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Editorial Comment

Reading Rob's article stimulated some thoughts in your editor:

I have a series of observations about new roles that I am quite sure many people experience:

· There often seems to be a mis-match between expectation and reality (the new role might have been over/under sold)
· You very quickly get handed an objective (or a task) that has been shelved for quite a while and is now strangely a massive priority
· You are quietly told of a delicate personnel problem that exists within your function that must be sorted out immediately as it is likely to spill over into an industrial tribunal that will damage the morale of the department
· No matter how much research you do to determine the cultural characteristics of your new organisation, you are bound to get some surprises
· One of your major priorities seems to be the immediate need to develop credibility for your function

And the big one………..

· The most recent organisation results that you had read about in the press (and that were presented in a glossy format in the last set of report and accounts), actually belie the true state of the business. As a result there is a major cost reduction exercise planned (most of which will directly affect you and your function).

Some of this may seem to be negative and perhaps to a certain type of person it is. To me, that these are common occurrences is evidence that there is a lot more similarity between businesses than I had once assumed.

I have concluded that it is always possible (as well as desirable) to prepare yourself for dealing positively with your new role.

A list of tips:

There are a number of experts in the field of outplacement, career management and management development who will give you a series of useful tips. These will include the following:

· Understand the strategy of the organisation, in particular those features that give it a competitive edge
· Understand the team. Do they work as a team?
· Identify your leadership style and how it can be used most effectively in the 'new' culture
· Assess how much change is really necessary - start to map it out
· Target the people who will be your allies and start to develop a relationship with them
· Determine your first actions quite early
· Start behaving as the new boss (if you are a boss) - this may mean that exaggerating a certain style of leadership is necessary to make a point
· Map out your 100 day plan
· Get to know your people well, strengths as well as areas for development
· Communicate by actions
· Keep close to your boss, learn to understand the person as well as you can, become an ally and a confidante
· Understand where you need to create allies and create them
· Create early successes - even relatively superficial ones
· Regularly review where you are at (10 days in, 50 days in and 100 days in)

All of these are good and likely to help you. More recently I have also started giving some thought to how my experience of self-managed learning models can help me to be more prepared to start in the new organisation and role. I believe that there can be a great opportunity before starting, perhaps at the interview process, or more likely once the role has been offered, to continue the research by using the structure of the learning contract:

1. Where have you been? Can you help me to understand the history of the organisation? Where did you start? What different product/technological/environmental/social pathways have been taken and why? How have you encouraged learning in the past?
2. Where are you now? Over and above what I read in the report and accounts, how is the business doing? What are the current challenges? Why is my department/function structured as it is? What are the perceptions of my function/role? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the management team and of my department? Where are the challenges? Why do they exist? What are our key sources of competitive advantage? What are the values of the business? How well are these known? Are desired behaviours clearly articulated? What gets in the way of you achieving your goals? How do you encourage learning now?
3. Where do you want to get to? What are the organisational and functional objectives over the next 3 years? Why have these been chosen? What is the long-term strategy of the business? How do you envisage learning being facilitated and encouraged in the future? What do you want your employees to be able to do differently in the future?
4. How are you going to get there? Can you talk me through the detailed plans for the organisation? What systems, enabling processes, behaviours, skills, resources, budgets, contingencies have been planned to ensure that you achieve your goals? What are the key milestones in your plan? What plans do you have to develop your ability to deal with change?
5. How will you know that you've arrived? How is the organisation going to measure its success? What are the key business metrics and what will be the impact of these changes? How will you measure the 'value add' of your change initiatives to the achieved business results? How will individuals measure their learning and their ability to deal with change?

I have begun to use this format to help me develop a more in depth understanding of the organisation. In addition, I have found that this approach can help to identify the rigour of the thinking and planning within the existing management team/function. You will notice that I have also consciously included questions on learning. As every organisation now is constantly involved in a process of change, questions that relate to learning seem not only relevant but essential.

I do not necessarily advocate asking all of the questions listed above and clearly many more questions can be determined. They simply represent a 'starter for ten' with the 5 learning contract questions providing a good framework. I have used this approach in my latest job change and I believe that I am even better prepared than before. Needless to say, many of the observations listed above still emerged. I think that it is relevant to expect them and in so doing be prepared to deal with them. I do not think that companies deliberately try to mis-lead candidates at interview, but I do think that they are not as prepared as they should be to brief potential employees and outline objectives.

Changing jobs and companies can be daunting; it can also be exciting. I would love to hear from others about how they have dealt with career and organisation changes.

Rob Shorrick

A moment's reflection makes it plain that the Five Questions provide a much more rigorous goal-setting framework than is usually in operation in our organisations. It seems almost too obvious to state. Yet most of us do not apply it as widely as we might.

Goal setting is a process which is both encouraged and required, and it stands as probably the functional core of management. Yet all too often it is a process ineffectively approached and, therefore, incompletely accomplished.

My own recognition of the extra-SML significance of the Five Questions is brought home to me every now and again through the response of those being exposed to SML. In learning groups, people report on how they have used the Five Questions within their own work or give examples of how it has been used for clarifying the goals of their work team.

The incident which most immediately jumped to mind, though, on reading Rob's article, happened at a recent meeting when Ian Cunningham and I were talking to people with an interest in gaining an alternative education for their children. Ian had just presented the Five Questions and talked briefly about their use in defining learning goals in a Learning Contract. The questions remained up on the flip chart when the vexing issue of costs arose. The State provision of schooling is free but alternatives must be paid for, and this presented some of the parents with a practical problem. It was very striking when one of the mothers pointed to the Five Questions on the flip chart and said, "Well, that's the way to deal with it. That's the way to deal with anything you want. Set the goal of getting the money you need, and fill in the rest of the questions." She had immediately seen their wider relevance.

Personally, I often need such reminders. The Five Questions are so familiar that they no longer seem like a big deal. I take them for granted. Again and again I am surprised when I find they are not part of the goal-setting which goes on in many organisations. And when I see the consequences of their absence. I recall a dramatic example that emerged when some of us were commissioned by a high-tech company to research their organisational culture. The brief was to provide an analysis of how responsive the culture would make the organisation to the latest proposed change initiative.

The company was no stranger to change initiatives. What was new, in this instance, was the idea of checking the compatibility of the initiative with the existing culture, the aim being to use that knowledge to gain a smoother and more effective implementation on this occasion. When we heard of a whole history of past change initiatives we were, understandably, interested to know how they had fared. What had worked and what hadn't. In effect, we were asking for the accumulated answers to Question Four, How will you get there? and Question Five, How will you know you have arrived? How had they gone about implementing past change initiatives and to what extent had the implementation processes met the criteria they had established for success.

Our questions were met with blank looks, followed by embarrassment, incoherence and distraction. The subject was changed, and our question became taboo. It was clear that Question Five had never been answered. It appeared that it had never been asked. For all these change initiatives no criteria were established for how they could tell whether or not the change had been successful. The company simply ricocheted from one change initiative to another, apparently with little being learnt in the process, or about the process.

The potential of the Five Questions is enormous. They could be ubiquitous in organisational life. In schools, too. And also in the lives of each of us, as individuals.

Graham Dawes