90-Day Plan

A colleague of mine is a candidate for a job at a public utility.  She's had a few great interviews, which doesn't surprise me at all because she's an outstanding manager and generally a great person to be around.  For the last round, the company asked her to provide a plan for her first 90 days, should she be selected for the position.

I've always hated that question.  In the past, when I've been asked that, I've insisted that in such a short amount of time, I'll be lucky to get to know the key players and the location of the restrooms, much less get anything serious accomplished.  Even while giving it, I knew that was a terrible answer; therefore, I was glad the question came up again now, so I could think about a better one while not under the critical gaze of a CEO.

In reality, I had provided one of the best answers, but by just sort of throwing it out there I'd not given it the respect it deserves.  In the first 90 days, only a few of your goals will be true business objectives -- you don't even know what they are yet!  Rather, most of your mission during those first few months will be, dare I say it, People Centered.

In no particular order:

• Meet every person on the team individually.
  
  I've been amazed by the positive reception I've had to simply setting up individual meeting with each member of my staff, no matter how many levels down the org chart they may be. That response tells me that senior leaders aren't doing this nearly often enough.  Meet with your employees, find out what they love about their job and what concerns them.  Find out what makes them get up every morning and show up at work.

• Meet each department head. 
  
  If you're in IT, then odds are your customers are internal as well as external.  Start with the internal folks.  Get a sense of their priorities and mission, and how well they think your group is meeting their needs. Find out what else your group could be doing to support them.
  

• Meet semi-weekly at first, then weekly with your boss.
  
  Creating an initial 90-day plan is a great opportunity to set the expectation in your future boss' mind that you're going to look for some one-on-one time over the first several weeks. In those meetings, find out what his priorities are, and how well your team has been meeting them up until now. As time goes on, make sure that you and your boss stay on the same page.
  

• Review any pending job openings in your group.
  
  If possible, put them on hold until you are given sufficient chance to evaluate your organization:  you may want to make some changes, or look for an opportunity to promote from within.

• Set up regular team “all-hands” meetings and begin holding them.
  
  The content of the meetings matters much less than the fact of having them.

Of course, there are a few pure business matters that do require your early attention as well:

• Review existing performance metrics.
  
  You don't know what they are, but you have some idea what they ought to be.  See what you've got, then decide on some new ones you'd like to see and get started producing them.

• Are there any fires that need attention right away?
  
  You'd hope your future boss would let you know about this prior to your coming on board, but she may have avoided the subject.  Or, she may not even realize that there's an immediate problem.  Make it a priority to determine if one exists, and if so, to get it fixed.
  

• If your prospective boss did mention any near-term priorities in the course of the interview process, be sure those are given due attention in your plan.
  
  Doing so demonstrates that you were listening, and that you are already on the same page with your new boss.
  

• Determine where your greatest exposure is, and make sure it's covered.
  
  In a recent leadership position I held, it took me a little too long to realize that there was one group in particular which was both not in good shape and had the ability to completely blow me out of the water.  I was eventually given plenty of opportunities to wish I'd noticed that sooner.
  

Ultimately, the 90-day plan is a great opportunity for you to illustrate to a prospective employer that you have been around the block a couple of times – that you know where the land mines are and how to avoid them. In fact, if your potential future boss doesn't ask you for one, consider providing one anyway, thus letting her know that you are thoughtful, focused, and, most importantly, that you read this blog.

Starting and Finishing

In his classic book, The Soul of a New Machine, author Tracy Kidder follows the design and construction of a new mainframe. IBM had introduced a new product, and its Route 128 rival, Data General, was eager to produce a competitive model. Kidder embedded himself with the engineering team tasked with bringing the big iron to the marketplace. Reissued in paperback a few years ago, the technology described is now laughably obsolete. However, the real theme of the book concerns not technology, but human creativity, and in that sense the book will always have relevance.

I read this book a long, long time ago, and as far as I know, I don't even have a copy lying around. But some things stick out in my mind. In particular, Kidder spends a little time describing two categories of engineers: starters and finishers. Although it was over 20 years ago, and I certainly don't remember that section verbatim, I do clearly recall how deeply Kidder's description resonated for me.

Starters are driven by the need to create. They are incredibly comfortable with an empty white board and a ticking clock. Starters have ideas -- more ideas than they can follow up on, usually -- and are compelled to see those ideas become reality. They're tinkerers, experimenters, and hackers. Starters are the engine of innovation.

And yet, a starter who builds the world's greatest computer may only stay engaged until the machine barely operates. If it crashes every other day, or if it requires four power cables and a windmill to operate, or if you have to enter data into it using toggle switches, that won't bother the starter. His drive to create was satisfied the moment the system came to life and did more or less what it was intended to do. Anything beyond that, for a starter, is hardly worth paying attention to.

