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Designing Organization-Wide Transition Acceleration Systems
November 23, 2009
By Michael Watkins and Doug Soo Hoo
For more than a decade we have studied leadership transitions and designed systems to help accelerate everyone taking challenging new roles at Johnson & Johnson and other leading companies. We've devoted our energy to this work because transitions are times of great vulnerability when new leaders lack established working relationships and detailed knowledge of their new roles. If they fail to build momentum during transitions, they face uphill battles from that point forward.
The stakes for the leader in transition obviously are high. But the organization has a big stake in making leadership transitions successful too. In fact, we've come to believe effectiveness in transition acceleration is an essential element of enterprise risk management and a potential source of competitive advantage. Success in reducing the rate of leadership failure in transitions reduces the risk of organizational failure or damaging under-performance. Also, if you can help all the leaders in your organization make faster, better transitions, it will help you to be more agile and responsive than your competitors.
Given this, companies should manage leadership-transition acceleration as they would any critical business process. This means putting in place the right structures and systems to accelerate everyone. It also means having the right metrics and incentives in place to assess transition risk and the impact of transition acceleration systems in managing it.
How should companies approach designing comprehensive transition acceleration solutions? In a decade of work with leading companies, we've developed a set of six "design principles" that can be applied to build organization-wide transition acceleration systems:
#1 Deliver transition support just-in-time
Transitions evolve through a series of predictable stages. New leaders begin their transitions with intensive diagnostic work. As they learn more and gain increasing clarity about the situation, they shift to defining strategic direction (mission, goals, strategy, and vision) for their organizations. As the intended direction becomes clearer, they are better able to make decisions about key organizational issues—structure, processes, talent, and team. In tandem with this, they can identify opportunities to secure early wins and begin to drive the process of change in their organizations.
The type of support new leaders need therefore shifts in predictable ways as the transition process unfolds. Early on, support for diagnosis is key. Later, the focus of support should shift to helping them define strategic direction, lay the foundation for success, secure early wins, and so on. Critically, new leaders need to be offered transition support in digestible blocks. Once they are in their new roles, they rapidly get immersed in the flow of events and can devote only very limited time to learning, reflecting, and planning. If support is not delivered just in time, the new leader is unlikely to use it. One success factor in J&J was the use of a "milestone process" which aligned transition support events to when it was needed based on historical learning's of timing and readiness.
#2. Leverage the time before entry
Transitions begin with selection or promotion, not when leaders formally enter their new positions. The time prior to entry is a priceless period during which new leaders can begin to learn about their organizations and plan their early days on the job. Upon formally entering their new organizations, new leaders are invariably swept up in the day-to-day demands of their offices.
Organizational transition acceleration systems should therefore be designed to help new leaders get the maximum possible benefit during whatever pre-entry time is available to them. This means supporting new leaders' learning processes by providing them with key documents and tools that help them to plan their early diagnostic activities. For executives it may be beneficial to have coaches engage in pre-entry diagnosis and create summary reports on the situation. At J&J, the transition acceleration process is triggered immediately upon acceptance of the offer of promotion or hire. This results in HR initiating a transition risk assessment process and developing a transition acceleration plan specific to the executive's needs.
#3. Create action-forcing events to propel the process forward
The fundamental paradox of transition acceleration is that leaders in transition often feel too busy to learn and plan their transitions. While they know they should be tapping into available resources and devoting time to planning their transitions, the urgent demands of their new roles tend to crowd out this important work.
Although it helps to leverage the time before entry and to provide just-in-time support, transition processes also need to provide "action-forcing events." These are key meetings with coaches or cohort events that bring leaders in transition into more reflective mind-sets.
The implication is transition support should not be designed as a free-flowing process in which the leader sets the pace. It is better to create a series of focused "events"—coach meetings or cohort sessions—at critical stages. After undertaking some pre-entry diagnosis of the situation and helping the leader to engage in some self-assessment, for example, the coach and client are well positioned to have a highly productive "launch meeting." At J&J, these action-forcing events are also seen as "milestone deliverables" that reinforce the view that these actions are necessary business deliverables.
