Getting a great start - burning imperative and setting milestones

All week I'm reviewing key ideas from The New Leaders 100-Day Action Plan: How to Take Charge, Build Your Team, and Get Immediate Results (George Bradt, Jayme Check and Jorge Pedraza, John Wiley & Sons, 2006, 230 pages).  Yesterday I covered the options for engaging the new culture and how to control the Day One agenda.  Today I'll review how to get alignment behind a burning imperative and how to set milestones and tracking mechanisms.

The burning imperative

By the end of your first month, the authors say you should get buy-in around a "burning imperative."  That means working with your team to decide on your mission, vision, objectives, goals, strategies and values.  Don't be tempted to write this off as too "touchy-feely."  Don't assume everyone already knows and agrees on the burning imperative.  A shared imperative can help drive fast progress.  A fuzzy, confused imperative will likely have folks working at cross purposes.

The mission answers the question, "Why do we exist?"  A vision is a picture of success in the future.  Objectives are qualitative performance requirements, and goals are the quantitative targets for those objectives.  Strategies in this case are fairly high-level decisions about how to reach the goals, and values will drive behaviors.

It sounds like a lot of work, but the authors suggest building this imperative in a one-day off-site workshop.  Their tool 7.1 provides a framework for the workshop.  You can run the workshop yourself, get facilitation help from within the organization, or bring in an outside facilitator. 

Regardless of how you do it, the authors suggest getting this done in your first thirty days.  Find a day that works for 80 percent of your team, and then give the others a chance to change their schedules or not.  Get as many of your team there as you can, but have it in the first month even if you can't get everybody.

Setting milestones and tracking mechanisms

By Day 45, you need to have agreed on milestones - for your team, and for the individuals on your team.  And you need to setup regular tracking reports and meetings.  You might want weekly meetings to start, but meet at least once per quarter at a minimum.  (My preference is for more frequent meetings in the crucial first 100 days.)

Remember to set SMART goals, and to set key milestones along the way so you can keep things on track.

For more ideas on setting and tracking milestones, see:

• Tool 8.1, a goal recording and tracking sheet,
• My post about individual performance planning,
• My post about monthly coaching sessions, and
• My post on how to increase the chance you will achieve a goal

Tomorrow:  selecting one or two quick wins by Day 60 and deciding on people and roles by Day 70.