Gents,
I have been a podcast listener now for 2 years and I attribute a lot of my management success to the advice given in these casts. I took over my local sales office's outside sales team in 2010 (10 people) and spent the last 2 years turning it into a well oiled machine. I have now been offered a promotion to take over our entire sales office as the General Manager. The caveat is that the existing GM will "swap" roles with me and take over my duties. He will report to me as well as 2 other direct reports (inside sales manager and product manager) and there will be about 40 skips. This poses some challenges as he has run his branch vastly different than I intend to operate...little accountability and a lack of focus on results (hence the change being driven by senior leadership). My new role will give me management over many seasoned 25+ year employees who are somewhat resistant to change. Do you have any advice on how to organize my "kick-off" meeting to address the 40 or so people and make sure I start off on the right foot? I have reviewed some of the content in the podcast discussing "new hires" and setting the ground rules. I am thinking about incorporating these into my presentation.
Side Note: None of my new directs conduct one on ones so this will be low hanging fruit for improvement.
Any advice you can share above and beyond this would be appreciated.
Mike
PS: I am only 34 years old and many of the branch personel are 10-20 years older than me.
I have a few pieces of advice
First and foremost, congrats on the promotion! On to the advice (not in any particular order):
1 - If you can, have a candid conversation with you current boss/future direct. If he is being demoted, you need to make sure he's not going to sabotage. If he's been around a while, he'll say the right thing. But, it's a great opportunity to set expectations.
2 - If you haven't already, make sure you have a candid conversation with you new boss. I'd want to know why the old boss isn't being fired if they are failing. Is your new boss expecting you to manage him out or is this some sort of last attempt at saving the person's job.
3 - Don't make a lot of changes right away. Take some time to observe the other teams.
4 - A corollary to the previous point - introduce changes slowly - If you make a lot of changes, people will panic.
5 - Create a plan after the first month (+/- a week), get buy-in from your new boss. Then start working it.
I'm sure there is a lot more, but these are the items that came to mind immediately.
-Dan
When I took over a huge
When I took over a department aged 30 I arranged a quick 1:1 with everyone, about 100+ people. It gave me a chance to set out my vision and get feedback from people on how the departments are currently running, the current ethos, culture etc. They found it a really powerful tool that I had taken the time to actually speak with them all individually.
I would also set up my new lines of communications through 1:1s with new directs, meetings etc, and take the advice given above, find out how it is currently before doing too much, too fast.
Great Feedback
Thank you for the advice. Very good content and will undoubtedly be put into use. One on Ones will be some easy "low hanging" fruit for me...
How about New Manager Assimilation?
I haven't heard Mark and Mike talk about this, but an experienced senior manager I know mentioned that holding a new manager assimilation was an effective way to kick start a relationship with the new team. He shared a link with me:
http://www.leadinginsight.com/assimilation_process.htm
And if you do a Google search I see there are a few more links with some suggestions on how to run such a process.
You could think of it as a twist on the skip levels that they recommend specifically for the case of a new manager.