The First 100 Days in a New Job

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick, and welcome to CareerCast at the Chicago GSB to help you advance in your career. Today we're speaking with George Bradt, who combines senior line management and consulting experience from a whole variety of companies around the world, including Unilever, Procter & Gamble, and Coca-Cola. Today, he uses all of that experience as the managing director of PrimeGenesis, where he helps executives transition into a new job and do it in a way that makes them successful at a much higher rate.

He has a bachelor's in economics from Harvard and an MBA from Wharton, and has written a couple of books. But the one we're going to talk about today is The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan. George, thanks for taking the time.

George Bradt: Delighted to be here.

Anita Brick: You know, it's very interesting. There's so many things about how to find a job, how to find your passion, but not too many things about what to do to manage the process. Say once you've received the offer. So as a start, and we have a number of questions that were submitted by students and alums, what do you think are the three most important things to address before you even accept the offer?

George Bradt: The headline is organization, role, and personal risks. There are seven major landmines, whether they're coming in from the outside or whether they're getting promoted from within. There’s the organization risk: if the organization fails, you're going to fail with it. There's the role risk, which is people not having gotten clear on what the role is or gotten everybody else aligned around what the role is.

There's a personal risk where if you've oversold yourself and you don't actually have the strengths or motivation. Then there's a learning risk. There's a relationship risk. There's a delivery risk. And then lastly there's an adjustment risk. Survival of the fittest is really survival of the people that can adapt the best to changes.

Before you accept a job, you've got to do due diligence. Because if you don't make sure that the organization risk is manageable, the role risk is under control, and that the personal risk isn't there—that you haven't oversold yourself—you're toast. If you don't get that right, nothing else matters.

Anita Brick: One of the Executive MBA students asked, how do you even negotiate going, say, from mid-level management to a more senior position where you may be perceived as middle management, but you know you're ready for the next job?

George Bradt: My sense would be it's negotiation and action. It's one of these … where it's really hard to convince somebody you can do something until you've done it. Now there are these huge differences in what you do when you're managing yourself or managing others, or managing managers or managing a department or managing the enterprise.

And the big difference there—I think the big difference there is when you're managing the department, you're really leading processes. You're leading in the strategic process, you're leading the operational process, you're leading the organizational process, whereas at lower levels you're managing tasks. So instead of negotiating and saying, wow, I can do this, probably the best way to make the jump is to take on some of the processes and demonstrate it.

Go to your boss and say, well, let me lead the strategic process or let me lead the operational process around this, or let me see if I can help improve our organizational processes. Demonstrate that you can do it. So that's negotiating by doing.

Anita Brick: What are the top skills that you would see that you would need to demonstrate to make that leap from mid-level management to a more senior level?

George Bradt: Well, it's a broadened perspective. It's the difference between managing the discrete task and managing the process. And what happens when you're managing the processes. It's sort of the combination of discipline with a whole different level of relationship skills, where you're pulling people in who don't work for you but work with you and enrolling them in the process. And it's a much broader perspective.

Anita Brick: All right. So now you have the job offer, you know, sort of, what you're going to do. OK. What do you then do between the time you accept the offer and the time you start, which could be as little as two weeks, or it could be several months?

George Bradt: It's a magic time. What happens is, in most cases, particularly with people coming in from the outside, the company has taken longer to find you than they wanted to, and they've certainly taken longer to get you to accept the job than they wanted to. And they want you to start yesterday.

You, on the other hand, have either been working like crazy in your old job, or you've been looking for a job or doing whatever you've been doing. And you know, once you start the job, you're going to be working 150 percent of the time. So you want to take a vacation, go skiing, go to the beach, spend some time with your family, whatever.

Turns out you're both wrong, because it turns out that stretching the time between acceptance and start, and then making use of that time, is incredibly valuable. Imagine, if you will—you're one of the people who’s going to be working for me. And imagine you wanted the job—you were up for promotion, but you didn't get it because they hired me in from the outside.

Anita Brick: In fact, that was one of the questions one of the students asked. You're going into a team. Four people on that team that report to you competed for that job. None of them got the job; you did. How do you even manage that situation?

