PrimeGenesis Blog
We’re all new leaders all the time
Leadership is about inspiring and enabling others to do their absolute best, together, to realize a meaningful and rewarding shared purpose. While a strongly shared purpose remains constant over time, any organization’s context and culture are continually...
Following a Dictator Requires Different Leadership Skills
Following a dictator like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak is a particularly challenging task. Dictators substitute personality-driven command and control for strategic and organizational processes. You don't need strategic planning if you're going to do everything the...
Promoted From Within – Thoughts For Google’s New CEO Larry Page
In general, when leaders are promoted from within, they need to keep in mind that they can not control the context, can not make a clean break, and have no honeymoon.
Given these, they need to manage the context they inherit as much as possible, take control of their own transition, and accelerate team progress after they start.
For Larry Page moving into the CEO role at Google, this means starting now to secure the resources and support he will need, deciding what parts of Eric Schmidt’s legacy he will keep and what parts he will change, and evolving the stated and de facto strategies as appropriate.
Where one of the main transition management challenges for someone joining a new company is positioning themselves, the challenge for people like Larry, getting promoted from within, is repositioning themselves. Larry is not going to change who he is and his history with his colleagues. He’s not going to change his strengths. But he can change his behaviors, how he relates to others, his attitude, and the work environment he creates, including which strengths he leverages first.
The New Leader’s Playbook
Moving into new roles are crucible events of leadership and some of the toughest challenges people face. Nearly half of new leaders fail in their first 18 months. In that light, four things make a big difference: Get a head start – Manage the message – Build the team – Follow through to sustain momentum and deliver results.
Wake Analysis on People Development Leadership Skills
You can learn a lot about a manager by the debris he or she leaves in his or her wake. Some managers leave a trail of broken and disillusioned people behind them that never recover from getting run over by the manager. Other managers leave behind...
Start Your Onboarding Process Off Right
Don't begin to recruit anyone until you understand how their role is going to help deliver results that move the organization forward in line with its purpose and priorities. He had been a standout star in everything he’d done from high school through...
Red Cross Disaster Services – a Lesson in Motivation
I'm spending this week with the leadership of the American Red Cross Disaster Services - in theory to help roll out an iterative approach to disaster management to 140 of their disaster relief operations directors. In practice, we're all getting a master...
How Framing Messages Can Help in Your Job Transition
Jorge Pedraza suggests that "Framer's Win". Specifically, he says that "Communication is largely about framing. It is said that “facts speak for themselves.” But the truth is that people who help frame the facts are the most...
Onboarding Framework – Negotiating
We're in the process of pulling together the next edition of The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan. It seems like a good time to re-think what we've got in the current edition and add in some new ideas. Would love your perspective on what in...
Initiating Changes to the Company Culture in the Onboarding Process
In the vast majority of cases, converging and evolving are the right leadership skills to apply to transition management when onboarding. (Please see my earlier post, "Onboarding Context and Culture".) Sometimes new leaders can just assimilate in. ...