New Leader Assimilation

Condense 6 months assimilation time to 2 weeks!

Background:

Change is constant inside and outside every organization including internal changes in leadership at all levels. We strive to assure leadership changes do not interrupt or slow down continuous improvement in productivity. No doubt as a leader you have transitioned through successive assignments and have needed to introduce yourself to team members you are going to lead in a new assignment. The challenge for a newly appointed leader is to help the team maintain high levels of performance and not be impeded by the uncertainties of what their new supervisor will bring.

The New Leader Assimilation Process described herein is designed to accelerate gaining familiarity and quickly giving team members detailed information about the new leader’s background and vision. This process can also serve as a method for the leader to listen carefully to needs expressed by team members as well as provide a launching pad for communicating where the group is headed.

Work groups operate in varying stages of maturity and various models have been proposed to describe these stages. One of the best and easiest to understand is from the best-selling business book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni. He describes five stages through which leadership teams progress to achieve top level performance. The progressive stages are: (1) Building Trust, (2) Engaging in productive ideological debate, thereby mastering constructive conflict, (3) Achieving commitment to decisions and goals, (4) Holding one another accountable to team goals, and (5) Focusing on and achieving results for the greater good, those of leadership team as higher priority than subordinate team goals. A key point is that your team must have competence in a lower level stage as a prerequisite for moving up to the next one in sequence.

When a new leader takes charge of an existing team, the high level of uncertainty regarding their background, intentions, style, vision and goals naturally causes regression in the progressive stages of team development as team cohesiveness diminishes. The team will typically have “security” needs (back to Stage 1 — Building Trust) because of their lack of ability to predict the new leader’s behavior and expectations. This “insecurity” can be intensified as team members try to “fill in the blanks” concerning characteristics of the new leader not familiar to them and typically the blanks are filled in incorrectly. The challenge for the new leader is to help the team rapidly return to high levels of cohesiveness and achieve the highest potential performance.

The New Leader Assimilation Process is designed to accelerate gaining familiarity with the new leader and quickly giving team members detailed information about the new leader’s background and vision. This process can also serve as a method for the leader to listen carefully to needs expressed by team members as well as provide a launching pad for communicating where the group is headed.

Objectives:

The overall aim of the process is to “jump start” the team and help them move out or get started moving out of Stage 1 — Building Trust. The specific objectives for the New Leader Assimilation process are:

1. Identify team members’ current perceptions of the new leader’s background for the purpose of verifying these perceptions.

2. Develop a list of information team members’ perceive they need to know about their new leader.

3. Share with the new leader items of information that team members believe the leader needs to know about them.

4. Communicate to the new leader things that team members would like the new leader’s help with.

Process:

This process is designed to include a “third party” facilitator, that is, a person who is not a member of the work group. This feature as well as discussion steps with the leader absent, are included as mechanisms for providing a “safe” and relatively uninhibited atmosphere for sharing information. It is important that the facilitator at various stages respect the anonymity expectations of team members.

The process consists of the following steps:

1. Chartering: The new leader meets with the facilitator and reviews the process steps, the underlying principles and goals, and “buys in” to going forward.

2. First Group Meeting: The new leader gets the work group together with the facilitator, introduces the facilitator, and explains his/her desire to utilize the New Leader Assimilation Process and what his/her expected outcomes are. The facilitator explains the process steps. The new leader then leaves the meeting and the facilitator begins collecting information on easel sheets in answer to the following questions:

• What do we know about _______?

• What don’t we know about _____ that we would like to know?

• What does ______ need to know about us?

• What do we need _______’s help with?

3. Leader Debrief: The facilitator adjourns the group meeting and then takes the easel sheets unedited to the new leader and goes through them line by line, helping clarify the information. The facilitator takes care to protect the anonymity of the participants. The facilitator leaves this material with the new leader for him/her to study and reflect on for a couple weeks. The new leader prepares his/her thoughts on how to respond to all of the items on the easel sheet.

4. Second Group Meeting: The leader and facilitator call the group together. The facilitator recaps the process steps up to this point and turns the meeting over to the leader. The new leader, referring to the easel sheets, goes through each of the scribed items. As the new leader speaks, team members can ask questions if they wish to for purposes of clarifying what is on the easel sheets or get clarification of what the leader is saying.

It is important for the new leader to:

· Avoid being defensive

· Be honest and open with responses

· Speak with clarity so that information is not misinterpreted or reinterpreted later

· Be sincere in taking an interest in listening to team members input

· Take advantage of this occasion to begin building an inspiring vision for the team.

When thoughtfully planned and executed the New Leader Assimilation Process can get a new team up and running quickly and head off misunderstandings early on in the life of the new team. Many times a new leader may have a reputation preceding him/her that may not be totally accurate and team members can behave and act based on incorrect assumptions. This process allows a work group to take care of this type of problem early and get synchronized up front to operate at high levels of performance. Six months of assimilation can be condensed to two weeks.

This process can be adapted for use with a new team member entering an existing in-tact team. The purposes and goals are much the same. In this case the leader can act as the facilitator, since the group likely does not in this situation have security needs. As a convenience a “third party” facilitator can still be utilized if this is preferred.