Article by Ben Thompson / originally published on LinkedIn / October 3, 2019

Think with me for a minute about the last time you had a nice, grown-up dinner party.

You probably thought carefully about who you were going to invite. Maybe you considered the combination of personalities at the table, and who would enjoy sitting next to who. You definitely did some planning on the menu, how you set the table – you made it really nice. You cleaned and tided the house and made the place look welcoming. Put on a nice set of clothes, some of your favourite music, and a smile….

Now, how jarring does the word “customer” or even worse “buyer” sound in this context? Pretty out of place, right? You are hosting a special event for your guests… not selling a product to customers.

This gets to the heart of why in my professional life I never, ever talk about customer experience, and instead I talk about Guest Experience. It’s something I learned working with the Walt Disney Parks and Resorts teams and especially with the Disney Institute, the professional development and training division of the company. I have come to see and understand this principle as a fundamental philosophy for consumer-facing businesses. I really believe in this approach, having experienced it working many times, and am passionate about the effect it has on the top and bottom line..

One of the concepts I have since developed with my clients is the link between guest-centric thinking and employee empowerment.

The point as I see it is that if colleagues in your business…

1 – Feel like they are hosting guests in their home (as opposed to serving customers in a place of work – exchanging their time for money), and

2 – Feel empowered to go above and beyond for the people they are serving, especially when something goes wrong, THEN you have the secret to amazing guest experience, which leads to great reviews, word of mouth recommendation and business success.

Hold on minute though… more and more these days clients are asking us for technology-solutions, and in fact one of our specialisms is digital transformation as it relates to the guest experience. So can a company take a fundamentally human instinct and relationship and re-create it in a digital environment?

I believe applying this human-philosophy to the digital age comes down to three simple principles…

1. A Personalised experience

2. A Seamless experience

3. A Connected experience

Personalised experience

In the same way that you might make hand-written cards with people’s names on, or buy little gifts for each guest that you know they will like, a great digital infrastructure will:

A, learn genuinely relevant information about guests, and

B, use that information to generate useful, timely and engaging content which adds value and yes, charms your guests.

Data, combined with a strong and secure technology infrastructure is the mission critical part of enabling a digitally led guest experience. Our task is to ensure that our clients’ technology architecture is built to be guest-centric, with the ability to understand and derive useful data from all points of the journey – we call this having a Single Customer View – not that the data is all derived from a single source, but that data on a single customer is safely and securely brought together from many sources. The point I try to emphasise is that everything we invest in should benefit our guests, or what’s the point?

Personalising the guest experience using the guest’s permissioned data, (especially if it is a repeating guest) will make a big difference, will raise the ticket value and the the chances of recommendation.

Seamless experience

Let’s say not everyone knows each other at the beginning of the dinner party, so you do some introductions. It’s a nice way to break the ice, get everyone talking and find common ground for conversation. But how high up the “awkward-scale” is it if half-way through the conversation you find you have forgotten the name of one of your guests, or have to ask them a second time for some simple detail about their lives?

“Jenny, you have children, don’t you? No…? Er… ah… sorry… [awkward pause] …”

So why is it that in countless experiences with brands we have to give our names and our personal details three or four times, as we are handed from one person to another before we get what we were looking for? When we build guest journeys for our clients, we really focus on the integrations, to make sure that each part of the system talks to the others – like happy guests at the table.

Connected experience

We live in the age of the network. Not just social media, but networks of networks, online communities, Reddit boards, interest groups of all flavours, held together by rich conversations about our common interests and values. The beauty of mobile technology is that these great conversations you had at the dinner party will spark off many other lines of interest, they will open up new networks and strengthen existing ones. In the same way, I try to help my clients to make it easy for their guests to fit their branded content into their lives… wherever they are, whatever they are doing… to make it easy to link the conversation about your brand in with other stuff that they also love. This means mobile technology, brand partnerships, and thinking ahead of where guests are today, to where they will want to be in the future.

Some simple but powerful tools we have worked on here include integrated systems for booking, itinerary planning, checking in and paying for services and upgrades whilst on-site. Why would I want to have to keep swapping apps, websites, payment systems, tickets and barcodes? The guest expectation is one simple connected system that knows me, knows what I want, and helps me get it, right when I want it. And of course, the post-visit or post-purchase experience is incredibly important for driving repeats, establishing ongoing contact in a way that adds value for the guest, and allows the cycle to begin again.

