YOUR @ 60 DAYS CHECKLIST

RESILIENCE

Resilience is about commitment, persistence, positive attitude and bounce back:

• Commitment – your determination to push through versus pull out
• Persistence – your ability to keep trying
• Positive attitude – your willingness to spot the growth and learning opportunity
• Bounce back – your ability to renew and come back even stronger after setbacks

Resilience is not a characteristic that is bestowed to some individuals and not to others. It is a learned active process. You can, and must, continue to develop your resilience if you want to pursue a great first 100 days and a great leadership career.

How to develop your own personal toolkit for fostering resilience at work:

• Stay motivated and focused on what really matters.
• Don’t be a perfectionist – it’s very exhausting.
• Grow a thicker skin and accept that everyone makes mistakes and no one is perfect.
• Sit with discomfort – sometimes it’s a matter of waiting it out until a solution is found.
• Stay strong in self-belief and be confident that you can solve problems.
• Focus on the positive and identify what’s good about this problematic situation.
• Aim high, but be realistic and philosophical if you can’t achieve all your goals.
• Avoid losing perspective and making a drama out of every issue.
• Self-talk and mantras can be really helpful in stressful situations: ‘This too shall pass’, ‘There is always a solution’ or ‘In the bigger picture, does this really matter?’
• Talk about issues as problems seem less insurmountable once we voice them.
• Ask for help and solicit ideas from the perspective of others.

RESOURCEFULNESS

I find resourcefulness is a much less talked about characteristic than resilience and yet it’s just as important. Resourcefulness is about the creative ability to overcome problems and making do with what is available to develop a solution. Don’t just take everything at face value – figure it out – is there another way around a problem?

Resourcefulness is about problem-solving, creativity and adaptability:

• Problem-solving – your ability to devise quick and clever solutions.
• Creativity – keep an open mind about a range of possibilities.
• Adaptability – ability to adapt to deliver, even when the goalposts change.

Resourcefulness is the ability to find quick and clever ways to overcome difficulties. It requires creative and agile thinking. Like resilience, it is a skill that can be actively learned – and, as humans, we all have a level of resourcefulness when it comes to survival and thriving, so you definitely have it. Just be more alert to using it.

Develop your own personal toolkit for fostering resourcefulness at work:

• Get good at evaluating a situation and what you have available to tackle the issues. Check if you are faced with the problem or a symptom of a bigger problem. Is solving the symptom merely fire-fighting? You need to focus resources on solving the bigger problem too.
• Think creatively – is there another way? Adapt your ideas and prior experience to bring fresh thinking to the table.
• When someone puts a limit on you, push back – don’t take the first no as the final answer.
• Negotiate better – how can you get what you want and make it a win for the other person too?
• Who else can help – think about who has access to the resources you need. For example, can you borrow someone temporarily from another team?
• Be prepared to bend the rules – sometimes in pursuit of the right outcome, it is better to beg for forgiveness later than ask for permission in advance when knowing you will be told no.
• Dare to ask for what you want and need – you don’t ask, you don’t get.
• Keep your options open – play a few hands at the same time, so you have a few routes in play to help solve the problem or overcome the obstacle.
• Embrace different possibilities, opportunities, people, views, suggestions and experiences.
• Be proactive – better to try something than to do nothing. Show up and try something, try something else, try something else.

Sometimes problems seem insurmountable, but there is always a solution. If you are tired of dealing with a difficult problem, take a break – don’t just give up.

GET THE TEAM WORKING HARDER FOR YOU

In the next 30 days, take the time to communicate effectively with your team to remind them of your vision and what you want to achieve by the end of the first 100 days. Are you holding your people to account for what they promised to deliver? You could have total clarity on what you want to achieve but are your team on board or working to a slower pace than you expected.

By now, you should be expecting to have sight of some of the deliverables agreed earlier on. Check on the progress. Don’t just ask for reassurance – look for proof of progress. You may need to provide more guidance. Be assertive with the team that deadlines matter, and that you expect people to deliver on what they said they would deliver. It is a weakness of leadership to set a clear direction but to not follow up to check that they are delivering on what they promised.

I find that sometimes the boss of a team doesn’t like conflict and puts up with too much delay or excuses instead of holding team members more strictly to account. Absence of conflict is as unhealthy as too much conflict. As leader of the team, you need to express your standards and views and encourage others to express their views. If someone is not delivering to standard, then it could be that they didn’t fully understand what you asked of them. So non-delivery may be more about lack of communication than lack of willingness.

CONTINUE TO BOND WITH YOUR PEOPLE

For the past 60 days, your interactions with most people have likely mainly been about simply ‘meeting and greeting’ – surface-level introductions and surface-level interactions. Go deeper, now, and take the time to deliberately work on improving your team and stakeholder relationships.

Try to consciously bond more deeply now with the people around you. By this, I mean disclose more, listen more, invest more time, and take the relationship to the next level. I am not saying you need to be someone you are not – or that you need to be everybody’s friend – but what I am saying is find your own way of taking your working relationships to the next level.

