Get ready for a new role (Week 7-8)
Your focus area for weeks 7 and 8 is to continue on the strengths theme and start sharing the love! Building your most important relationships from a position of strength will help to maintain the momentum you’ve created so far.
Spend 30-40 minutes creating your plan now, then follow it for the next 2 weeks.
Simple.
Strengths trading
What to do
You’re going to make sure that you and the most important people around you in your new role are in a position to really support and challenge each other! You’re going to focus on the shared strengths that you’ve got available to you and make sure they’re delivering value for you as you work together.
Why do it
Building relationships from a position of strength will typically speed up the development of trust from a base of confidence. People will often wait for relationships to build through time spent together, but you don’t always have the luxury of time! By trading on your strengths, you’ll be in a great position to:
- Have a clear understanding of what great combined performance looks like
- Easily support and challenge each other around stuff that helps performance the most
- See what’s going to work well in your relationships and where you need to plan for gaps
- Have a clear reference point so you can build on success or deal with failure effectively
How to do it
There are 3 steps to take with this. Read through these, look at the example and then create your own plan.
1) Key relationships and shared success
You’ve probably got a lot of important relationships to build in your new role. For the next couple of weeks, you’re just going to focus on 3 key ones. So, who are the 3 most important people for you to build strong working foundations with and what’s the shared success that you’re both invested in? Make notes about what you’ve learned from the time you’ve already spent together.
2) The strengths trading floor
From step 1, what collective strengths do you need to make the most of as you work with each colleague? What strengths do you each bring? Where do you need to combine your strengths?
Once you’ve got the strengths to be traded clear in your mind, go and check what your colleague thinks, and whether there’s anything to add or change.
3) Check progress and keep building
Each time you work with your colleagues, keep holding each other accountable for making the most of your individual and joint strengths, the need to keep reviewing and learning and keep checking progress you’re making towards your shared goal.
Example plan
You’re nearly ready to trade some strengths. To help you along the way we’ve completed an example of a Project Manager starting a new, senior leadership role. Read through it, get some ideas from it and then create your own plan.
1. Key relationships and shared success
| Who? | Shared Success? | Notes/thoughts |
|---|---|---|
| James | Successful project delivery, on time. | Experienced colleague. Confidence is strong. Partnering/collaboration really strong here, so no sense of hierarchy is important. Just work together! |
| Ian | Successful project delivery, on budget, with no surprises. | The financial element is obviously important to Ian. Showing how we can help each other and work together from the outset will be really important. |
| Jerome | Virtual and Cross-site teams working really well together with a shared contribution to the project. | Needs some challenge to make sure we get his team stepping up and contributing to the overall success. Support/Challenge balance will be really important to establish. |
2. The strengths trading floor
| My Strengths | Colleague Strengths | Joint Strengths to develop |
|---|---|---|
| Guiding Teams. Connecting with Experts. |
James – Outstanding PM skills. Trusted/experienced delivery. | Stakeholder management and political insight. |
| PM brilliant Basics. Planning/Organisation. Connecting with experts. |
Ian – Financial insight. Political overview. Network of influence. | Reporting proactively to show stakeholders we’re ahead of the game. |
| Guiding Teams. Simplify the Complex. | Incredible work ethic/desire to succeed. Local relationships and reputation. | Leadership of virtual teams. Leading with confidence/authority. |
3. Check progress and keep building
| Focus | How effectively did I keep this in mind? |
|---|---|
|
I’ve added the table into every diary entry for meetings I have with James, Ian and Jerome, so I can see them as fixed agenda items for any meetings we have and score every meeting.
Coaching tips
If you can build these strengths trading plans together with your key relationships from the start, there’s a pretty good chance the relationship will strengthen more quickly. It might seem a bit unusual to do this, but where there’s no track record of having worked together before, this approach can really help with managing expectations and building trusted, mutually respectful relationships.