In a New Role, Achieve Clarity With a Don’t Do List
When taking on a new role, position, or assignment, good leaders do everything they can to define the criteria of success and to understand the expectations others have of them before they jump into the fray.
Point blank asking what the team and the leaders above them expect helps to create important clarity. The compound question, “What would you like me to do and how quickly would you like me to do it?” sets the stage for understanding what others expect. This to-do list guides leaders as they prioritize what to tackle first.
But there is another question set that is even more powerful for creating role clarity and it produces a very different pathway forward. Asking others “What shouldn’t I do?” “What shouldn’t I get involved with?” and “What shouldn’t I change?” will produce an entirely different level of understanding.
This Don’t Do list reveals how others see the role, not just what outcomes they expect. Learning what the team, customers, and peers think a leader should not tackle tells them oodles about how they define leadership success. More importantly, it exposes sacred cows, areas of strength, and territories protected by others.
Leaders listen and learn from the Don’t Do list and reserve judgment as to how they will proceed. When others tell a leader what boxes to ignore or not to check, they inadvertently describe how they see value in the role. Smart leaders dissect this information and decide whether what they have learned constitutes a defensive posture or sound advice.
The Don’t Do list creates a clarity of role that can’t be achieved by the Do list alone. Thankfully, leaders can explore both question sets and avenues to identify how others see the task ahead and to define expectations more precisely.
The next time you take on a new role or assignment, consider asking the critical stakeholders what they think you should do and what they think you should not do. You may find that there is more to what people say they expect than meets the eye.
Loving this approach and I'm sure they're questions we don't all ask
When I did my research, people told me what things were and what they weren't. For example, they could tell me what work looked life and felt like when a leader cared and when they didn't care. So, this idea of describing what thing are and what they aren't really does help us 'colour inside the lines'
Great advice, but the most important insight here is unstated. Leadership advice is almost always biased toward “do this” and “do that” and rarely addresses “never do the other thing.” As a result poor leaders actually execute the “to do” list even as they demonstrate a host of behaviors that would end up on anyone’s “don’t do” list. It’s a recipe for chaos.