Rules Are Meant to Be Broken From 42 Rules for Your New Leadership Role

That's why you want to lead, right? You want to forge your own path and make your own rules! You're on fire to wow your customers, astonish the market, and create wins for you and your team.

You've probably noticed that some ways of leading tend to work better than others. Take sole credit for a team win? Bad. Engage your team in figuring out how you'll make the numbers? Good.

Leaders at all levels succeed or fail for a surprisingly common set of reasons: meeting business objectives, succeeding in interpersonal relationships, building a great team, and adapting to change.

These reasons hold true across industries, time, and market conditions.

One-quarter of senior executives promoted from within fail in the first 18 months; one-third of outside hires fail. Many flame-outs can be traced to missteps during their first quarter. More importantly, for the 60–75 percent of leaders who survive into the second year, their effectiveness and trajectory are powerfully affected by choices made as they start.

Why is this so hard?

If you're like the technology leaders, marketing executives, and top teams I coach, you might notice how easy it is to become so caught up in fighting fires that you forget to shut off the gas. Or, you suspect you're lousy at certain aspects of leadership, so you ignore them and hope they won't bite you.

Or, maybe you never learned the rules in the first place! Leadership is an apprenticeship craft. One by-product of the dot-com boom and mid-2000s boom is that many of today's leaders are people who were rapidly promoted during boom years—and many of them were moving too fast with too little adult supervision to learn how to lead well.

With the trend toward more "flat" organizations, your boss may be stretched so thin that he/she can barely advocate for your team, let alone mentor you. Welcome to your new leadership role—you have a bigger job, in a tough climate, with very little support!

Learn the rules, then bend or break them

As you read this book, take what I say as a starting point for your own good thinking. Adjust what you find here to serve your team's needs, the market conditions, the cultural context, your goals, and your personal leadership approach.

The intense learning curve and unfamiliar environments of a new job make it difficult for your brain to consider options and make decisions as well as you usually do. When brains are overloaded, people tend to rely on what they've done before, even when that didn't work very well or is out of place in the new context. Ironically, this tunnel vision and rigidity is especially true of leaders who have experienced success—people like you who have been promoted or recruited for a new role.

So use this book to prompt what you might want to do at each phase of your start. Ask yourself what from this material will be useful to you in the week ahead. Then, ask yourself what's missing, what you want to do differently, and which rules you'll break entirely. See what results you're getting, and come back to this process at the end of the week.

Consider the rules, make up your own mind, act, observe, and reflect. Repeat. Succeed.