Our friends at Lozinsky Consulting put it like this: “The Guest Experience begins at the very moment that someone considers spending time or money with a brand… so giving the potential guest intuitive and engaging digital experiences that make them feel curious and, more than that, eager to further explore the brand or the company is a must…”

At 9 Degrees West we don’t this guest-centric thinking is new or ground-breaking… we just think examples of deploying it consistently and effectively are rare.

If you’re interested in learning more about our work, or if you have questions please get in touch. Drop me a line at ben@9degreeswest.london. Tell me something about yourself in your email… I’ll promise not to forget it!

Ben Thompson is the founder and CEO of 9 Degrees West

Article by Ben Thompson / originally published on LinkedIn / December 16, 2018

When I worked in big companies I hired a lot of agencies and spent a lot of company money. A lot of that was money really well spent. I had the privilege to work with some really clever and creative people at agencies like Haygarth, OMD, Kantar and Kedge Futures to name but a few. But the problem with always being in a position where you hire someone to get some work done is you start to think “it’s too hard or complicated for me to do that myself”.

What I’ve learned from a year or so of running my own business, often on a shoe-string budget, is YOU CAN do it yourself, and you don’t have to sacrifice quality. You just have to be humble and keep learning, often from people younger and smarter than you.

Take web-site building. Three months ago if you asked me to build a website I would have reacted like you’d asked me to perform open-heart surgery. Then I got into a situation where I had to do it, with very little resources, and you know what? I did it, and it was good. This week I built another site for a client. And they love it!
This month I have kicked off two social media marketing campaigns for my 9 Degrees West clients. One is a fundraiser for a charity, one is a start-up crypto business. If you’d asked me to do this on my own a few years ago I would have freaked, but it turns out you can do it. We shot the fundraising video in central London over one long day, we had the edits done within a few days and the campaign is live and has already raised several thousand pounds.

If you want management and measurement, Facebook and Linkedin are REALLY GOOD at helping entreprenuers through the steps necessary to create, launch and track campaigns. You can boost a campaign through either of these channels for the price of a pizza, and in less time than an American Hot takes to arrive.
So here’s to the makers, the can-do, believe-in-yourself start-ups who step off the corporate merry-go-round and do it themselves, because they can.

Ben Thompson is the founder and CEO of 9 Degrees West

Article by Ben Thompson / originally published on Linkedin / 9th November 2019

Every business is born with a single transaction; an exchange between a producer who is selling, and a customer who is buying. Companies come and companies go, and the world changes, but this relationship remains at the heart of corporate life. I believe there is something fundamental about this relationship, and that its quality and sophistication has a great deal to say about the overall health of your business. I would go so far as to say that the long-term success of your enterprise is inextricably linked to how well you build your relationship with your customers.

So much, so obvious.

None of this is earth-shattering. The problem is that over time in many organisations the laser-focus on the customer that once existed gets lost. This happens for many reasons, here are just three.

Firstly, as a business grows and attracts more clients, so the individual importance of each client lessens. When you have one customer who buys 100% of your product – they are everything to you. If in ten years you have a hundred customers, each one is numerically less important to you than the first.

Secondly, if your business becomes successful, a situation may arise where demand for your product or service is greater than your ability to supply it – so you have to make choices betweenyour customers as to who to prioritise. Scarce resources have to be shared out and this puts the business doing the selling in a position of power.
Thirdly, if your product becomes a nationally or globally desired as a “brand”, you will actually find yourself and your colleagues choosing carefully which customers to sell to in the first place.

I highlight the three situations above; the growth in number of clients, demand exceeding supply, and the growth of brands, because all three can lead to a loss of focus on the customer, and a swelling of heads in your business. Success, in other words, can breed contempt – or something near to it. This is in direct contrast to the way you made your first sale.

You see, whether your company’s first sale was direct to a consumer, or to a business customer, the chances are that in order to make the sale, you had to do your homework. You had to work hard on understanding your customer and what they wanted; you had to work hard on your product to perfect it, whether it was a consultancy service, a mobile-app, or a box of biscuits. You approached the customer with humility and respect. I believe there is a tremendous value and significance in this,which people on both sides of the table can lose sight of, and I want to remind people about.

