We are on Day 24 of Elon Musk’s reign as Chief Twit. Since his acquisition of the social media platform closed, it has been…chaotic, to put it briefly. It remains to be seen how this story will end but the path to Twitter 2.0 is off to a rocky start with reports suggesting that somewhere between 70-85% of employees have been laid off, fired, or have resigned since Musk took control. Advertisers dropped the platform from their media plans quickly and in droves, citing concerns of brand safety as hate speech surged and $8 verification checkmarks created a parade of parody accounts. This budget pullback sparked fairly public beef between Elon and companies given that this activity brought in more than 90% of Twitter’s revenue historically. Paired with an increasing list of communication missteps to employees, all of this represents a masterclass in how not to acquire a company. Granted, Musk’s string of business successes goes back further than his list of unconventional public opinions and actions. With bold plans - maybe creating an American copy of China’s WeChat - and deep pockets, there is a lot that is left to unfold here.
A few weeks back, I was catching up with someone in my network who was about to start at a new company. She asked for any advice and recommendations on how I think about new roles. I had a few thoughts that I have found as consistent winners and while she is not moving to take over a company as the CEO (yet!), I thought I might call them out here as guidance for Mr. Musk. Oh, and they might be useful to you too!
- Focus on the People
In the majority of cases, you joining a company is not a positive thing for the team you are coming in to lead. The role you are taking could be because a trusted boss was fired or moved to tackle an opportunity elsewhere in the company. Perhaps there was a recent acquisition and your skillset is needed to assist with the merger. The economic situation could be positive with a team experiencing tremendous growth, and your entrance could be seen as a limiter to ambitious employees or a risk to the good momentum that currently exists. Host rejection becomes a real concern in these cases. It is easy for us to see ourselves in a positive light. We also know our intentions when joining a team. But you are a huge question mark to the team you join and have paid no interpersonal credits from which you can withdraw. Your reputation and intention will not be established in only a few days. Too many people have seen leaders give the Big Speech™ only for those leaders to reverse course on that stance or fall woefully short of those promises. Their trust in you will be earned, and not given.
While it is difficult to see for our new teams, this problem could not be missed when Elon took over Twitter. The uneasiness was palpable even from outside of the company as Elon began ideating on product changes before joining the company and, likely, before meeting the majority of his downline team. From afar his assumption seemed to be that the team across Twitter would assume positive intent and would energetically align themselves behind the new vision. However, loyalty commitments and demands to be “more hardcore” lead to resignations. Where empathy was needed, Elon did not give it. His commitment was to his ideas and not to the people who could help him make those ideas a reality. And the people at Twitter reciprocated that in kind.
My opinions reflect my approach to leadership and what I have found to be successful. In my experience, great people build great teams which drive great results to create great companies. If you focus on the people in your organization and create meaningful work that helps them to grow and pursue their goals then they will give to you their best and enduring effort. When I join a team, my top priority is to front payment on as much social compatible as possible. Meet with your team first. Let the business and strategy reviews come second. Get to know everyone’s career goals and let them learn a little about how you lead and what you care about. I like to ask these questions:
- What are your career goals? Talk to me about two, five, and ten years out.
- Talk to me about your development. What are the strengths you are proud of and lean on? What are the opportunities you are currently focused on improving? What skills do you want to learn?
- Talk to me about the team. What do we do that you like that adds value? What is good about our culture? What do you think we need to focus on improving? What should we change culturally?
- Talk to me about your manager or the previous team leader. What do they do that helps you to be successful? What do they do that was a distraction or a waste of time? Did anything they do make you feel less motivated?
You will want to come back to these questions on a recurring basis, especially the last one which morphs into “What can I start or stop doing to help make your job better?”
It is also fair to talk a little bit about your approach to leadership. Talking about what you think is important helps the team start to get a sense of where you will focus and what you will and will not care about. You should also have operating principles for how you think work should be delivered. For example, one of mine is that we should “be expert lead”. All of this information is a form of early expectation sharing, While there may still be missing clarity on strategy and how you will invite change into the team, these conversations can help lay the ground work that makes those future changes coherent and makes it reasonable for good intent to be assumed.
- Don’t Do Anything
Change no thing. Do no harm. Make no recommendations. Decide no future. Set no strategy. This might sound extreme but I recommend for a minimum of one month that one of the best things you can do is have no impact. This is not crazy talk! The inverse is crazier and incredibly prideful. Let’s talk it through in the context of Twitter.
