Leadership consultant and author Ty Wiggins helps incoming CEOs transition into their new roles. He’s learned a thing or two over the years about those early days.
Each CEO is unique, and so is their transition period. But what does every single CEO I have worked with struggle with? The balance between learning and taking action. This is perhaps the toughest common aspect of a CEO transition.
From my privileged position of sitting alongside CEOs in transition, there is an easy answer to the question about how fast to move. The answer is, of course, that you should act as fast as you can, once you have learned what you need to learn in order to make good decisions.
Festina lente (make haste slowly)
There is value in the concept of “going slow to go fast” Going slow means taking the time and making the effort to learn as much as possible before you act. The longer you stay in a learning state, the more information you will have to come out of the gates at the right pace, while also avoiding the risk of doing things that you later have to walk back or unwind.
Your learning curve in the first months of your role will be extremely steep. The expression “drinking from the fire hose” is a common way to describe your early weeks and months. What you understand in two weeks will more than double by the time you get to four weeks. What you know at four weeks will more than double by the time you get to the eight-week mark. And so on. Yes, the learning curve flattens out, but the point to remember is that, in transition, waiting another two weeks can make an enormous difference.
Ideally, you should resist making big decisions or wide-sweeping changes early on (unless something is on fire).
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Read moreEasy wins
While you need to resist the pressure (internal or otherwise) to come in and fix or change everything straightaway, you will still want to make some moves during your transition, not least to signal your intentions as a new leader. But doing too much too soon can be trouble.
In the award-winning eponymous TV series, Ted Lasso turns to a suggestion box to field ideas on where to focus his attention. If you have seen the show, you will know that many of the suggestions are unhelpful to say the least. In the end, Ted focuses on fixing the water pressure in the team showers. It’s a humorous example of a very effective early action — something small, basic and easily ignored, yet something that sends a clear message.
I’m obviously not advocating you bring out your own suggestion box. Instead, as you think through what you want to achieve early on, the ideas here will hopefully provide some direction. Remember, how your actions are perceived — whether just a convenient opportunity or a strategic win — will be up to how you explain it.
You will likely find issues within the business that fall into the “early wins” category, problems that are small and easy for you as the new CEO to fix — to the thunderous applause of the crowd, or perhaps not quite. But keeping an eye out for wins like these can demonstrate positive intent early.
A CEO I helped transition effectively, for example, had joined an organization that had two locations in the head office city, literally across the street from each other. People in most divisions were spread across both buildings, driven by poor planning, laziness and personal agenda around offices and views.
Each day, people could be seen going from one building to the other for meetings. Some floated between the two buildings so much that no one really knew where they were. Almost everyone moaned about how stupid it was.
Three weeks in, the CEO had heard enough, and by his fourth week, he decided who should be sitting where. That weekend, he had movers come in and put people in their new spots. One comment from the stakeholder feedback was, “The senior leadership have been saying it is too hard for two years and he fixed it in a month.”
This action delivered several positive outcomes: It stopped a large amount of the negative noise in the business, it removed one of the excuses for lack of collaboration and teamwork, it improved efficiencies and office attendance, and it showed employees that they were important and high on the CEO’s radar. It meant that the CEO started on a foundation of engagement and trust, making it easier for him to push through more radical changes later on. We knew this because people continued to reference the office move as a reason to trust him.
It often makes best sense to find something that your employees, senior leadership team or board think is a small win, rather than seeking a significant problem to hang your hat on as CEO. Commonly, these are easy-to-address issues that can make a positive impact: fix IT or pay issues, fix physical office frustrations, reduce or remove unnecessary reports and so on.
Of course, these easy wins are not always present, so take them when you can. But don’t just mindlessly chase any win you can claim. Your earliest actions as CEO will send a clear message of what is important to you — it could be aimed at the team, the shareholders, the market or it could be aimed at the board.
Whichever direction you choose sends a clear signal about your priorities. A good question to ask yourself when looking for a quick win, or acting upon it, is: A win for who?
In many situations, it is beneficial to make your people feel first and foremost that they’re the priority. This is what Ted did by fixing the water pressure.
Early moves
At a slightly larger scale than easy wins are a CEO’s early moves — the more substantial decisions that are made during the transition period.
Often the early moves are things that the business is aware of already. It is rarely something out of left field that you suddenly discover. It is commonly a decision that the business has been struggling with for some time or an issue that just won’t seem to go away. Different from easy wins (although it’s all semantics), early moves change the business direction in some way or signal a future change.
A new CEO I advised decided at around six months to sell a large, underperforming area of the business. In his words, “Everyone from the board to the janitor told me that it was a dog and it should have been sold years ago. When I asked why it hadn’t been I got a variety of excuses and cop-outs. There was even a buyer for it. So, I did one last series of meetings asking for objections and for anything that I didn’t know about it — nothing. So, I sold it and the transaction was completed in 60 days.”
Research by McKinsey on the bigger moves and decisions made by more than 600 CEOs by the end of their second year found that the most popular, in order, were: management reshuffles, mergers or acquisitions, cost reduction programs, new business/product launch, geographic expansion, organizational redesign, business/product closure, strategic review and geographic contraction.
Ty Wiggins is an adviser at Russell Reynolds Associates. He advises leading companies on leadership transitions and executive onboarding to ensure more expedient paths to effectiveness. Based in London, Ty is one of only a handful of people globally with a Ph.D. in senior leadership transitions. He harnesses his academic, consulting and coaching background to provide CEOs, boards and senior leaders across industries with the advice, support, challenge and insight needed to start well and perform quickly.
