New Beginnings

In case you missed it, we’ve got a new Prime Minister in number 10, and Keir Starmer is in his first days in his new job. I know very little about being Prime Minister, but I do have very vivid memories of the early weeks of each of my leadership roles - the excitement, the fear, how tired I was at the end of every day from the sheer newness of everything. 

I was once given a book called The First 90 Days prior to starting one of my leadership jobs, a bestseller with a title that’s become a bit of a buzz-word. I found that the book itself had some useful stuff in it, but I’m a bit suspicious of how the premise of the book has come to be interpreted - that you have ninety days to make your mark and prove to the organisation that whoever hired you made the right choice.

Earlier in my career, I worked for a few leaders and managers who seemed to have absorbed this approach. They would come in, change things up immediately, make it clear that a new era had dawned, and alienate half the staff in the process. This bull in a china shop approach rarely seems to go well and I think originates from a particular conception of leadership - that of the heroic figurehead, there to lead from the front, to come in with the bold new idea and save the day. It’s true that new leaders often bring an exciting vision and relevant experiences to the table, but, to be effective, this needs to be paired with a deep knowledge of the organisation, the work it does and the people who do it. 

I’ve had three leadership jobs so far, and each time I’ve started one, I’ve learned a little more about how best to begin. So for anyone who’s going to be starting a new job either now or in the future (including Keir Starmer, if he’s reading), here are a few things I’ve picked up from my experience of beginning. 

Be a sponge 

In the first couple of weeks, soak up every single thing that you can about the organisation you’ve joined. Talk to the staff, the artists, the Board, audience members, participants, service users, contractors - experience the work, listen in in meetings, read as many documents as your brain can handle. It’s a basic point, but still one that many people skip or only do partially - it can be tempting to only talk in depth with the senior team or to wonder whether you really want to stay late to chat with a group of volunteer ushers. Only you will know how much time you have available, and, in my experience, you often glean the most useful information from the most unexpected places. 

Any new joiner has a superpower which is their objectivity - they are coming in with a fairly neutral and objective view on what the organisation does and how it works and they have an amazing opportunity to spot the things that aren’t working so well but are being repeated because they’ve become habitual. I think you’ve got a maximum of three months before your new environment begins to feel more familiar, so use this time to bring the clarity of an outsider to your new home. 

Diagnose

The point of being a sponge is to help you paint a picture of where the organisation is at right now. In the aforementioned book The First 90 Days, the writer, Michael D. Watkins, describes five organisational ‘types’, each of which comes with its own challenges and opportunities and will need different leadership approaches. Whilst I find Watkins’s categories a bit prescriptive, and probably more relevant for for-profit businesses than charities, I like the idea of diagnosing how an organisation is doing when you first arrive. The thing I’m most interested in finding out about is the culture of my new place of work. There will be many strategic challenges to solve - some might be urgent (we need to raise a lot more money in order to survive the next 12 months), others might be more long-term (we should double the size of our learning and participation department to enable us to reach more people in our community). But, as the quote goes, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. For me, developing and maintaining a positive working culture, if it’s not there already, is always goal number one - without this I think it’s very hard to make meaningful change happen. 

Quick fixes

One of the reasons that I think new leaders come in and shake things up straight away is to demonstrate that they want to make change. This isn’t in itself isn’t a bad thing - quite the opposite - but it can be counter-productive if they don’t bring the rest of the team along with them. 

In my experience, whenever I’ve joined an organisation, talking to people and observing how things are done will bring to light a handful of areas that are acknowledged by most people as ‘not working’. It might become clear that everyone finds the weekly staff meeting a waste of time, or that all the budget holders are a bit confused by the spreadsheet they’re being asked to use and don’t feel clear about how to manage their budget lines. These are the things to crack on and fix - because people already want this change, and it demonstrates that you’ve both heard them and are able and willing to act.  

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

Try trialling

For some changes that you want to make, one way to ensure that the people you work with feel ownership over the decision is to do something different on a trial basis. I’ve done this a few times and always find it really useful - it allows you to set a timeframe for a new approach (say, two months) and then ask for feedback at the end of that period. By framing it in this way - that this doesn’t necessarily need to be a permanent change unless it’s found to be useful - the team are able to come at it with an open mind, and know they have the power to change things back if they want. The feedback opportunity is always valuable - I’ve never had an instance where the new approach is scrapped wholesale, but often there are tweaks that are suggested at the end of the initial trial period that I’d not thought of and make things even better. 

Don’t trash your predecessors

As mentioned above, I think many of the issues we have with leadership at the moment come about because of an outdated image of what a leader should be, based on too many stories of conquering heroes, or leading characters in films that come in and save the day. Consequently, it’s easy to slip into inhabiting the idea that, now you’ve arrived, everything will be fine - you’ve spotted all the problems and, damn it, you’re going to fix them. And this in turn can lead into what I consider a cardinal sin - trash talking the leaders who came before you. That’s not to say you may not have opinions about what those people did or didn’t do - they might have left a negative working culture behind them, or made some decisions that left the organisation floundering. But, probably, they were also trying their best, and, at the time, their actions might have seemed logical and decisions made with good intentions. Whatever you think privately, you owe it to the person who came before you to speak about them respectfully, to honour the work they did in front of the staff team and acknowledge the team you’re now leading may have agreed with and supported many of the things that your predecessor introduced. Speaking about them disparagingly or rudely will win you no respect. 

Don’t make promises you can’t keep

Some of the wisest words about promise keeping that I’ve heard come from Game of Thrones (stay with me). Earnest hero Jon Snow says the following when it’s suggested that he should tell a tactical lie: “When enough people make false promises, words stop meaning anything. Then there are no more answers, only better and better lies.” Keir Starmer should take note, and so should we. It’s easy (and good) to start a new job with a sense of optimism, a desire to fix everything you think needs fixing, to make things bigger and better and bolder. It’s also very likely that some of the things you want to accomplish might turn out to be impossible, unadvisable, or simply take much longer than you’d anticipated. It’s fine to set out intentions or goals (“I’d love to invest some more resource in your department”) but to make a commitment to something that you then can’t hold up (“I’m going to get you two new staff members by Christmas”) will erode trust before you’ve had a chance to gain it. 

When the time is right, point the way

Whilst I’ve little time for the knight in shining armour approach, leaders do need to lead. They need to have the skills to draw people together, but it needs to be in service of something. A positive working culture will only take you so far - a team also wants to know what its mission is, what it’s trying to accomplish, so that there is something to measure success against and feel proud of when it’s achieved. 

In the book Creativity Inc., all about the founding and ethos of animation studio Pixar, author Ed Catmull talks about different mental models for leadership, including one used by director Andrew Stanton, who thinks of it as captaining a ship that’s in the middle of the ocean. He talks about the job of the captain as pointing the way towards land - commiting to a destination that provides the crew with a direction to head in. So after all the absorbing, the listening, the diagnosing, the trialling, the thinking and planning, there’ll be a moment when you can pull together everything you’ve learned and lay out your vision of where land is to your team. How you get there can be up for grabs - what you’ve decided is what direction you’ll be going in. 

Leading is a messy business - things are rarely simple, you often can’t do all the things you want to do (at least not all at once) and sometimes you have to acknowledge that the bit of land you were pointing the way towards isn’t particularly hospitable and you’d be better off changing course and heading somewhere slightly different. But I think if you start as you mean to go on - listening, thinking, being honest - you can earn the trust and respect that you’ll need to see you through. Because if we’ve learned one thing from last week’s election, it’s that lying, double standards and a lack of integrity will come back to bite you in the end.