Don’t think I’m being misty-eyed here. I’m not hankering after a bye-gone, gentler age of business that probably never existed. I’m not endorsing great relationships with customers because they’re nice to have. Neither am I saying you should be subservient or weak. I will argue for real, tangible business reasons why you should work hard on developing great customer relationships that are ultimately about ensuring your ongoing success. I will make the case that if you are in a sales team, it is your responsibility, by exposing the business to the needs of real, changeable, finicky customers, to ensure the ongoing success of the organization. Because if your business has lost touch with what got them that first sale, you have opened the door to your competition to take your customers away from you.

Get the best to trade the best.

The fundamental objective of any sales team has to be to understand and meet the needs of your customers better than the competition, thereby ensuring that your own business continue to prosper and grow. You need to get the best from your own company in order to trade the best when you go back to the table with your customer. This is a game, and one where you are constantly putting on and taking off at least two different “hats”.

When you are out meeting your customer, you are wearing the first hat: the hat of the brand champion. When wearing this hat you are obviously selling the features and benefits of what you do, but you are also listening and observing, learning as much as you can about the precise needs of your customer, both stated and un-stated. You are looking for what is behind the words they say as well as their actual statements, and you are deciphering the difference between what they want as people, and what their company needs. There is a difference. In this stage, everything is possible, “no” is a not a good word, and trust has to be established. When you leave that first meeting your customer needs to know firstly that they have been heard, and secondly that as far as it is in your power, you are going to act on their feedback and deliver them what they want.

Take a second here and think of the value to your organisation of the information you are gathering here. Precise insight on what the customer is looking for from the market; how well they are being served by the current offer; how much more they would buy if their needs were better met; what their own business really needs to thrive. Wouldn’t most CEOs want to know this stuff?

Once you’ve figured all this out and you’re back in company HQ, you put on your second hat: the hat of the customer champion. Your job now is to secure the very, very best of what your company has to offer, so you can deliver on the opportunity you have just opened up in the customer meeting. Again, this sounds obvious, but remember that in successful businesses many people view customers and their requirements as basically a pain in the backside. This is particularly so with folks who spend little or no time actually meeting clients themselves! Many an excited account executive has had the wind taken out of their sails within the first half an hour of arriving back at the office by the long list of reasons that get thrown at them notto give the customer what they want. This takes a while to get used to, and can be extremely frustrating. It’s your job in these situations to take your business with you on the journey you need them to go on; show them why this is a great opportunity, listen to their concerns and build in the relevant safe-guards they suggest – as long as they don’t dilute the end product so that it is no longer what the customer wants.

Two golden rules

In this situation I find two golden rules helpful. The first rule concerns keeping within your company’s commercial boundaries, including the rule of precedent, and the second rule is protecting your company’s strategic interests.

By keeping within your company’s commercial boundaries, I mean keeping at the front of your mind throughout every decision you make that you are the custodian of this business, and it is your job to deliver sustainable, profitable growth. I often imagine myself inheriting the results of decisions my team or I have made, and asking myself whether I would thank myself for signing this particular deal. What would the sales or commercial director say about this deal in 5 years time? What would the CEO say in 10 years time? Would they still think it was a good deal? With regard to precedent, I ask myself, is this a deal I would be willing to repeat in another business, with another customer, in another product category?

It’s tempting you see, when you are managing one big customer or a group of clients to get “tunnel-vision” about the personal success you will achieve through this customer winning above all others. You cantake a “get the best toys for my customer” approach, and this is where the second golden rule of protecting the company’s strategic interests comes in. Put simply, this means that a deal or decision that is great for your customers might in the long run be bad news for your company if it restricts the opportunities for competitors in the market and so puts more power in the hands of one customer than is healthy. It is in your company’s strategic interest to have a balanced group of customers across as wide a field as possible, to give your business stability and balance. The dynamic sales guys powering all the good stuff into one channel may give you overall growth for a while but if it means your customer base cuts in half in a few years it is bad news.
In all this, having the right mind-set is extremely important, particularly as a lot of people you work with live in fear of customers and customer-interaction. It’s a fact of life that a lot of people don’t trust big customers, and develop a basically cynical attitude towards them and the people who do their purchasing. I have seen this a lot, and I think it is a huge mistake. I have even seen it in sales people which worries me enormously, because if as a sales person you go into that room with cynicism and mistrust, it will communicate itself to the person on the other side of the table, and you will never build the rapport with them that you need to make the all important sale. You will be in damage limitation from the start, rather than value-creation. If you have listened well to your customer however, if you have really asked yourself how well you are meeting their needs, and if you have worked hard to secure the very, very best of what your customer has to offer – you are ready, and your attitude should be one of prepared optimism. I have spent most of this article talking about how you prepare. You should be optimistic for at least two reasons; firstly, your customer wants to grow their business, and they need your help to do it, and secondly if you believe there are more opportunities out there, you will be looking for them. If you don’t, you won’t.

