New roles and your feedback on [Tuesday Reading] please

New roles and your feedback on [Tuesday Reading] please

[Today’s Tuesday Reading is by Dr. David Sweetman, MOR Associates Leadership Coach and Consultant.  David will be facilitating Tuesday Readings moving forward. David may be reached at [email protected]]

Have you recently taken on a new role? Can you recall the last time you did? If you’re anything like me, both excitement and anxiety fill your thoughts.  Jim Bruce is a legend of rock-star proportions at MOR. Brian’s announcement about Jim’s transition saw an outpouring of affirmations of what a difference Jim and Tuesday Readings have made in the lives of so many.  I applaud Jim on behalf of our MOR community for all the well-researched insights he has shared with us over the past fifteen years – and will continue to share with us about once per month.  I am excited to help continue Tuesday Readings, yet I feel the responsibility of an incredible privilege in serving all of you through this new role.

That said, starting a new role begins with an important recognition: you are not your predecessor.  We will fail in a new role if we try to be our predecessor. We will fail if we do not learn from the successes of the past. We will also fail if we are not true to ourselves.  For future success, you must both build on the success of the past and bring your own personal strengths.  How do we do that?  There are great insights on starting a new role in prior Tuesday Readings, including articles both from Jim Bruce and Brian McDonald specifically on the topic.  To summarize some of their key points:  

1. Share your broad vision early

2. Assess the landscape and determine expectations

3. Identify stakeholders and build relationships

4. Leverage a SWOT analysis and sketch out priorities

5. Act on what you learn, targeting early wins

As with any checklist such as this, the key to success is not found in rigidly going through each step, but in understanding the context and working on each step where appropriate, sometimes dithering between steps as the situation calls for it.  While we won’t cover all of these important steps today, let’s focus on the first two:

Share broad vision early.  Your vision for your new role will be a function of the situation and what strengths you bring to it.  For Tuesday Readings, my broad vision is simple: that we continuously grow in providing meaningful and timely insights that help you, our readers, be ever more successful as leaders.

Next, let’s focus on assessing the landscape.  For Tuesday Readings, Jim’s last reading provides us with some of that perspective.  There is also the perspective of the people you will be serving.  What can you learn from that? This is where we need your help.

Any moment could be a good pivot moment to seek the gift of feedback.  A transition is an especially important time.  Assessing both the current state and desired future state are helpful foundations on which to begin.  In true form for MOR, we have two simple questions for you: What are the “pluses”, and what are the “deltas”?  That is, what are the greatest strengths you’ve seen in Tuesday Readings, and what suggestions do you have for strengthening them into the future?  Please follow this link to provide us with your feedback.  We want to be respectful of your limited time as a leader; it should take less than two minutes and will be a tremendous help.  

What can you expect for the future of Tuesday Readings?  I will share results and analysis of the above survey results once compiled next month.  Also, we will be adding voices in addition to Jim – other leaders in MOR, additional program participants, my contributions.  You may have also noticed a couple small format tweaks to make these emails easier to read across a variety of devices with a variety of screen sizes.

Ending where we began on the broad topic of transitions, do you have thoughts on a recent transition you made to a new role?  What techniques were most successful for you? What questions do you have? Please send me a note – I’d love to hear from you. Those insights could become the topic of a future Tuesday Reading.

Thank you for your help as we build on the successes of the past and look to the future of the next chapter of MOR Tuesday Readings.

Please make your day a leaderful one for you and your team,

David

P.S. If you’re interested in what I bring to this role, here is a bit about me and my background.