George Bradt: OK, well, let's combine the two things. Part of it is what you do before you get there. And then part of it is what you do afterwards. You're one of those four people, OK? And you wanted the job. Imagine if I show up on day one and then day three I come by your desk in the morning and I say, listen, I know you're one of the stars.

I know you're one of the lead internal candidates for this job. Can we have lunch today? I really want to get to know you before we really get into this.

Anita Brick: How do you do that sincerely? So that you kind of make that bridge without alienating the person further?

George Bradt: You don't do it. You don't do it on day two. What you do is … imagine the difference between that and me calling you up the day after I accept the job, two weeks before I start. and saying, listen, I've just accepted the job. I know they've told you that, and I know you were one of the lead candidates.

I'd really like to get to know you even before I show up. I'd like to spend some time with you. And just before I get biased by anything, it just seems like it is in your best interest and my best interest in the company's best interest for us to figure out how to work together. It's so important to me that I will meet you anywhere in the world, any time you want, over the next two weeks before I start, but let's get it right before I start.

It's a very different conversation, right? You're not going to say no.

Anita Brick: No, you're not going to say no. I don't think you'd say no to either situation.

George Bradt: But this time you're going to give me the benefit of the doubt, and we're going to sit down. We're gonna have a conversation. I'm going to get to know you. I mean, the agenda is just that. It's just seeing how we work together. Now, onto your second question. I've got these four people. I do the same thing with all four of them.

What you do with them is you do exactly that. You get to know them personally because in the end, all leadership is personal. And then for your first six to eight weeks, you do absolutely everything you can to support them and work with them and make the working relationship great. You don't evaluate them; you just wholeheartedly believe that you're going to make this work as well as you can.

And if these people that wanted your job and now have to work for you don't come to you sometime in the first six to eight weeks and say something like, I’ve got to tell you, I really wanted the job. I was a little disconcerted when you got it, but now I get it and I understand, and I can learn from you, and I can work with you, and this is going to be OK—if they don't do that proactively in the first six to eight weeks, make them go away. I'm not saying fire them, OK? I'm saying if they're not going to support you, they need to be working for somebody else.

Anita Brick: Got it. OK, now you start the job. What are the first kinds of things that you can do to establish a positive reputation outside of the probably one to a few people who may have wanted your job.?How do you get some quick wins? How do you establish yourself and kind of learn the lay of the land?

George Bradt: This is now the pivot point for our whole conversation here. We tell new leaders, people going into these leadership roles, that they really only have to do three things: cheat, control, and exploit.

Anita Brick: OK, so those are provocative words. Tell us what you mean by those three.

George Bradt: What I mean by those three is: cheating is about getting a head start before the start, mapping out your plan, figuring out your messaging, figuring out what's important. You want to use the time between acceptance and start to get a jump start on learning and relationships. And then over your first hundred days, you want to really start accelerating delivery.

So cheating is getting a head start before the start. Control is taking control of the message, which means you have to be clear on what your message is. What's your vision for the future? What's the platform for change? Why does anybody need to do anything different? And then what do you want people to do? Your message is going to come somewhere out of there, but you have to take control of the message and take control of that message on day one and over and over your first hundred days—that's control.

Exploit is about exploiting opportunities in the marketplace. And the only way to do that as a leader is to build a high-performing team. So over your first hundred days, what you're doing is—assuming you've gotten a head start, assuming you've got your message and you're starting to seed your message—you’ve got to basically jump start your high-performing team by putting in place four or five building blocks.

First thing is—we call it an imperative. Other people call it a shared purpose, but in English it's getting everybody on the same page. So everybody knows what they've got to do and everybody understands it. That's the first, most important thing you’ve got to do in the first 30 days. Second thing you’ve got to do is jump start your operational process, but you’ve got to get some sort of system in place where you can manage milestones so you know who's doing what by when in line with that burning imperative.

Third thing you’ve got to do is, you have to, have to, have to pick some early wins. There is going to be a conversation at six months, but somebody is going to turn to the new leader's boss and say, how's she doing? And in today's world, if the answer to “how’s she doing” is “She's great. We love her. She fits with the organization. She's blending in. Everybody likes her. She's kind of off to a slow start, but we just feel great about her. She's just got the skills, the strategic thinking. She's going to be terrific.

