Promoted? Six “Must Have” Ingredients for The First 180 Days

Are you moving into a new role within your company? Been promoted and joining a new organization? If so, you will want to ensure that you get a quick start toward success. To that end, creating a dynamic First 180 Day Action Plan is a must. 

So, what is a First 180 Day Action Plan and why do one? Very simply, it’s a plan to help you master the crucial tasks needed to succeed in the early part of the new job, the phase where first impressions are forming. It helps you get a head start, create agreement on top priorities, manage a consistent message, set direction for the team, and sustain momentum. It also and perhaps most importantly, creates a vehicle to provide your new boss with progress updates, which can be critical towards creating positive performance perceptions in the first year.

In our executive coaching practice, we have found that the most successful leaders in transition align people, plans, and practices around a shared purpose. A noticed theme is that the “best” incorporate these six essential ingredients into their first 6-month plans:

1. Assess the Culture. Skilled transitional leaders quickly assess the culture of the organization and their specific department. They are careful to match the speed at which they make changes against both the need to change and the readiness to change. They rapidly size up whether the culture requires assimilation, slow or quick convergence, or a shocking impact. Getting the assessment wrong and acting too quickly or too slowly, can cause a leader to fail.  
2. Align on Top Priorities. Leaders need to be clear on what their new boss’s three top priorities are and ensure they and their teams are aligned around them. A good 180-day action plan clearly states top goals and has defined action steps toward achieving them. Using the plan as a checklist to show progress made is a great way to highlight momentum to a new supervisor in one-on-one meetings.
3.  Create Immediate Wins. The best leaders invest lots of time, early on, to listen and learn. They assess both short and long-term opportunities and challenges, paying particular attention to the “low hanging fruit”. They know that an easy and quick way to create confidence in themselves and the team is to identify an important but easily attainable target that they can rally all around to create an immediate team win. Incorporating lots of praise and recognition highlights the early success and further elevates team confidence. 
4. Identify Stakeholder Status. Leaders must quickly identify their key stakeholders (e.g., boss, directs, peers, partners) and then as highlighted by Bradt, Check, and Lawler in their book, The New Leaders 100 Day Action Plan, categorize each as either a “contributor, detractor, or watcher”. Contributors share the leader’s vision and are supportive of any changes to be made. Detractors are those comfortable with the status quo or may even see the leader as a threat. Watchers are those on the fence or the silent majority. The key is to try to move every influencer one step in a positive direction. 
5. Develop a Talent Plan. A good leader asks themselves, “Do I have the right team in place?” And if not, quickly develops a plan. They know that the right person, in the right role, is the key to success and that the assessment needs to be made in the first 120-180 days. The mistake many leaders make is that they wait too long to act even though they know what must be done. To clarify, the complete plan does not need to be implemented within the first 180 days, but rather identified and then executed over the timeframe which makes most sense.  
6. Solicit and Act on Feedback. To deliver early and continuous results leaders need to get consistent and frequent feedback from a minimum of five top stakeholders. We recommend that leaders mark their calendar to do at least 1X a month. This feedback can be a quick 5- minute conversation that is hooked onto an existing event, meeting, or conversation. The point is to ask open ended questions to inquire about the progress on a specific behavior (e.g., delegating more, communicating better, etc.).  Listening with “open ears” and then acting upon any recommended changes sets the tone that the leader is committed to continuous improvement.   

Success in a new role can be greatly enhanced by getting the culture right, aligning the team around top priorities, creating quick and easy wins to build confidence, identifying & assessing stakeholders, getting the talent right, and gaining the feedback needed to deliver continuous results. The key: build a powerful and effective First 180-day Action Plan that incorporates the “must have” six ingredients and win! 

Partial source: The New Leader’s 100 Day Action Plan by Bradt, Check, and Lawler