The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan: How to Take Charge, Build Your Team, and Get Immediate Results, 3rd Edition

APPENDIX VII

Leading a Department/Team Merger, Reorganization, or Restart

The basics of (1) get a head start, (2) manage your message, and (3) build your team, apply in every case. What's different is what you need to get a head start on and the restrictions around that, the nature of your message and the context for that message, and the conditions and context of your team building.

Merging or Jump-Starting Teams

What's three plus three?

Six. Certainly. Sometimes. With some synergy it could be seven. With some loss along the way it could be five.

When you are transitioning to a role where you will be merging or jump-starting a team, it is not just about the new direction that you will chart, it is also about deciding how you will deal with the legacy issues of the past. Most likely there will be some aspects of the team's culture, norms, behaviors, and strategies that you will want to keep or leverage and others that you will want to wipe away immediately. The art of this transition is to determine what can stay, what must go, and how to blend those decisions into the new direction. By definition, these transitions require that a new course be charted quickly. Waiting to do so will allow any undesirable legacy issues of the past to quickly seed in the new group. To counter that you'll want to make decisions and communicate quickly and with absolute clarity.

To be successful in a merger or jump-start situation you have to start by knowing the:

• Objectives
• Boundaries
• Immediate Actions ...