Elon had a number of major strategic initiatives that he wanted to push from day 1. Reducing the count of bots, redefining the rules for account suspension, movement away from advertising revenue, reduction of bloatware, reducing unnecessary head count, and increasing speed to new feature launch were amongst the top items. These are all good ideas in their own right, but the problems started rolling in immediately as each project hit the ground. While the concepts were good, the nature of Twitter as a social media platform was far more complicated and complex than the surface level thought given to it by the new CEO. In wanting to reduce focus on advertising revenue and update rules on content moderation, Elon spooked advertisers who jumped out pretty immediately. By delivering on his promise to increase speed to launch, Twitter Blue failed to account for user-driven edge cases and roiled the platform with parody accounts that scared off most remaining advertisers and even lead brands to pause their organic social efforts. By reducing bloatware and employee headcount, Elon is haphazardly introducing security risk to the platform and left him short on critical staffing functions. A comical story tells off a campus security member who was laid off only to be called back days later when the company cut badge access and locked themselves out of the building without the ability to get back in.
In fairness, Elon could have never predicted these outcomes. His expertise with engineering systems and he found recent success in physical goods like cars and rockets. However, I expect that many of the experts he never met, never discussed future strategy with, and whose warnings he never heeded would have had a pretty good idea of the impacts of each of these projects. Many of these former leaders had spent years learning their part in delivering Twitter to the market. They had seen projects go right and also go wrong, gaining a sense of where the risks really laid. They knew the skeletons in the closet, the tech that was on the fritz, and what consumers really wanted from their product. To listen earnestly to their views would be common sense. To ignore them entirely and assume that within a few days you have enough sense to lay out a good strategy is pure hubris.
We are all tempted to fall into this trap. All of us want to make a good first impression and highlight that we were the right choice for hiring. Some of us have best practices from previous companies that we love and want to bring to our new work. Potentially, we may even do the first pass of business reviews and think we have everything in hand. Only later do we learn that there were layers of nuance we had not seen, that personnel differences lead our former best practices to fall short, and that a “good” impression is better than an “immediate” impression.
The passive start offers a few advantages. First, it is far better for us to lean heavily on the in-house experts as we join a new team. It sets a precedent for the team that you want them to engage as owners of the business. By taking a passive role to start you offer a chance for strong performers to prove their worth and give you a sense of the strengths of your new team. Second, by not giving a new strategy to the team we can better see the existing direction of the company and evaluate the pros and cons thoroughly. By not providing an alternate direction, the team will continue to execute in the way they have been against the priorities that are top of their list. No amount of interviewing and initial business reviews will provide as complete a picture of how works gets done as simply watching it. By engaging too quickly in setting a new direction, we miss the chance to gather this context. Third, we can avoid costly missteps driven by low-context decisions. Organizations are complex things and it takes time to really understand what is happening. That is ok. A passive start gives us the chance to go a fewer layers deeper into the machine and identify potential issues with the future strategies we were considering.
When Louis Gerstner became CEO of a floundering IBM in 1993 reporters continuously pressed him for a view on the vision and strategy to turn the company around. He famously quipped “The last thing IBM needs is a vision.” The quote continues to be referenced today highlighting Gerstner’s rigorous focus on execution of the business over lofty visions and goals. If you listen to Gerstner’s telling of his early days at IBM an overlooked aspect of his hesitancy to provide a vision comes from the fact that he was not a traditional technologist and knew that as he started as CEO he did not know the company well enough to push for any change with any degree of confidence. That humility is exemplary for any of us.
At some point you have to, and will want to, make changes to strategy and execution within your team. I generally point to the three month mark as the upper end of the range where it is reasonable to have taken the passive approach. That can be variable based on the simplicity of the team you are joining, your familiarity with the industry or job function, and your seniority. More senior leaders should wait longer to act because their plans tend to be further reaching and adopted with fewer questions.
- Solve stakeholder needs
For most of us, our primary stakeholder will be our manager. It is probably not a contentious statement that as you start, a primary focus should be in figuring out to work best with your manager and solving for their problem statements. This is fairly straightforward. Your manager likely set the job requirements and was involved in bringing you to the team. By the time you accept the position, you should have a clear sense of what they are looking for you to do. Do those things, confirm with them that you are approaching it in the way they expect, and let them know when those things are done.