If that's the answer she's got, she may not find out about it for six to 12 months. But on “off to a slow start,” there was a seed of doubt planted and people will start looking at what she's doing a little bit differently.

Oh, I wonder why she didn't get that. Wonder why she wasn't that prepared. So the antidote is: How's she doing. How is she doing? Let me tell you what she's gotten done. She's done a lot of that. Which is why you have to pick your early wins. Probably by the end of your second month. So you got four months to deliver them, and then you got to jump-start your organizational process.

You got to figure out who's in the right role, who's in the wrong role, who you have to move now, but you can evolve. But you got to figure it out before the end of your first hundred days.

Anita Brick: OK. So how do you—one relationship we didn't talk about managing is managing up. What are the things that you need to do at the beginning to manage up? I mean, certainly having the quick wins will help a little bit down the line, but are there any foundational pieces to put in place at the beginning with your manager?

George Bradt: Absolutely. And and some of these are basics. And most people will kind of go at this. But with your manager you're really managing two risks. You're managing the delivery risk—you have to deliver what your manager wants you to deliver—and you're managing the relationship risk. The relationship with your manager is absolutely, without a doubt, no questions asked, the most important relationship you’ve got. If that's bad—people don't leave companies. They leave managers. Jump-starting a relationship with the manager is maybe the most important thing you have to do between the moment when you accept the job and when you start.

Anita Brick: And what are the things that you can do very tactically to make that work?

George Bradt: It starts with a conversation where you lay out three things. The first thing … you're really asking, it's like, hey boss, this is great. I'm so excited to work with you. Give me your read on the situation. Understand their perspectives. What's the organization's strengths? What's keeping them up at night? What's important? What's working? Hey, what's going on? Just, you know, is this a startup? Is this a turnaround? Are we in trouble? Do you want me to keep doing things? What do you want me to change?

Second thing is expectations. OK? What's really important? Two parts. What's really important to you? Because I need to understand the context. And then what's important for me to do to help you get what you need done. So what are your expectations of me, and what are the resources involved? Because expectations are useless unless there's a resource there as well. Otherwise I can't get it done.

And then the last piece is, we call it implementation. It's code for culture. But you just want to ask them. So tell me how you track things. How are—what are your control points? What are you managing? What—you know, what are the really, really important reports or meetings?

I want to make sure I understand that. How do we make decisions? What decisions do you make? What decisions do I make? Because shame on you if you're going into a marketing job and you walk into your boss's office week two and say, I thought I should tell you I fired the agency, and your boss goes, that was my decision to make—you know, then you're in trouble.

And then the third part is communication. Just ask them what's the best way to communicate with you in terms of mode? Do you like face to face? Do you like emails? Do you like voicemails? Do you like blogs? Do you want me to get you through Facebook? And how do I communicate with you? Frequency: how often do you want me to communicate with you?

Same thing, you know. Shame on you if you walk in after a month for your monthly update and your boss goes, excuse me, I want a weekly update, where have you been? And shame on you if you walk in week two for your second weekly update and your boss goes, no. If you need a babysitter, go somewhere else. I expect monthly updates.

Just ask. And then formality. And the last thing which we've actually added since we wrote the book is, what's the best way to disagree with you?

Anita Brick: Oh, it's a great question. Yeah, might be a little disconcerting, but it's a great question.

George Bradt: The other piece there is make sure you don't believe the answer.

Anita Brick: How do you read between the lines?

George Bradt: This goes to scouts, seconds, and spies.

Anita Brick: OK, there's a theme here going on.

George Bradt: Scout, seconds, and spies are the most important way for you to understand the culture and figure out how things work. So scouts are people from the outside that are going to the territory and they're looking around. These are people that maybe worked at the company before. They may be customers, they may be suppliers, they may be analysts.

They're people that have a view of the company that say, hey, here's what's really important. Could be somebody that worked for your boss before. It could be somebody your boss worked for—you know, hey, tell me about this guy. What's the best way to disagree with them? Scouts. Seconds are people that are going to help you. Ideally, your boss is one of your best coaches.

