Works
- The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, 2003
- Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming, and How to Prevent Them, 2004
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
Negotiating success with the boss. A new leader should hold five conversations with the boss: on the situation and how the boss sees it, on expectations and how success will be measured, on working style, on the resources needed, and on personal development. Watkins treats these as a negotiation that sets the terms on which the leader will be judged.
Learning before committing. Watkins advises new leaders to accelerate learning about the organization by talking with people across it before committing to a course of action.
Creating coalitions. A new leader needs the support of people outside his or her direct authority. Watkins's chapter on coalitions asks who the potential supporters, opponents, and convincibles are, who defers to whom on key issues, and how to sequence conversations so that early supporters help recruit others.
Predictable surprises. A predictable surprise is a disaster that catches leaders off guard although they had the information to foresee it. Cognitive, organizational, and political biases keep foreseeable threats off the agenda, and the authors' remedy has three steps: recognize the threat, prioritize it, and mobilize support for preventive action.
What it explains
Watkins explains how a leader in a new role wins the room to act: by settling expectations with the boss early, learning before committing, and building a coalition among people he or she does not command. His work with Bazerman explains why foreseeable threats go unaddressed until someone puts them on the agenda.