Master Your Next Move: The Essential Companion to The First 90 Days

This new book, subtitled "The Essential Companion to The First 90 Days," explores eight typical career transitions, and shows how to apply the first book's core principles to some specific situations you might face. It's a muscular book, full of stretching questions, personal challenges, and practical tools. And there's advice for organizations, too, about how to support people through times of transition, and why it's good for business. The bright yellow cover matches the positive message inside.

Most of us go through several transitions in our careers, and each time, the challenges are different. How we handle them determines the impact they have on us, on those around us, and on our organizations. In fact, according to this book, it's just about the biggest deciding factor in our whole career.

With that in mind, "Master Your Next Move" is written for people who are keen to progress. The focus is very much on leadership, and most of the examples are about people in senior roles – including some with major corporate responsibilities. But the author believes we can all take something useful from each story. Ultimately, he says, the secret of successful transitions is knowing how to manage and lead yourself, whatever stage of your career you're at.

And he knows what he's talking about. Dr Michael D. Watkins is a professor at The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, at Harvard Business School, and at INSEAD in France. Many of the case studies are inspired by his work at the International Institute for Management Development in Switzerland, and his experiences at Genesis, the leadership consultancy firm he founded.

So keep listening to find out how to tackle any type of transition; what your personal priorities should be; and what your company can do to accelerate successful transitions for everyone.

The content of this book is built around the eight-part framework laid out in "The First 90 Days," Watkins' previous book. But don't worry if you're not familiar with his approach. He outlines it succinctly in the introduction to "Master Your Next Move," and we'll briefly run through all eight principles now.

The first instruction is to accelerate your learning. Whatever type of move you're facing, you’ll need to quickly get clued up on all the technical, cultural and political dimensions of your new role.

Then, match strategy to situation. There are right and wrong ways to tackle any transition – and your approach has to be right for you.

The third principle is to negotiate success. When you're changing your role, this will involve some critical conversations with your new manager, about what's expected of you, and the resources at your disposal.

Step four is achieve alignment. Make sure your objectives, and the approach you choose to take, are in line.

Then, build your team, reshaping the current group as required, and energizing your people to get behind your plans.

Number six is to secure early wins, creating momentum for the whole transition process.

Seven is to create alliances, increasing your potential to make the changes you want.

And the last instruction is to manage yourself. By keeping your equilibrium, and maintaining your energy, you'll retain your ability to make good judgments – however difficult a transition period becomes.

That framework is the core of "The First 90 Days," and Watkins is confident it will work for any type of transition. But in this new book, he wants to dig deeper into eight specific scenarios.

He starts with a quick questionnaire. This shows you which of the eight chapters you should prioritize, based on what's important to you and your career right now. It's a great way to focus your attention, allowing you to personalize the advice from the start. And you'll find plenty of other useful tracking grids, checklists and self-assessments dotted throughout the book.

So let's look at the eight transitions that feature in "Master Your Next Move." Each has its own chapter, giving the book a clear and manageable structure. The author says to start with the one that best suits your current situation, but he's confident that most people will find useful insights in all of them.

Chapters one to five are labeled personal adaptive challenges. And the first of these is promotion – seen here through the experience of business unit leader, Bert Vandervliet. His story is told in detail and, even though this and all the other case studies are fictitious, it has a clear ring of authenticity. It sets the scene engagingly, and gives strong context for the author's advice.

Bert's been progressing steadily in his career, but his latest promotion has proved problematic. The business is in a difficult position, and now a lot of its success or failure is down to him. He didn't expect to, but he's really feeling the strain.

After setting up the overall transition scenario, the author then explains the key challenges involved and the best ways to deal with them. To regain control, Bert will have to work out his priorities, and tackle them as soon as possible. He'll also have to delegate effectively, and trust his people more.

Bert's new role means that he'll need to grow in confidence to communicate widely, including at conferences and in the media. He'll also have to increase his visibility and grow his authority, so that he can lead others to success.

His key challenges are listed in a table, along with a very useful "What should you do?" column. Initially, the answers are given as simple phrases, making them seem refreshingly doable. For example, to cope with greater complexity and ambiguity, you should "delegate more deeply."

Then, each of these simple phrases is unpicked in its own section, and there's clear advice about how to make the right moves in practice. There are also things for your organization to do by way of support. If you're newly promoted, for example, it really helps to have a process to follow, as you get used to your new responsibilities. And you'll also gain from having a few intermediate, "stepping stone" tasks to build your confidence.

Chapter two repeats the pattern of chapter one: another challenging transition scenario, followed by a rich exploration of the best ways to tackle it.

