible Progress: As you are identifying and gaining the support of key players, it is important to demonstrate that you are progressing to keep support and create momentum. To create momentum in your new assignment, you must make some quick successes. By the end of the first six months at most, you must have made substantial progress in addressing your job’s most pressing priorities. Invariably the priorities with the greatest impact are those meeting at least one of three criteria: 1. Immediate and tangible financial benefit to the organization. 2. Issues are addressed that employees understand to be important. 3. Measurable positive non-economic results. Quick Successes Are Key: New managers secure early successes by identifying problems that can be tackled in a reasonable period of time and whose solutions result in tangible improvements in performance. These are not necessarily the most important projects, but rather projects that can yield results quickly. This creates a sense of accomplishment with your team and motivates them to press on with new projects. Such initiatives should focus attention on the few key issues that you believe to be central. In doing this, seek to get results, set the right tone, and energize people. Be action-oriented during this time and you will reap rewards later.