Michael D. Watkins

I've digged up some research because I love to give it a little bit more backend and more backstory.

Do you know Michael Watkins? He's a professor of leadership and organizational change at IMD.

He described seven shifts in the transition from functional leadership to broader business leadership.

And three resonate with what I see in CX.

And I've done that myself where I thought, I'm so right, why don't you see it? Am I, yeah, are you that stupid or am I that smart or both? And of course that doesn't work.

It doesn't make you a diplomat.

So his framework of Michael Watkins, it concerns broader leadership and business leadership and applying it to CX, of course, is my interpretation, but it raises an important question.

As your responsibility grows, are you changing how you think, how you prioritize and influence? I think it's a great read, And if those things apply to you, please research further.

And then as I backed it up and looked at the paper we had previously discussed, which is the hiring process, for ai if you will all of a sudden it dawned on me that we haven't done a great job of helping our frontline team members become good managers and we know this the data tells us this for decades that we as industry don't do a good job preparing the most impactful senior individual contributors to be good, empowering leaders in their roles.

And so I was sitting with this and then I said, well, I wonder how the theories and the approaches of Michael Watkins, The theories and the approaches of Patrick Lencioni would apply because those are two people who I certainly pay attention to in my organizational leadership days.

So I decided to do a little work there and to do a little research and to understand, do the things that they thought about, did the considerations that they had apply to how AI fits into this new work model that we have? And the reality is it's interesting and you kind of have to squint a little bit, but they do.

I saw patterns that led there as we think about AI.

Oh, absolutely.

So we're doing a deep dive today into Michael Watkins' highly influential framework, The First 90 Days.

And our mission here is to identify those core transition mistakes that Honestly, they virtually guarantee an uphill battle for new leaders and then figure out the actual mechanics of how you avoid them.

Yeah.

That conversation tends to highlight almost everything that your boss expects without it being a direct question of them.

Michael Watkins, who wrote a book called The First 90 Days, calls this the expectations conversation.

And it's one of five conversations he recommends having with your boss.

The others cover the situation you're both in, your working styles, resources, and your development.

Uh, I go back to a book that I've read multiple times now called The First 90 Days.

I think Michael Watkins.

Yeah.

It's a great book on when you start entering a new organization, how to approach entering that organization.