The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan

4Activate Ongoing CommunicationEstablish Leadership and Begin Cultural Transformation.

Everything communicates. Everything. Even the things you don't do and don't say send powerful signals to everybody in the organization observing you.

Because we live in the midst of a communication revolution, the guidelines for communicating are changing dramatically. As much as you would like to treat communication as a logical, sequential, ongoing communication campaign, in many cases, you must manage it as an iterative set of concurrent conversations.

The prescription for communication during the time between Day One and co-creating a Burning Imperative is counterintuitive and stressful for new leaders following this program. The fundamental approach is to converge and evolve. The time before co-creating a Burning Imperative is all about converging. This means you can't launch your full-blown communication efforts yet. You can't stand up and tell people your new ideas. If you do, they are your ideas, not invented here and not the team's ideas. So this period leading up to co-creating a Burning Imperative is marked by a lot of listening and learning. Your learning will be directed by your message. You'll be living your message, but you're most definitely not launching a communication campaign of any sort. (This is one of those things that you don't do that will communicate volumes to all ...