Just advised a client starting a new job on the 7 Steps to Maximising Success and Reducing Risk in the First 100 Days in a new CXO role…

7 Steps to Maximising Success and Reducing Risk in the First 100 Days in a new CXO role:

1. Review your personal career strategy and write down how your decision to take the role fits with it; if it fits well, great; but if your decision was expedient because you need a job, that’s fine too but make sure that you are not pretending otherwise. Don’t kid yourself.
2. Review the strategy of your new organisation and how it is inter-dependent with your role; be very precise in analysing this. At CXO level, business strategy is inter-dependent, not just linked, with personal strategy.
3. List your key relationships in your First 100 Days, starting with yourself and your Family and then your boss, peers, direct reports, clients, stakeholders etc.; don’t miss any out.
4. For each relationship predict in a short sentence what a good and bad outcome could be in 100 Days within the context of your personal strategy and that of the business.
5. Track each relationship status using Red-Green-Amber on a weekly basis.
6. An amber and red status for at least one relationship is almost a certainty within the term so when it happens use FEEL-NEED-DO (see Fenton Model) to slow down your response and ensure you start as you mean to continue in how you manage relationships under stress.
7. During your First 100 Days listen more than you speak and never ever use email on an important matter: PICK UP THE PHONE!

Ciaran 

Three tips for the fifth of professionals going for a second career on reaching retirement…

1. Your second career will be a business. Run it it like one.
2. With some exceptions, most professionals don’t know what they don’t know about running a business. My Dad called this “compound ignorance”. I know you feel you should know everything about everything because that’s the way you were trained. Just relax into not knowing everything. Find people who know what you don’t. Your second career is less likely to crash and burn.
3. Reflect on what skills, competences and passions you have not yet fully exploited in your career because you couldn’t, for whatever reason. I call this your “A Asset”. Don’t be put off by people saying “you can’t”. As we say where I come from, “feck the begrudgers”. Go for it.

#A-Asset #FentonModel

Ciaran

Seven New Year Decisions for Business and Professional Leaders…

#SmallChange #FentonModel

1. To stay or leave your current role. Don’t go back to work passively.

2. If you stay, to decide how your organisation’s strategy fits with your own personal career strategy.

3. To decide what, precisely, you want to achieve by the end of 2015.

4. To decide how you are going to create an atmosphere in which your best people will help achieve that outcome.

5. To decide who is ambivalent about you and your plans and how you are going to take responsibility for persuading them.

6. To decide who is against you and definitely not for turning and what you are going to do about them.

7. To decide and clear contract what behaviours you and your team could change by just a small factor of say 5%-15%; that is only five to fifteen actions or statements out every hundred. That’s small change. But the impact of a small change in behaviour by you and your direct reports can, in aggregate, be the difference between achieving your goals and not.

#SmallChange #FentonModel

Ciaran