I recommend over-communicating to your manager as you start (and I recommend communicating to them your intention to overcommunicate). As mentioned above, there are a lot of potential context landmines you could step on when starting a new role. By communicating your intended path forward you give your manager the chance to guide you around those issues. Additionally, by communicating how you are approaching problems you are giving your manager information about your operating principles. This also gives them the chance to share theirs so that you can each know what to expect from the other. It is much easier to realign around these differences if done earlier.
When joining a new team, I start with Weekly Reactions that I send to my manager. This qualitative report chunks my onboarding observations into themes of behaviors, expected cause, and potential changes I am considering in response. Near the end of my “do nothing” phase, I share a draft of strategic pillars and major priorities for the team for review prior to broader distribution. Finally as work really starts to get underway, I replace by reactions with a Weekly Status to highlight progress against the stated priorities to again ensure the translation into tactics is avoiding potential problems. This works for me. Ultimately, you should iterate to whatever is best for you manager based on the feedback that you are actively seeking from them on this collaboration.
As Twitter CEO, Elon has no manager. He still messed this up. Because we all have stakeholders for our work outside of just our manager. For Elon that was advertisers, end users, and the employees he needed to keep in the company. For us, that may be another cross-function team that we work closely with, peer leaders, or also end users of our product. Elon started at Twitter by pursuing the projects he believed to be most important. He quickly found himself backpedaling to understand the problems of his advertising end users in order to align work more closely with their needs. It is a useful reminder that almost every team is dependent upon others to achieve their goals. And when you join a team, you become part of that interdependence. Solving for the needs of these stakeholders is important then to set an impression for yourself as a “problem solver”. As you meet people, ask them what you can help with. Then get it done. When you follow-up with them you can tell them, “Remember that thing you needed? Look, I got it done.” There is no better way to start off a new working relationship and, thanks to reciprocity, you can trust that at some point they will return the support in kind.
- Trust yourself
This is one that Elon certainly did not come up short on, so I will share this just as feedback for you. Starting a new job is uncomfortable. We know nobody’s name, we have no idea where the bathroom or cafeteria is, and common questions like “Do people tend to Reply All here?” are unanswered. Most often, we were performing well at our previous role and left because of that high performance or because we had become too comfortable. In a new job, all of that comfort is erased and imposter syndrome sets in. Pretty immediately the question comes up of whether we are in over our heads.
First, give yourself some grace. It is impossible to know everything about a new company all at once. Your standards for yourself are likely higher than the standards that those around you have for your first few weeks. Let yourself ask the basic questions, for it is far better to ask a basic question three days in rather than three months in.
Second, ask yourself “What am I going to learn by going through this situation?” or “How will figuring this out make me a better leader?” Amy Edmondson defined the concept of psychological safety and highlighted that one of the primary mechanisms for establishing it in teams is to shift from an “execution mindset” to a “learning mindset”. Recognize that the stress you are feeling comes from evaluating your new work from an execution framework. Execution, in fact, is just the tactical delivery of a known plan. That alone makes it impossible to hold as relevant to a new team move. But as you get started, execution is not what you are trying to do. The early days of anything are going to be 90% about learning. The more things you identify that you do not know, technically, the better you are doing at learning.
Third, do not discredit the fact that you had learned previous jobs or team structures before. Have confidence in yourself even if you feel like a bit of a fraud. Remind yourself frequently of similar situations you have worked through, harder questions you have figured out, and comparable team structures in which you excelled. Know that as you re-orient, you will start off and running.
Human behavior is complicated. The sheer number of personality types, incomplete understanding of biological and social pressures, and layers of causal impacts make any human-oriented activity - whether it be moving to lead a new team or run a large social media platform - significantly more complex than, say, building a car or rocket. For that reason, I recommend you see these recommendations as a starting point. I encourage you to use what feels natural to you and to adjust to your needs and use cases. And I would be curious to hear from you on other tactics you recommend or advice you would share! And while no idea is a definite loser, maybe we can all at least agree that “lay off 50% of your workforce in the first 2 weeks” is not an optimal start. Wishing all the best to you for any ongoing or future new role starts.
Share your work-related questions and dilemmas with us for upcoming blog post consideration.