From guest blogger Stephen Welch…
I’ve been working on a development guide for people who have just been promoted. The brief was to give the happy new employee a guide to how to behave in the new job. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised context was key.
Success in any new role is not about how you match the job description. It is about context and how you lead a new team to success. How you align them around some key priorities. How you think about new relationships, team motivations and working in the right way, at the right time, for the right result.
This meant my draft development guide suddenly changed focus. Yes, there is content on the role, and the competencies required to succeed in it. But there is now a lot more content on themes like:
– What is the team situation and dynamic?
– What does the organization require of the role? Is it a start-up, maintain success, repair, or total rebuild?
– How do you align the team around a shared set of goals and ways of working?
– Does the team have a consistent view of the situation and what is required? Is that the same as yours?
The challenge in any new role is that you are entering a new situation and a new context. And unless you take the time to understand that context, there is a risk you will miss the mark. This means underperformance.
So I realised in building the development guide that I needed to give the newly-promoted manager a time, a space, a methodology to think about context and the team situation. And maybe even running an event with their team to unearth the key issues.
And this is where Mirror Mirror can come in as a structured process of doing exactly that.