Today I want to talk to you about risks and rewards in your first 90 days in a new leadership role. To do so, I’ve developed a 9-box tool to help you assess the objectives you make in your first 90 days. Let’s take a look.
First, determine the risk of the objective. Is it a high-risk, low-risk, or somewhere inbetween?
Next, assess the rewards of that decision. Are they high, medium, or low. Mark the box where the two intersect.
Now it’s important to understand that if things are too high of a risk or too low of a reward, or the matrix isn’t just quite right, you don’t do those things. So you really want to focus on those things that fall in the upper quadrant.
Now, in this 9-box, I’ve added a third layer. It may add complexity to the mix, but allow me to explain. This axis represents the visibility of your decision. Is it seen or not seen? As a new leader, you want early wins through clearly defined goals. You want some of those to be very visible so everyone in the organization sees them. There may be some unseen things that you decide to do and those won’t go unnoticed if you write those down and get them clearly defined with your boss.
Now that you have a framework for setting up your objectives and goals for your first 90 days in a leadership role, what are you going to do about it?