The final thing to remember, as I have hinted throughout the article, is that there is always a difference between what your customers want, and what they ask for. The smart manager gives their customer what they actually want and need to be successful, which might be very different from what they state as their needs.
A couple of illustrations on this, starting with the most obvious: price. Most customers say they want the cheapest price you can give them, but they really don’t. What customers actually want is the best possible product, with all the features and details that matter to them, including how the product gets delivered, how long it takes to get there, what the customer service is like if anything goes wrong, and finally how buying it from you makes them feel. They want all that to be right, and then they want the best possible price they can get for it.

This is why the listening stage in customer relationships is so incredibly important, because it is where you pick up all the valuable insight into what makes your client’s day, and what really frustrates and annoys them. So often it is the details, the execution, the delivery of the product that goes wrong and makes them question whether they want to buy from you again. The maker of the computer I am typing this article on knows I will probably only buy a new computer every five or six years. So if they want me to come back and buy another model from them, this computer needs to give me years of enjoyment and satisfaction – then I will gladly come back and purchase a new model at the full price, without even thinking of another brand.

When the Lexus launched into the UK market in 1990, Toyota had spent years preparing for an entrance into the luxury car market, but despite this, in 1990 they had to recall the LS400 for a potential fault with the cruise control. This could have been a disaster for the brand, but the response from Lexus made all the difference. Dealers contacted all new owners of the LS400 personally, picking up the cars from their homes, fixing them and returning them with a valet and a full tank of petrol. The owners remained loyal, and by 1991 Lexus had become the leading luxury car import into the US with over 70,000 cars sold. So always remember it’s never just about the price.

Doing a major deal with your business should take time, it should be arduous – if it isn’t, you are probably not being challenging enough on yourself or your business. In negotiations, customers may make demands, they may insiston better margins, more investment, and instant decisions. But what they actually want is to feel the satisfaction of a hard-won deal where they know they had to work really, really hard to get what they wanted. Satisfaction for the seller comes through knowing that through listening hard to their customer, challenging themselves and their company to deliver, managing the risk, staying optimistic and securing a great deal, they have sharpened the saw of their whole business and so set the company up for more success in the future.

Ben Thompson is the founder and CEO of 9 Degrees West

Article by Ben Thompson / originally published on LinkedIn / September 15th 2017

What does it mean to be creative? And can you teach it?

I read several articles this week on this topic while I was preparing for a presentation. I started the work with the basic assumption that “yes, creativity is probably in all of us to some extent”, but some have more inherent abilities than others. On my way to assembling my presentation I stumbled across some great thinking on this that I thought was too good not to write about.

Ok first up, there is a guy called Ken Robinson, who basically says the education system in the US and Europe is screwed, and that it educates kids out of creativity by the time they are 11 or 12 in an effort to make sure they pass their exams and go to college / university. He makes a huge thing about creativity, how it is as important as literacy, and how your kids’ school is almost definitely NOT teaching it. Here’s a link to his work http://sirkenrobinson.com.

Secondly I stumbled on a Ted talk by a lady called Angela Duckworth Lee.
Angela gives an excellent 5 minute piece on GRIT – the perseverance under pressure and through failure and disappointment towards long-held goals. The piece doesn’t mention it specifically, but in conversation with a learned friend of mine it occurred to me that creatives have more grit than most, because they deal with rejection every day, yet keep going. Like the cartoonist who has to submit 250 sketches to have one accepted.
Apparently.