It could be people from HR, could be a mentor, could be the person that brought you in. But it's people within the organization. You know, the analogy comes from the old days of dueling, where everybody had a second. They're people that are supporting you, you know, for a professional golfer it's the caddie. So those are the seconds. And then the spies are the people that are going to tell you what's really going on.

You know, look to the administrative assistant world because they always know what's going on. If you're coming at a mid-level, look to the people that work for the people that work for you, they know and they're not afraid of you, and they'll tell you the truth if you ask them.

So ask your boss. What's the best way to disagree with him or her? Check in with your scouts. Check in with your seconds. Check in with your spies. Watch and then figure out. Generally, your boss will overestimate their appetite for agreement by at least one click.

Anita Brick: OK. How do you find where their hidden powers are?

George Bradt: You've got to figure out how the information is flowing. You've got to figure out how decisions are really made. You got to figure out who's really allocating resources. And this is where your scouts, seconds, and spies are so important. If you ask them, how do things really work? But as you come into a new organization, understanding the hidden organizations, the shadow organizations, the back channels—it's one of the most important things you have to do.

Anita Brick: How do you do it?

George Bradt: You do it by asking. You do it by asking the scouts, people that worked there before, how do things really work? You do it by asking your seconds, hey, how does this really happen? And then you do it by accessing your spies: OK, we need to get this thing to happen. How do we figure it out? Oh, we got to talk to so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so.

Look for the people where there's a lot of informal, non-work communication going through. The person that controls the weekly plans for the softball league? They know everybody and people will tell them things, and they'll know—they can be a great spy.

Anita Brick: So one of the students asks the question, when is it the right time to implement changes, change direction, maybe even make cultural changes? How do you know how to balance what you feel needs to be done and do it very directly? Kind of managing the whole culture and network.

George Bradt: Two different ways of looking at it. The first is, we use an ACES framework to think about this. A is assimilate, CE is converge and evolve, and S is shock. So ACES is just a way to remember it. But arguably those are three different ways to come into an organization. Some organizations today, you know, you come in, you try to be anything other than exactly what they are, and they will chew you up and spit you out pretty quickly.

Choosing to assimilate into any organization is always the safest way to come in, and likely to produce the least amount of change.

Anita Brick: And it doesn't have to be a very conservative organization. You could have to assimilate to an organization like Google, which is not very straitlaced at all.

George Bradt: Absolutely. And if you don't fit with that culture, they're going to spit you out. OK.

Anita Brick: So assimilation is one.

George Bradt: Absolutely. What we—we were working with one guy who'd come out of a corporate environment and went into—not Google, but another, more relaxed place. And he kept trying to wear suits. And I said, you can't wear a suit. Everyone else is in jeans. You're not fitting in. He finally got the point. So that's assimilate.

Anita Brick: OK.

George Bradt: The other end is shock, where you come in and you make changes right away. A couple of my partners are turnaround experts, and they describe walking into one company and showing up at 9:00 in the morning and saying, good morning, we're in charge, you now all work for us. And here are your assignments for the day.

Jack? Where’s Jack? Jack, I want you to get this done. Sue, I want you to get this done. We'll meet again at 5:00. Want to know what you've done today? Total shock. Totally changing the organization. Guarantee you do that, the organization will hate you from day one. You want to use this approach very rarely. If you're coming to a company that is bleeding $1 million a day in cash and has $10 million in the bank, and they're going to be out of business in 14 days unless you shock the system, you better shock it.

In general, though, 80 to 90 percent of the time, the best way to come in is to think about converging and evolving—where the first thing you do is become part of the organization. Learn about it, understand how things work, get accepted, and then slowly evolve the organization to where it needs to be. The question then becomes when do you shift? And how do you—when do you stop assimilating, when do you stop converging and when do you start evolving?

And of course, the answer is, it depends. It's going to be different in different organizations. Point is, you won't know till you get there. So you come in converging; in some cases you'll start evolving it after a week or two. In some cases it'll be after a couple of months. Some cases won't be till the end of a year.

