[MUSIC] How do you work with others? This onboarding process is very much of a team sport. It's not something you can do on your own. Think about those folks who actually gave you good advice in the past, your trusted advisors. These are the people who have your best interests at heart. They want to have what's best for you and they really care about you. In fact, they may even love you, but not in a romantic sense. But they will give you feedback that's honest, and objective, and sometimes very tough. Think about the teams that you were involved with in the past. It may have been in your previous role in the business. It may have been on a sports team. It could even be at school. Do you necessarily migrate to a certain role on those teams? Do you always take the leadership position, or do you find times when you can be a coordinator, or maybe the creative person on the team? Moving to a new job gives you a chance to totally change your role. You can move to roles where you're much more comfortable. Let's look at a checklist that may help you as a thought starter. First of all, you want to focus on your colleagues, your boss, maybe your previous boss, and people who have been useful to you in the past. Secondly, think about not only your parents, but your extended family members. Could be a brother-in-law or could be a cousin who knows something about the area you're now joining and the area where you're going to be working. And third, think about people that are not necessarily in your family. These could be family friends that are distant from you, but people who you can now call on to ask for advice as you move ahead in your new career. A special category of advisors are resisters. These could be parents who always had a dream about what they wanted you to do when you grow up. A number of my young engineering students will come to me and say, you know, my parents still want me to be a physician and so they want me to transfer to pre-med, but I'm very, very happy in the engineering school and that's where I'd really like to stay. A second category of resisters would be clingy girlfriends or clingy boyfriends. These are the people who learn about your job and say, I really rather not have you go there. Handling this situation is very, very difficult, very sensitive. You need your best emotional intelligence to, if I feed back to them why you want to do things and where you want to go and not have long-term negative ramifications. A third category would be mentors, mentors who are so invested in your future that they can't see alternatives that may be important to you. In all of these categories, it'll take your best emotional intelligence to feed back to them why you're making the decision that you've chosen. You have to be sure to let them know you have listened to them, you've internalized what they've said, you've understood their points, and yet you still make a different decision. Closing a loop with them will make you feel that you respect them and they will stay as advisors for you. As you're moving into your new role, it's important for you to understand the context within which your business will be operating. Michael Watkins wrote a book several years ago called The First 90 Days. And in it, he describes the life cycle of a typical corporation. So, you may be joining an operation that's in a start-up. And if it's in a start-up, you have to be comfortable moving from job to job very frequently, maybe weekly, maybe even on a daily situation. The company, if it's successful, will move from a start-up into a sustaining mode which is generating returns for its stakeholders that are quite satisfactory. So here your role is going to be making incremental improvements while keeping the business on track. If the business gets off track or if there are changes in the marketplace, it will move into a category which Watkins described as realignment. And here, there are two teams of people. The first team of people will be thinking about the past. They'll have their feet firmly plas, placed in the past. The new people will be seeing the evolution in the marketplace around the company. They'll be trying to move the company strategies to better fit the new marketplace. You'll be working with this new team and your challenge will be to be persuasive to go back and persuade the people who are still in the old world that change is needed. If that doesn't occur, or you, maybe you occur, you may be entering a company that's in a turnaround. In a turnaround situation, people expect change. They expect you to make dramatic decisions quickly that are going to affect them. In fact, they're willing and, and anxious for you to do that. So think about how your style of managing, how your working in a team will fit into one of these four contexts. If it's not the one that's comfortable for you, you still will have to do it for awhile, and you should get comfortable and you'll get better at doing it while you're practicing. But as you have time in the future to be able to move to, morph to, that context which would be much more comfortable for you. So think about how you will do that. Karen had a very desirable job working for the president of a company that was in a sustaining mode. Her role was to work with the various divisions on their capital expenditure requests, and also to help them with their benefit plans. A new opening occurred for a general manager's position in one of the divisions. The president asked Karen if she would take the role. She thought about it for a while and thought she wasn't 100% qualified for it, but she did have most of the skills, more than, substantially more than half the skills required to take the job. But more importantly, she thought, will the team in this division support me if I get off track? So she sought a trusted advisor, someone in the human resources department. And after talking with him for awhile, they concluded that the team would in fact be supportive of Karen if she became the new general manager of the division. So she could then be comfortable that if she did have some problems, they would pull her back to central and keep her on track rather than let her step off the edge. Over the years, I've had a chance to watch people like Karen and others as they consider taking new jobs. And it's led me to develop my own rule. It's called the 60% rule. It's composed of two elements. The first element is, do you contain or do you have the skill sets and the aptitudes for at least 60% of the required activities for your new job? And, it's important you have both, and do you have the support of your colleges in the new position? If you can say yes to both of those, you should take the job. It reduces the risks significantly. And later on, as you become a manager and you're picking people for different jobs, you can use the same 60% rule. It works quite well. So as you become a manager, you'll also be able to use the 60% rule when you're deciding which of your colleagues you're going to promote to a new job. This idea of matching a person to the context is very important. In your new role, you may find you're a perfect fit or maybe something you're going to have to adapt your style to for a short time. But in the long term, think about where you best fit and how you can make that greatest contribution. As you wrap up this module, let's take a look at the tips and takeaways that may be useful to you. Identify your trusted advisors. These may be people that are beyond your traditional advisors, maybe one degree of separation away. But as you're finding them, be careful of the resistors. Reflect on your role on previous teams. This is your chance to change roles, become a more valued contributor to your new teams in maybe more than one role. And last, understand the context of your new environment. If you fit into it comfortably and your personality is one that allows you to make a great contribution, that's fine. If it's something where you temporarily have to use a different style, that'll be fine too, but you'll learn from that ultimately where you want to fit to make the greatest contribution. This matrix will be the most important tool you'll use throughout the course. It will be the driver to guarantee success in your power onboarding plan.
