Leadership Lessons

If you have a client-facing role or a partner-facing role, the first 30 days offer you an excellent opportunity to have an outside-in view of your own organization and your priorities.

Your organization depends on the revenue coming in from your customers and partners. It is, hence, crucial that you address this audience comprehensively and clearly before you make any significant decisions.

I suggest that you spend your days on the road and planes for the first 30-90 days. After that, you should make it a point to meet all your top customers and partners and some of your second-level clients and partners.

The earlier you do this; you can understand the reality from the field. It is also crucial that you are well-versed with your teams, people, and business unit's priorities before meeting your customers and partners.

When you meet these as external entities, your clients and partners would expect you to come prepared and may even raise a few pending issues for resolution. You should not find yourself to be sounding helpless or clueless.

As a manager, you are expected to address the issue comprehensively with alacrity. Too many statements like "I will get back to you after checking" would not auger well for the first impression.

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Rajesh Soundararajan is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Futureshift Consulting, a boutique consulting outfit that helps organizations chart their business, marketing, and technology strategies that generate demand, drive predictable revenue, and achieve impactful outcomes.

Your HR partner is a member of your team and can work with you throughout your career as a manager. Find out who these Topics you may want to review could include:

- earlier personnel issues you should be aware of

- any unit HR history that could be helpful to you

- HR processes and tracking

- earlier Employee Survey results

- current HR plans in place

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Rajesh Soundararajan is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Futureshift Consulting, a boutique consulting outfit that helps organizations chart their business, marketing, and technology strategies that generate demand, drive predictable revenue, and achieve impactful outcomes.

The Group Meeting:

As soon as possible, plan to meet with your unit as a group to get acquainted. It is crucial in setting the tone of your relationship. Some points to cover in the group meeting:

- Discuss your first order of business and ask for their help.

- Tell them that you will meet with them individually.

Individual Meetings:

Individual meetings provide an excellent opportunity to prove that you are interested in each employee as a unique person. These individual meetings may be done after the group meeting. If the team is large, you might want to pick your team's critical members and start having one-to-one meetings. If you have a small group, make it a point to meet all the members individually.

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Rajesh Soundararajan is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Futureshift Consulting, a boutique consulting outfit that helps organizations chart their business, marketing, and technology strategies that generate demand, drive predictable revenue, and achieve impactful outcomes.

Your new role's success will depend significantly on the relationship you establish with your manager. Both of you need to begin by establishing a shared understanding of expectations and goals.

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Rajesh Soundararajan is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Futureshift Consulting, a boutique consulting outfit that helps organizations chart their business, marketing, and technology strategies that generate demand, drive predictable revenue, and achieve impactful outcomes.

The very first step is to meet with your predecessor. For every manager, this step is critical to providing continuity in how employees are managed.

Below is a checklist you can use to ensure you cover the critical aspects of your new role. If you do not have a predecessor, cover these topics with your manager.

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Rajesh Soundararajan is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Futureshift Consulting, a boutique consulting outfit that helps organizations chart their business, marketing, and technology strategies that generate demand, drive predictable revenue, and achieve impactful outcomes.

The first thing you need to do is schedule meetings with the four stakeholders to make your job successful.

1. Your predecessor

2. Your new manager

3. Your employees

4. Your HR partner

Think of these initial meetings as fact-finding sessions. In each case, explain that your intention is to learn and understand. Be prepared to ask questions -- and to listen. While you are waiting for these meetings, determine.

Get acquainted with the HR partner for your new team. They will be a valuable resource for you throughout your career. They have seen many a manager like you come and go into the group and seen team members join and move out. They may have been involved in staffing the team, including possibly the discussions where you were shortlisted for your new role. A good relationship with your HR partner would help go a long way in understanding many hidden dynamics that may not be visible first.

Similarly, you may want to talk to other reportees of your new manager. While you need not take their inputs at face value, it will give you a good background and contextual understanding about your new manager.

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Rajesh Soundararajan is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Futureshift Consulting, a boutique consulting outfit that helps organizations chart their business, marketing, and technology strategies that generate demand, drive predictable revenue, and achieve impactful outcomes.

When you start a new role as a manager, these are the six questions that you must be answering yourself addressing in your first 30 days. These six questions relay the foundation to your subsequent interactions. This will mean you will have meetings with your predecessor, new manager, employees, and with your human resources function. Here is what will get you started.

1. How do I schedule my meetings?

2. What should be covered in my meeting with my predecessor?

3. What should I discuss in my meeting with my new manager?

4. What are the key things to ask in my meeting with my employees?

5. What should I go over with my HR partner?

6. What tips will make me successful; what traps do I need to be aware of?

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Rajesh Soundararajan is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Futureshift Consulting, a boutique consulting outfit that helps organizations chart their business, marketing, and technology strategies that generate demand, drive predictable revenue, and achieve impactful outcomes.