When transition coaching is provided it is critical the new leader and the coach connect early on in a focused and meaningful way. This is one reason it can be beneficial for coaches to engage in intensive pre-entry diagnosis: they have a precious resource—knowledge about the situation—that they can convey to the new leader. Their insight, offered in the critical early phases of the transition, can help to cement the coach-client relationship.
#4. Provide additional, focused resources to support specific types of transitions
There are fundamental principles and tools that can be applied to any transition. However, the way they are applied and the specific priorities new leaders pursue vary significantly depending on the types of transitions they are experiencing. It therefore is often helpful to identify the most important types of transitions the company needs to support, and develop specific, targeted additional resources to support them.
In particular, there are often good reasons to provide new leaders with additional resources for dealing with two common types of transitions:
• Promotion. When leaders are promoted they typically have to alter their approach to leadership in predictable ways. The competencies required for them to be successful at the new level may be quite different from what made them successful at their previous level. They also may be expected to play different roles, exhibit different behaviors, and engage with direct reports in different ways. So focused sets of resources that help newly promoted leaders "take it to a new level" help to accelerate these transitions.
• Onboarding. When leaders join new organizations or move between units with distinct subcultures, they face major challenges in learning about and adapting to new cultures, and building the right sorts of relationships and supportive alliances. Focused, accessible resources for helping them to understand what it takes to "get things done" in their new organizations can help to reduce derailment and speed time to performance. At J&J, for example, we developed a set of Harvard Business School-like case studies on the company's history and culture, as well as overviews of key businesses.
#5. Match delivery mode and extent of support to the level of the leader
If cost were not an issue, every transitioning leader would get intensive, highly personalized support. In an ideal world, a new leader would be assigned a transition coach who would undertake an independent diagnosis and brief the person on the results prior to entry. The coach would help the leader engage in self-assessment and identify key transition risk factors.
Because their impact on the business is so great, it may in fact make sense to provide very senior leaders with this level of transition support. But it doesn't make economic sense to provide it to leaders at the director level or below. The solution is to (1) identify alternative modes through which to deliver transition support (for example, coaching versus cohort sessions versus Webinars and e-learning), (2) assess their relative costs and benefits, and (3) match delivery modes and extent of support to key levels in the company's leadership pipeline in order to maximize the return on investment. For J&J, we implemented our Transition Risk Assessment which helped guide understanding of the transition risks that should be considered and the extent of support suggested by level.
#6. Clarify roles and align the incentives of the key supporting players
Finally, for any given new leader, there typically are many people who can potentially impact the success of the transition. Key players may include bosses, peers, direct reports, HR generalists, coaches, and mentors. While primary responsibility for supporting a transition may be vested with one individual—typically a coach or HR generalist—it is important to think through the supportive roles others could play and to identify ways to encourage them to do so. New leaders in transition often are viewed under a magnifying glass by direct reports and peers and first impressions can make or break a new leader. Key supporting players should see the causal connection between putting these principles into practice, which enables quicker time to competence and credibility, and a successful transition.
Measuring Impact
Success in putting these six principles into practice isn't a guarantee of transition effectiveness; even the best-laid plans can go awry. But care in designing transition acceleration systems can substantially improve every leader's chances of success and thereby position the organization to avoid failure and increase agility. J&J, for example, conducted independent research on the impact that has validated the power of our approach. A study by an outside consultant commissioned by J&J, and based on 125 interviews with participants in Genesis Advisers programs and in transition coaching, highlighted the positive impacts:
Average reported improvement in performance of 40 percent for transition coaching and 38 percent for transition programs.
Conservative estimate of economic benefit (based on salary costs only) of $141K per participant for coaching and $81K per participant for programs.
The authors of the study concluded that, leader transitions are "high risk" points with significant cost implications. This study revealed that the leader transition programs at J&J appear to be quite effective at enhancing leader performance during these challenging periods."
Michael Watkins is the chairman of Genesis Advisers. His new book is "Your Next Move: The Leader's Guide to Navigating Major Career Transitions." Watkins also is the author of "The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels."
Doug Soo Hoo is an affiliate of Genesis Advisers. He recently retired as director of learning and development after 21 years at Johnson &Johnson.
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