Perhaps it is a good time to suggest a social event such as taking your team out for breakfast on a Friday. Social interactions will help you to get to know people faster and can lead to more fulfilment at work. If you’re a new external appointment, the more you get to know people, the more you will start to feel a sense of belonging and less isolated and less like a newbie.

REASSURE YOURSELF THAT YOU ARE DOING A GOOD JOB

In my experience, executives are very insecure (understandably) in their first 100 days. If they don’t spontaneously receive regular reassurance and validation from others, they may act out their anxiety in all sorts of unhelpful ways, including too much arrogance and too much self-praise. Most ambitious people are over-achievers, always dissatisfied that they are not good enough, and have not succeeded. Or worse, they feel like a failure no matter what they achieve.

Don’t be one of those people. Change the game – find ways of reassuring yourself that you are making progress, so that you don’t have to constantly rely on positive stroking from others or constantly speak about your progress with a hidden question mark at the end of every sentence. Try to tame your inner critic. Don’t let fear-based thoughts control you. Remind yourself what you have already achieved. Be positive about your prospects. Forgive your mistakes. Continue to have the courage to take risks.

REALISE THAT PEOPLE ARE WATCHING YOU AND COPYING YOU

Stakeholders, especially your team members, will be watching you with interest and paying attention to what you do and what you say. Followers consciously and unconsciously mirror and copy the behaviours of the leader and now is the time that you can really capitalise on what I call the leadership ‘multiplier’ effect – to create a ripple effect on positive behaviours in others and a ripple effect of positive emotions in others. All of which will improve the morale, motivation and performance of your team and those around you.

Everyone pays attention to the leader. When all those working for you follow your lead, and everyone working for them follows their lead, the cascading effect is extremely powerful as a change mechanism and it starts with you. Take charge of this multiplier effect, and work it to your advantage. Focus on changing one thing about yourself – a quality, characteristic, standard, behaviour or norm – and it will have a multiplier effect on all those around you.

As the leader of the team, your multiplier effect can be both positive and negative. You are already demonstrating positive behaviours that come naturally to you, but what about your negative behaviours? Unfortunately, all your negative traits are also being copied, multiplying and cascading and causing problems. So, as a leader, you need to pay attention to changing your negative behaviours. Identify where one of your worst behaviours is having an impact on the performance of your first 100 days plan and decide to change it.

For example, it could be that you like to move very fast but fail to pay adequate attention to the morale of your team. Talk to your team about this. Share that you feel this is an area you have inadvertently neglected when leading previous teams. Explain that you want to be more thoughtful now and that you are open to ideas on how to put tactics in place to sustain team morale, whilst also driving for results on time and on budget.

CREATE STRONG AND POSITIVE EMOTIONAL RESONANCE

Think about how you can create what is known as ‘positive resonance’ – deliberately create positive motivating emotions in your team. Think of your team as a blended soup of emotions. As the leader, you have the most flavour or the most seasoning in your team soup – and you can decide what that flavour is, and how strong it can be. For example, if you and your team have had a recent market success, then you can use that to have a celebration event. Consciously exploit the feelgood factor of the success. For example, can you secure press and online coverage to highlight the success and sustain employee morale and motivation for as long as possible?

Everybody wants to feel like they are part of something important and exciting. Everybody’s motivation will soar if they feel that they are part of a winning team – so celebrate all your early wins and make every team member and every recent recruit feel part of that celebration.

Pay attention to the viral effect of all your emotional ups and downs. The first 100 days is an intense time period so, naturally, your emotional reactions will be heightened. You need to have good self-awareness to observe when these heightened emotions are taking over, and you need to exercise self-regulation to manage and overcome these emotions.

For example, you may feel extremely buoyant and optimistic in the first few weeks of the first 100 days – and these feelings may exaggerate themselves to the extent that you lose touch with commercial reality and over-promise on delivery of year-end results. Your team won’t thank you for this. Or you may feel anxious at the beginning of the first 100 days – and, if you are not able to manage the anxiety, then you are more likely to postpone decision-making. This will not enhance your leadership reputation, and others may lose confidence in you.

START TO RECORD YOUR PROGRESS AND LESSONS LEARNED

This middle section is often where the most progress occurs. It is a good idea to write down and record such progress, any lessons learned and any key insights. At the end of your first 100 days, I recommend that you formally present a record of your achievements to your boss and key stakeholders. So it is worth making notes now, in preparation, and so that your whole first 100 days journey is reflected in your presentation, and not just the progress made in the final ten days.

UPDATE YOUR FIRST 100 DAYS PLAN

Review each desired outcome and reset the actions for the next 30 days, based on your first 60 days experience, and on the following:

• A review of progress against plan
• A sense-check using the @ 60 days checklist
• Integrating the feedback you received on your leadership performance
• Insights on how to be more resilient and resourceful
• Critical success factors for the next 30 days