But it's this balance of risk and reward. It is a very fine balance. I wish I had a more scientific way of telling you the answer there.

Anita Brick: OK, so what are some clues of the timing? What are some clues that an organization is ready to evolve with you?

George Bradt: Focus on the results and then focus—if you start with the results—here's what I have to deliver. Here's how I have to change the processes—the strategic, operational, organizational processes to deliver the results. The culture will follow.

Anita Brick: OK, but time out for a second. You have inherited a team that's underperforming. They don't produce results very well. You have to work with them. How do you accelerate the results when you have an organization or a team that is not very efficient, not very effective. Probably not very happy. So how do you do that?

I mean, it's nice to say let's just make more results. But how do you do that in an environment where the resources you have are not that terrific and you have to motivate them first, and change is not one of their favorite things?

George Bradt: I guess my premise is, leadership is fundamentally about enabling and inspiring people to do their absolute best together, to realize a meaningful and rewarding shared purpose.

Anita Brick: And that's great. At a practical level, what are some tactical things that you can do if you have this underperforming team to actually do that? Be taken seriously where they rise to the occasion?

George Bradt: OK, so the first thing you do is you lay out that shared purpose. Here's what we're doing, get everyone to buy into that. Then you lay out, OK, who's going to get what done by when? A lot of times, an underperforming team—nobody's told them what to do. So you just say here's we're going to get done.

And depending upon how weak they are, you'll manage your milestones that way. You know, if you're dealing with senior-level people, you're going to do quarterly milestones. If you're dealing with a group that's less effective, it's monthly. If it's even less effective, you'll do it daily. You know, if you got a real problem, great—we're going to meet every morning for half an hour.

We're going to do daily tasks so that you're—you as the manager or leader apply different levels of management based on what they're capable of doing. So you get the milestones, pick some early wins, pick something they can achieve. Almost by definition, the early wins are not gonna be the most important wins. They're going to be the things we can do.

OK, today we're going to plan the company picnic, you know, just to get it done just so people can say, wow, we did something. The early wins are, of course, about the six-month conversation, but they're about giving these people confidence in themselves. And then sooner rather than later, you've got to do a role sort, even if you can't fire anybody, move them off the team.

It's almost guaranteed that you can apply this basic matrix of who's in the right job, who's in the wrong job, who's performing best, who's performing less. And you can then move people around. If I've got somebody that's performing reasonably well and they're in vaguely the right job, I'm not going to worry about them. If I've got somebody that's performing poorly and they're in the wrong job …

I took over a guy …. There was a lady working for me who was just killing the people she was managing. She was overmanaging them. She was controlling. She was so detail oriented, they had no room to breathe. But she was terrific. I said, great, and I put her in charge of strategic planning and media. It was all numbers-driven. Research, teaching, planning, research, media.

Gave her that group; freed up this group to succeed. She got to play with her numbers and she turned into a star performer. So in your underperforming team, likely you've got somebody you can move to a better role. You can likely shuffle the team so they deliver early wins against those milestones in realizing that shared purpose.

Anita Brick: So it really is what you said before. It is managing results. But the context and the speed, the pace, may be different depending on the level of quality and performance of the team and the resource management. When you're shuffling, you're finding where people's strengths are and hopefully being able to move them around.

George Bradt: Yeah, the big difference is the level of intervention and the pace.

Anita Brick: So what if you had—and you may have experienced this—you took over a position. You're promoted into a position that is more senior than where you'd been before. Actually, this question came from one of the Evening MBA students, and now you have this wonderful role. But the person who left it kind of left it in disarray and won't share any of the information.

How do you manage that role? Because now that person, you don't report to that person, they don't have to do anything for you, but they've left things in a little bit of a mess and you have no information to really fix it.

George Bradt: It's a turnaround situation, so you're going to have to get your information from other people. And what happens there is all of a sudden the learning risk is a big deal. And you need to understand, you need to dig in big time to understand the customers—all work is a process. You know, total quality. You'll see suppliers provide inputs into the process of the work that provides outputs to customers.