The first 30 days of taking on a new role as a manager will be the most defining thirty days for that job and lay the foundation for your success on that job and possibly the next.

This Fight or Flight - 10X Leader Series is designed to help you quickly start your new role and become successful. This book is intended to help a new manager. And then some of you may want to use this as a guide every time you move into a new role as a manager into a new team, department, or new organization.

This book outlines the necessary steps to help you during your first thirty days as a new manager. Working on those steps, you will gain insights to help you pursue your department's mission and business objectives. In addition, you will build a productive working relationship with your employees.

The bonus resources section at the end allows you access to online resources specifically available for readers of this book. This section consists of up-to-date resources across the internet. In addition, it will make you familiar with the many management tools available for you.

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Rajesh Soundararajan is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Futureshift Consulting, a boutique consulting outfit that helps organizations chart their business, marketing, and technology strategies that generate demand, drive predictable revenue, and achieve impactful outcomes.

The idea for this book started decades ago. Yes, literally decades ago.

Over a career spanning 25 years, from my first job to the last, I have meticulously observed and taken notes on the job's challenges in the first month. Over the decades, I have coached and mentored hundreds of people, including first-time managers or managers in a new role. Over time, I saw myself sharing tips and suggestions that would make them successful.

The names of organizations changed; the job roles varied; the backgrounds of candidates were diverse. Yet, over time, I realized that the steps required to succeed were straightforward. There were very few things that differentiated a successful manager from the rest.

The trick was all about scheduling the right meetings in the first thirty days. Meeting the right employees in the first thirty days and doing a few things well was the key. The primer sets the ground. Yes, as simple as that.

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Rajesh Soundararajan is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Futureshift Consulting, a boutique consulting outfit that helps organizations chart their business, marketing, and technology strategies that generate demand, drive predictable revenue, and achieve impactful outcomes.

When culture had strategy for a coffee. 5 simple lessons to build an organisation the Starbucks way.

A strong ‘culture’ in an organization might take a long time for it to show, as it needs to be ingrained into the DNA of the organisation. Unlike a skill, that can be incorporated by training its workforce at any point, culture requires continuous focus from the moment of an employee joins the organisation. The employee is exposed to a ‘ways of the world here’, and pretty much adopts that particular way as their own.

It is in this context, that I wish to use the Starbucks example. What makes Starbucks do something that is so insanely simple and yet, delightfully magical? It is not their covfefe for sure!

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Rajesh Soundararajan is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Futureshift Consulting, a boutique consulting outfit that helps organizations chart their business, marketing, and technology strategies that generate demand, drive predictable revenue, and achieve impactful outcomes.

Hiring is a serious function for a leader. However, over the years, in the pursuit of standardization, hiring managers and leaders have delegated the search to the HR function. However, the problem lies elsewhere—the innocuous-looking job descriptions. Over time we have seen the innocuous job description has to lead to a lot more false negatives. And since these never get captured in a formal system, the organization and its leaders lose some stellar prospective candidates, for they were not able to cut through the job description maze.

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Rajesh Soundararajan is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Futureshift Consulting, a boutique consulting outfit that helps organizations chart their business, marketing, and technology strategies that generate demand, drive predictable revenue, and achieve impactful outcomes.

Learning to fall and preparing for failure is just as important as making for success. The path to success is laden with many, many rocks and fall you will. Learning how to fall with minimal impact and how you can get up and recover fast enough determines your success.

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Rajesh Soundararajan is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Futureshift Consulting, a boutique consulting outfit that helps organizations chart their business, marketing, and technology strategies that generate demand, drive predictable revenue, and achieve impactful outcomes.

This episode focuses on three pillars of business what makes a business successful in terms of revenue maximisation, profit maximisation and operational excellence. These three pillars sum up the success of your business.

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Rajesh Soundararajan is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Futureshift Consulting, a boutique consulting outfit that helps organizations chart their business, marketing, and technology strategies that generate demand, drive predictable revenue, and achieve impactful outcomes.

Failure is a fascinating word. Our entire life and Our success are because pic to get one extra step after failure. Get, many of us are ashamed to talk about a failure even to acknowledge that we fail. Here we are going to talk about why failure and talking about Failure is an essential step in terms of personal development and growth.

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Rajesh Soundararajan is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Futureshift Consulting, a boutique consulting outfit that helps organizations chart their business, marketing, and technology strategies that generate demand, drive predictable revenue, and achieve impactful outcomes.

This episode addresses the traditional challenges one has in balancing the three balls in their life - career, family, and money. It is important now than ever before that we understand this super-simple trick on managing these three balls and successfully juggling these three priorities.

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Rajesh Soundararajan is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Futureshift Consulting, a boutique consulting outfit that helps organizations chart their business, marketing, and technology strategies that generate demand, drive predictable revenue, and achieve impactful outcomes.