Finishers are driven by the need to perfect. They have no less of a creative impulse than starters, but they satisfy it by finding efficient ways to cross every T and dot every I. They make sure that the lights on the front panel meet all the IEEE specs, that all the defects uncovered in QA have been addressed, and that the power supply is of sufficient quality to keep the thing running reliably... well, at least until the warranty expires.

If you left home this morning in a car, you can thank a starter. If the car actually got you all the way to work, and the door didn't come off in your hand as you exited, you can thank a finisher.

As a leader, it's very important to spot these tendencies in your staff, and to delegate work accordingly. As an entrepreneur, it's even more important to recognize these traits in yourself. Fully appreciating your own strengths and weaknesses, as touchy-feely as that may sound, forms a critical piece of the foundation of your business. As speaker and author Marcus Buckingham points out, success comes to those who take advantage of their strengths and find ways to work around (rather than attempt to overcome) their weaknesses.

As for me:  by temperament, I'm definitely a starter.  As an engineer I am a starter.  As a writer, I'm a finisher:  it is much more comfortable for me to take an existing piece and hone it to perfection through careful editing than it is for me to stare at a blinking cursor, wondering if I have anything else to say.  As a consultant, therefore, I am fortunate, because so much of my work begins with engineering (say, evaluating a technology plan) and ends with writing.  I guess it just goes to show: if you roll a marble around a board long enough, it eventually finds the dimple.

Surviving the Recovery

Each morning, more or less, I make myself the same breakfast. If I'm fortunate enough to be doing so in a house rendered silent by the departure of my kids for school, I'll put the TV on, turned up just loud enough for the drone of the talking heads on CNBC to be heard over the sizzle of tomatoes and onions in my pan.

This morning they were interviewing a guy who made an interesting point. He noted that, in a downturn, small businesses tend to let their employees go later than large businesses do. In my experience, that's true. In a small company, everybody is like family. It's hard (and you can take my word on this) to let go people you care about, people who have entrusted you with their livelihood. You have a shared history.  There's the time you had dinner at their house, or they at yours. And then there was that day they brought their kids to work when their nanny called in sick, or that time that you were down with the flu and everybody pitched in to get you flowers. These are not people you want to see suffer, and even more so, you do not want to be the cause of their misfortune.

And so, when the economy hits the skids, small ventures are the last to trim their staff. Because owners are so reluctant to make this move, by the time they do so, the company's finances may already be in crisis.  Ironically, as entrepreneurs tried to wait out the downturn, they may have actually made it almost all the way through to the other side: as a result, they find themselves short-handed and short of funds just as the economy is turning around. At a moment when they should be positioned for growth, they are instead running on empty, struggling to serve their existing customers, much less respond to an increase in demand. Having lived through the recession, they're in danger of being killed by the recovery.

At this critical point, it's vital for your small venture to be looking to establish strategic partnerships. These come in many forms: a partner may provide a channel to a vertical market (such as government) that is hard for your firm to reach on its own. It may license your company's product for rebranding as part of their own offering. It may take over a geographic region, such as Europe or the Far East, that you are not able to service on your own.

Whatever the specific arrangement, a strategic alliance generally provides some specific benefits your small business needs in order to take advantage of the economic upturn. Most crucially, it can supply a much-needed infusion of cash: licensing or distribution deals can (and should) be structured to include some amount of up-front payment, perhaps in return for a discounted license fee or guarantee of exclusivity in a certain vertical market or geographic region. Additionally, a partner can provide some credibility for your small firm as it tries to penetrate customers who might otherwise be spooked by your weak balance sheet.

But what about the additional demand created by the partnership? Even when a partner supplies up-front cash, it's tricky to turn those dollars into resources overnight. In fact, some of the money may go to servicing bloated debt balances accrued during the downturn, rather than directly into fueling growth. Demand rises, but spending is still constrained.

For software and service businesses, there has never been an easier time to grow in a controlled, demand-driven way. The advent of commodity cloud computing, in its many forms, enables smart companies to deploy exactly the resources they need, exactly when they are needed. For example, when you need to test a new release, you can engage the hardware, software and networking required to support the test, and then instantly decommission those resources when the test is complete. Or, for web-based businesses, you can deploy a dedicated production environment after the contract has been signed: no more buying expensive hardware based on forecasts that may, or may not, be correct.

Stay tuned for more on strategic partnerships, cloud computing, and other topics of important to small business leaders. For real-time updates, please follow me on Twitter.

If I haven't said so before: thanks for reading! I'd be doing this even if nobody else read it (which, actually, is sort of what I expected when I created People Centered Leadership last year), but I've found the nice comments I've received about this blog to be very meaningful for me, and they help push me to keep it going. Thank you!