So if all work is a process, the customers could be internal customers or external customers or whatever. Understand the customers, understand what they need, understand the collaborators, the people that can help you. The suppliers, the other people in the work chain that provide work to you could be outside people, could be inside people, customers, collaborators.

Understand the strengths you've got—the capabilities of your team. What do we have? What resources do we have? What works? What doesn't work? Understand the competitors, external competitors, internal competitors. Who's out there trying to make this group fail? There is somebody out there trying to make this group fail and then understand the broader conditions. What's going on in the world around us?

Get that learning fast. Then you can make your evaluation around where you deploy your resources. Pretty clearly, if you go into a situation like that and you're dependent on the predecessor to give you the information, you're going to fail.

Anita Brick: Right. So you have to use your spies and scouts and seconds and all of that.

George Bradt: Absolutely. And in this case, there's going to be some more readily apparent information as well.

Anita Brick: One person asked the question—this is actually an Executive MBA student. This person landed the job, started the job. And after he started the job realized that the job was great. But he really mismanaged the salary comp benefits negotiation.

George Bradt: Right.

Anita Brick: Is it too late? Can something be done to renegotiate?

George Bradt: I think it is, because you're—what happens is if you try to renegotiate things after you've started, you're going to trip up on both the relationship and delivery risks. You'll trip up on the delivery risk in that you're spending time on something that doesn't help you deliver. You'll trip up on the relationship risk …

Anita Brick: Good point.

George Bradt: … because whoever you're talking to about renegotiating just got this huge doubt about your motivation, right?

You … I don't see how you win. The only way to win is to overdeliver so that the company realizes that they're underpaying you or they, you know, they're not treating you as well as they should, so that when they want to promote you sooner than you might have been because you're getting, you know, you're too—you're not getting paid enough, then you can negotiate a bigger jump on the promotion.

Anita Brick: All right. So how does this person not feel resentment and not complain, either inside the organization or even outside of the organization?

George Bradt: Well, there's two ways: they either get over it or they quit.

Anita Brick: I guess those are two good points. This is true.

George Bradt: But you're not going to win. You can't go back and renegotiate. You either say, right, made a mistake, take the hit and move on. Or if you can't live with it—made a mistake, go get yourself a better job.

Anita Brick: You wonder if this person made this mistake in negotiating. Maybe they hadn't done their homework, but you.

George Bradt: But you didn't ask that.

Anita Brick: No, I didn't. He didn't ask that. He just wanted to know.

George Bradt: And there was an article in one of your recent—the Chicago Graduate School of Business magazines that people almost always under negotiate because they fail to understand the size of the pie.

Anita Brick: Good point.

George Bradt: And they settle for $150,000. And they didn't realize that they could have gotten $200,000. It's going to happen.

Anita Brick: But it's true. So what's your greatest success story with helping somebody kind of accelerate their transition into an executive position?

George Bradt: It's a fun story because two people got promoted at the same time and it's a matrix organization. So one was promoted to chief financial officer and one was promoted to division president. And what was interesting about this one—because it was a matrix organization, the division CFO had to do a report to the new division president and the overall CFO.

We were brought in to work with just the division president, and we met with her about a month before she started and helped her map out her 100-day plan. And she then started cheating. She went out and she met with people before she started and got to know them. She was very much in control of her message through her first first few days, and then before the end of her first month, she pulled her whole team together—it was a global team—pulled them together for a two-day workshop where they figured out, what do we have to do, what's important, how do we work together?

And they also identified some early wins. Then they went off and started executing against those early wins. And then three weeks later, she pulled the team back together again. And they were there tracking the milestones and how they were doing. It was a love-in. They'd already started delivering. They felt good about things. It was great. This team was off to a fantastic start.

And then our divisional CFO, three hours into this four-hour meeting said, you know, it's kind of interesting. This team's feeling good. We're delivering, we've done this. I know what's going on. What's interesting is I haven't even yet met my other boss. So it's a paired comparison. Well, we've got this guy who on the one hand is part of a team … he's in at least his third, probably fourth meeting with his new boss. Absolutely a second meeting with the whole team. And they're starting to feel good about themselves at seven weeks. And his other boss hadn't had time to even meet with him yet.