This time we meet Julia Martinez, newly in charge of a group of her former peers. Her key step is to accept that her relationships will have to change now, as she and her team adapt. It won't be easy, but there are ways to ease the pain.

A great strength of this book is that it includes emotional advice alongside the more logical, professional steps. Watkins knows the actions that work in practice, but he also understands the impact of transitions on the people involved. It makes for a very rounded approach. We're encouraged to mold each set of strategies to our particular situation, keeping our unique personality traits firmly in mind.

Turning to chapter three, the challenge is one of corporate diplomacy. It's when your transition takes you into an especially complex working environment. The advice and tools on offer here focus on mapping the power structures, and building supportive alliances.

Next comes a chapter about onboarding. Everyone will recognize the difficulties involved in starting out somewhere new, and this may well be the chapter that many readers turn to first. Watkins shows how important it is to develop the right political wiring. And he explains how to align your expectations with those of your boss, peers, and any other stakeholders.

As this is a leadership book first and foremost, he emphasizes the dangers of arriving somewhere thinking you've got all the answers, or wanting to bring in all your own people. You'll start off on the wrong foot if you give the impression that everything's wrong. Instead, you need to come in wanting to learn – and ready to adapt.

The last of the personal adaptive transitions is the international move. Once again, Watkins combines sound professional steps with down-to-earth, human advice. You need to get your family settled first, and develop a support network with other ex-pats. Only then can you focus on assessing your business priorities, building your team, and putting your strategy into action.

The three remaining chapters are about organizational change. Here, you don't just have to adapt yourself to a new situation. You need to change the way your part of the business works – maybe even the whole operation!

Chapter six focuses on turnaround: avoiding business failure. Here, we meet Debra Silverman, who's been instructed to "get in there and stop the bleeding," and we explore the steps she needs to take. Her mantra, we're told, should be: first stabilize, then transform. There are external as well as internal forces to assess and address. And she'll need to know – and communicate – her own vision for success, and get all the different forces to line up in her favor.

Realignment then becomes the focus for a whole chapter. Imagine you're transitioning to a role where attitudes and behaviors clash, and the organization is sabotaging its own success. More than ever, you need to understand the situation quickly, and engage people in a process of shared diagnosis. Change the metrics and incentives to match the outcomes you want, Watkins says. And use every early win to boost morale.

The last chapter, labeled the STARS portfolio challenge, is a kind of catch-all approach for when you're fighting battles on a number of fronts. STARS is an acronym for five common situations leaders can find themselves in: Start-up, Turnaround, Accelerated growth, Realignment, and Sustaining success. If you find yourself tackling several of these at once, don't be surprised if you feel like a rabbit caught in the headlights!

But the Early Wins Evaluator should help, showing you how to work out your priorities and plan your moves. And we really like Watkins' FOGLAMP system here. It's a clever tool for asking the right questions (about Focus, Oversight, Goals, Leadership, Abilities, Means, and Process) and then putting the answers into action.

Those are the eight key transitions explored in "Master Your Next Move." At the end of each chapter, there's a useful set of questions to check that you've understood the advice, and started to think about how it applies to you.

So what's our verdict on this book? The author certainly makes a strong case for the need to prepare for transitions. He also shows why they can be difficult for even the most confident professionals.

But are transitions really the most stressful times we experience? People trying to work after a bereavement, or those threatened with being laid off, might say otherwise. We also wonder whether the book should have reflected more of the positive aspects of transitions, since they can often be times of excitement and opportunity.

That said, we can't fault this book for the quality of the advice it offers, and the detail it goes into about all the different transition types. As such, it's a valuable companion to "The First 90 Days," and the interactive elements provide immediate, practical help.

The tone is bright and energetic, and the book builds to a powerful conclusion about what organizations can do to make transitions go well. In short, they need to treat transitions as seriously as they do every other critical business process. But it's not about creating separate policies for all the different types of transitions. The best approach is to acknowledge the challenges people face when their roles change, and be alert to the help they need at different points in the process.

So what should HR leaders or line managers do to support their people through transitions? Before arriving in a new post, it's important to send them all the information they need to get started. In the early days of their role, introduce them to the key people they'll be working with. And keep using what the author calls action-forcing events – such as coaching meetings, presentations, and project launches – to focus them on the challenges at hand, and keep pushing the transition process forward.

Watkins says organizations that get this right fulfill an essential element of enterprise risk management. And, by accelerating transitions across the business, they also gain a serious competitive advantage.

It's a message that comes through loud and clear, from start to finish. During every transition, individuals and their organizations have to work together, to have the best chance of coming through times of change on top.

"Master Your Next Move, The Essential Companion to The First 90 Days," by Michael D. Watkins, is published by Harvard Business Review Press.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.