Employee Guide: Succeeding with Your New Leader

The Business Case for Supporting Your New Leader A transitioning leader faces a number of challenges when moving into a new role: understanding and adapting to the way the organization does business, identifying and forming connections with key stakeholders, clarifying expectations for the role, defining strategic priorities, and executing transition initiatives. This guide is designed to make your leader’s transition easier and better for both of you. Specifically, helping onboard your new leader can benefit you in the following ways:    Improve your team’s stability and collaboration: When leaders struggle, their teams are less successful and experience higher levels of turnover. As a result, direct reports often spend a significant amount of time mentoring new teammates and bearing extra responsibilities. Conversely, the best leaders manage more stable teams that achieve better outcomes. The direct reports of a struggling transitioning leader perform on average 15% worse than those who report to a high-performing one, and those direct reports are 20% more likely to be disengaged or leave the organization. Reduce the amount of time you spend on transition support activities: It is likely that you will spend significant time onboarding your new leader during their first few months. However, by executing the handful of activities in this guide, you can focus your skills and knowledge and save time helping your leader transition. Increase your access to career opportunities: Showing your leader that you are open to change, clearly explaining your strengths and desired development areas, and providing "upward" coaching helps them identify and assess opportunities to accelerate your development

Your Three Roles in Supporting Your New Leader You are a core part of the strong network your leader needs to transition quickly and effectively into a new role. Success in this transition benefits not only the new leader but you and your team. As a direct report supporting a new leader, there are three key roles to consider: Introducing your new leader to how the team works Coaching your new leader Demonstrating your openness to new ideas Your Three Roles in Supporting Your New Leader Benefits to You Projects are assigned based on your strengths Your performance and development won’t suffer Your leader has realistic expectations of your performance Benefits to You Minimal disruptions to your work as your leader gets up to speed quickly on how to do the job Your leader is focused on the “big picture,” prioritizing work accordingly Benefits to You Positive changes in processes or projects make your job easier Your leader views your good faith efforts as evidence that you are an honest and trusted advisor

Activities to Support Your New Leader’s Transition These nine activities can positively impact on the performance of your new leader. It is important for you to play an active coaching role rather than being a passive participant. The more you actively share and coach, the more you’ll help your leader (and yourself) to achieve objectives. Activities to Support Your New Leader’s Transition