Anita Brick: Well, so the other person could have a little coaching to do.

George Bradt: Well, I made that point to the organization.

Anita Brick: There you go. So does this approach change depending on what part of the world you are transitioning into a role?

George Bradt: The short answer is yes. Let me tell you two stories. We were working with a guy that had been at a bank in Japan, left Japan to go work in Hong Kong because he was a tax exile, so with the same bank. But he needed to get his deferred compensation in Hong Kong, it's 10% tax rate versus 50%. In the middle of his year in Hong Kong, he switched banks and another bank hired him to be head of Asia.

And their Asian office was back in Japan. But they understood the tax exile piece, and they agreed to let him stay living in Hong Kong and work out of the Hong Kong office. So we're working with him, talking about what he was doing. And I asked him my favorite question, which is, what are you doing day one? And he said, oh, well, I'm going to go into the office and meet some people.

Great. Which office? Well, Hong Kong. I work in Hong Kong. No, you don't work in Hong Kong. You're temporarily based in Hong Kong. But the head of Asia sits in Japan. So what he ended up doing on our advice was … it was a Western bank working in Japan. So he ended up flying up to Tokyo with his wife and taking all of his direct reports and their spouses out to dinner the night before he started, because it's a big expat community, so it's very important to do that. So that's the sort of Western piece.

Then he showed up for work and he introduced himself to everybody across Asia from this big hoot-n-holler, yeah, big sort of conference call thing, on the trading floor. 9:00: Hello, I'm here. I'm in Japan. I'm in charge. Sort of taking face from self, as they would say in Japan. Did some other things during the day, and then that night he took the bank's biggest customer in Japan out to dinner, big face to the customer to be out to dinner first day. We were very excited about this. He got off to a great start. Then he flew around Asia, did stuff.

So we then met another guy who was going to work for a different company in the United States, and we were all excited about this and said, hey, you know, what about this idea? And we have the human resource people from the new company on the phone. And she said, well, little problem. One is we never do anything with spouses. And two, we don't actually like big restaurants. We tend to hang out in bars. So instead of taking his direct reports and their spouses out to dinner in Tokyo, this guy took just his direct reports up to a bar for burgers the night before.

Yeah, very different cultural stuff. I guess the point is, it's absolutely cross-cultural: Asia versus Brazil versus the United States. But that's not good enough. You've got to understand the culture of the company you're going into and the microculture of the organization.

Anita Brick: Great. Well, it sounds like people who are just starting a job have—or just being offered a job—have a lot of things ahead of them. What else would you like to tell us that you haven't already told us about the best way to launch successfully in those first 100 days?

George Bradt: A lot of people that read our book, The New Leader 100-Day Action Plan, or sit down with us to map out their 100-day plan, get to the end of it and say, gosh, George, this is really just common sense. And it is! What's important about it … what's important about our process is structuring the common sense. And what's going to happen is, every day that you're on a new job, you're going to lose a little more control over your time.

The day after you accept a job, before you start, you have total control. You can set the agenda. You can decide who you meet with. You can take charge of the message. After you've been there two months, you're reacting to customers, suppliers, your boss, your people. You're getting pulled in a million different directions. It's why it's so … you know, the cheat …

You're right. Cheat, control and exploit is a provocative way of saying it. But the real message is take the time to plan it out. Get a head start before the start. Take control of the message. Take control of your onboarding. Because if you're not in charge of it, it's not going to happen the way you want it to happen. Take control of your message through your day one.

And then the last piece is this exploit piece. What about the high-performing team? If you're coming into a leadership position, absolutely the only thing you can do by yourself, the only thing you're capable of doing is failing. If you want to be successful in a leadership position, by definition, it's all about the people following you. And investing time over those first 100 days to build and accelerate the performance of the team—I firmly believe is the best thing you can do.

Anita Brick: Great, great end point. And George, thank you very much.

George Bradt: A delight! I enjoyed it.

Anita Brick: This is really great. And if you want to learn more about … there's a bunch of information on George's site. He is at www.PrimeGenesis.com. And thanks very much and thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at the Chicago GSB. Keep advancing.