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

Chapter 10. Embed a Strong Burning Imperative by Day 30

You can control your schedule during the fuzzy front end—mostly because no one expects you to do anything. You can probably control your schedule on Day One or, at least, have a big influence on it—mostly because no expects you to have thought it through as much as you have. Your control will be far less over the rest of your first 100 days—because all sorts of people will be putting all sorts of demands on your time. Carving out team-building time is going to be tough. But building a high-performing team is essential. So make the time.

Creating the Burning Imperative

On top of everything else you have to do, and all the other demands on your schedule, make the time to implement the building blocks of tactical capacity. The starting point, and indeed the foundation, is the Burning Imperative with its components of headline, mission, vision, objectives, goals, strategies, and values. Experienced, successful leaders inevitably say that getting people aligned around a vision and values is the most important thing they have to do.

The Burning Imperative is a clear, sharply defined, intensely shared, and purposefully urgent understanding from each of the team members of what they are "supposed to do, now" and how this imperative works with the larger aspirations of the team and the organization.

The Burning Imperative must have a shorthand ...