Here is Rob’s next chapter!

I’ll never forget my first job as a young Army officer.

Lt. Colonel Armstrong, commander of 3rd Battalion, 63rd Armor, called me into his office to tell me which tank platoon would be mine to lead. I stood at attention, hopeful. Every new lieutenant wants the sharp platoon — the one that’s already squared away.

“Lieutenant McKinnon,” he began, “I’m assigning you the worst of the twelve platoons in my battalion — 3rd Platoon, Charlie Company.” He then summarized why they were “the worst” — “Their performance stinks. Morale is low. And their platoon sergeant is an alcoholic.”

I walked out of his office with a lot of questions about both the platoon (“How bad could they be?”) and about myself (“Do I have what it takes?”). But gradually a small, strange comfort settled in: with this job there was nowhere to go but up!

One year later, at our annual gunnery exercises, 3rd Platoon, Charlie Company was named the top tank platoon in all of Europe.

We didn’t turn that platoon around because I was brilliant. I was only twenty-three, a wet-behind-the-ears green lieutenant. We turned it around by starting well. I gathered facts before I acted. I won the trust of my soldiers before I asked anything of them. And I got clear on what “winning” actually looked like before I spent a year chasing the wrong things.

The Leadership Challenge

Stepping into a new role is challenging: if you’re not intentional, you can blow the opening not through incompetence, but through impatience.

You feel it the moment you arrive — the pressure to prove yourself, to show everyone they made the right call. So you get busy. You may reach for an old playbook that worked so well in your last role. You start directing, before listening. You start solving problems, before you understand them.

The first temptation is to react instead of diagnose. This is especially strong when you’ve inherited a mess — when your predecessor left problems you can see from a distance. The instinct is to start fixing immediately. But acting on a problem you don’t yet understand is how, with great confidence, you solve the wrong thing.

The second is to lead from “me” instead of “we.” Your inner monologue might sound like this: What do I need to do? What problem do I have to solve? How do I look good here? Natural questions — but the wrong starting point. The better question isn’t “What do I need to do?” but “What needs to be done?” And help with that answer often comes from the people who were here when you arrived.

The third is a relationship problem. Too often, leaders in new roles wait until they need something from someone before they get to know the person. But building strong relationships early is as important as task accomplishment. Why? Because leadership is the art of getting things done through others. Your team will accomplish more if everyone is giving the best they have. And people are likely to give you more of their best if they know you and trust you.

Underneath it all sits the quietest challenge: a lack of clarity on what success even looks like. If you can’t say, in one to two sentences, what winning means in this role — and if your boss would say something different — you are about to spend your first months running hard in a direction nobody asked you to run.

The Leadership Opportunity

So how do you start well? Over the years — in uniform and out, with my own teams and with the executives I coach — I’ve come to identify five keys to starting well in any new role.

#1 — Study before you act.

Get as smart as you can on the current state of what you’ve just inherited by asking a lot of questions. What’s working? What’s broken? Who are the key people? How are their talents aligned with their tasks? What would you change if you were me? What are you afraid I’ll miss? Overall, what are the top strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats relative to your team accomplishing its mission? Here’s an important detail: ask the same questions of everyone. With many diverse inputs, patterns should emerge that no single conversation would ever reveal1.

#2 — Identify and build key relationships2.

You can do this in those very same conversations from #1. Whether or not you act on everything people tell you, they value being heard. “Key relationships” include more than just your direct reports. It’s the folks two levels down, your peers, your boss, and your boss’s peers. Meet over coffee. Take a walk. Invest in relationships when things are relatively calm because you will need to make withdrawals when the stresses come. In all these conversations, carry the posture of a servant: I’m here to serve you, not to be served.3

#3 — Get clear on your deliverables.

What does success look like — to your boss, and for the sake of the organization? Notice this is different from a job description. In fact, the higher you rise, the less anyone hands you a detailed job description. They hired you because they expect you to figure out what the job requires. What you need from them isn’t a task list; it’s clarity on outcomes — and the one or two “third rails” to avoid, boundaries you must not cross.

#4 — Score some early wins.

There will almost always be some low-hanging fruit — obvious fixes you can make in the first 30 to 60 days that demonstrate you can gather information and then act. Take advantage of these. But keep an eye on the bigger decisions too, the ones with longer term impact.4 Just make sure your early wins are substantive and aligned with the larger strategy. A flashy win on the wrong problem is worse than no win at all — it tells the organization you don’t yet understand what matters most.

#5 — Be ready to innovate.

Be careful about running all your old plays. What got you here in your last job won’t necessarily get you where you want to go in this new assignment. The role will hand you problems your past success never prepared you for. Ask yourself: where can I bring something creative to this?5 Managing is doing the same job the same way. Leading is finding a better way to do the same job.

The young lieutenant who walked out of Colonel Armstrong’s office with all kinds of questions had no special gift for any of this. But over the next twelve months, with some fast study and leaning on gut instinct, he did these five things. He listened before he led. He connected with his people. He got clear on the win. And a “worst” platoon became the best in Europe.

Notes

1. If you would like to read a whole book on beginning a new role, including game plans for assessing the job you inherited, check out The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins.

2. For more, see Chapter 12 on How to Start Fast with New Team Members.

3. See Chapter 2 on Servant Leadership.

4. See the chapter on How to Make Big Decisions.

5. See Chapter 6 on How to be Creative.