Establishing Organizational Citizenship
Popular onboarding books exhort you, as a New Leader, to come in and quickly deliver results. Many New Leaders mistake this message as an invitation to make immediate and sweeping changes, or operate outside important norms.
The irony is that your first major task as a New Leader is not to drive results, but to signal your desire to become a full-fledged corporate citizen. Here are some suggestions to accelerate your "naturalization."
- Demonstrate respect for the organization, its history and people.
- Emphasize your early learning over performance.
- Build relationships by understanding others’ worlds: their operations, their strengths, and the things they need from you and your team.
- Balance the temptation to bring external best practices with a thorough search for existing practices and capabilities.
- Communicate your priorities to underscore their harmony with, and support of, organizational objectives.
- Focus on, and communicate, “we” rather than “I” or “you.”
Contact us if you would like to receive a document that illustrates how to balance the cultural expectations New Leaders face.