Angela also references the brilliant Carol Dweck and her work on growth mindset which will be familiar to many of you, if not check her out here:

Finally I read an article in this month’s Creative Review featuring the brilliant Sir John Hegarty who built one of the best-known agencies in London, Bartle Bogle Hegarty. In it John says “I believe creativity is defined as the expression of self. Because we are all creative. That idea that some people are creative and some people aren’t is nonsense. We are all creative… and if you want to get better at it, you can.”

So if we want to get better at being creative, at expressing ourselves in whatever form that may take, we just need to believe we can get better (because we can), and keep going!

Ben Thompson is the founder and CEO of 9 Degrees West

Article by Ben Thompson / originally published on www.9degreeswest.london / November 6th 2018

So you’ve just started at a new company. Congratulations!

It’s a fresh start and the opportunities are endless. The team that recruited you are excited about the experience, skills and talent you’ll bring to the company, and so are you. Your new boss saw something in you they need, and the organisation needs to succeed. However, you will never get the chance to bring these skills to bear unless you make a success of “transition”– those critical first six to twelve months in your new role. The purpose of this article is to help more senior managers make a success of this phase. I won’t bore you with my credentials to write this – suffice to say that after twenty years of management roles I’ve made enough mis-steps to figure out a few of the right ones!

The first step in a successful transition is all about listening. When you start a senior management position in a new company, no one tells you really what you need to know. They may give you clarity on the vision, strategy and key goals of the company, and even on your own personal objectives – but they can never tell you the answers to the really critical questions. How can I get the best out of my team? What will really engage my customers and clients? Who will be my supporters and who will I need to win over in order to succeed? What’s the culture – in the wider organisation and in my department?

The answers to all these questions and more are in the heads of a handful of people working around you, with whom you must quickly build a meaningful relationship so they trust you enough to tell it like it is.

If this sounds incredibly trite, please remember that when you begin a new role you are under enormous pressure to prove yourself to those around you. If you are like me, there is a little voice going off inside your head saying “I know the answer, I can tell you how to do that, listen to me, listen to what I’ve got to say!”. It’s just a natural part of joining a new business – the urgent need to demonstrate your worth – and it runs completely contrary to what you actually need to do to fulfill the potential that everyone sees in you. So listen carefully, and actively, asking questions to try to get to the root of what is going on, and reserve judgement of people and organization until you have a fully formed picture.

As you start to listen, and develop a basic idea of what is going on and what top do about it, there are two important teams with whom you must build high quality relationships. The first is what Patrick Lencioni (“Five Dysfunctions of a Team”) calls your “first or primary team”, meaning the direct reports of your immediate line manager. The second is your direct team of reports – the people with whom you have to deliver the business for the wider organisation.

It’s useful to acknowledge to yourself that as soon as you step into your “first team”, you are a potential threat to some of your colleagues. This sounds a bit over the top but bear with me, there are a few good reasons why I say this. Firstly, if you’ve been hired by the current boss of the team, as is likely, then everyone knows that your boss specifically recruited you into the team. You are the physical embodiment of what he or she wants. So folks look at you and work out what you’re all about, and then the little voices in their heads start to ask, “what is it that this person has got that I haven’t?”.

Most people know that external hires are usually only brought in to a business if they have potential for the next level up – this is standard HR practice. So not only is this person exactly what my boss is looking for (and I’m not?), they are also going to get promoted faster than me!

Now clearly, this is irrational thinking. But believe me this is exactly what goes through the thought processes of many senior managers when someone new joins. The more mature will dismiss this quickly from their minds and focus on the task in hand, but not everyone will.

So what do you need to do? First you need to make clear by what you do and say that you are committed to this group of people as your “first team”. You will have your own team and targets to manage, but your personal and emotional commitment is first and foremost to this group. This means prioritising team meetings, being well prepared, listening and focusing hard even during long, dull discussions you can’t add to, and volunteering to take on work on behalf of the team. Again straightforward, but remember the little voice in your head saying “my boss is in the room, I need to look good…I need to get a good profile here…I need to get the best of any opportunities for my department!”. What I’m saying isn’t complicated, it’s just not easy.

Second, you need to be prepared to suffer some of what the rest of the team know is the painful side of the job you’re all doing. Call it “taking one for the team”. It may be getting on the wrong end of an irascible boss, it may be missing a target and having to explain why you didn’t hit it to the board, it could be any number of things. The key is to show that you are with the team in the stuff they find hard – and by doing so show that you are one of them.

Thirdly you need to abide by the unspoken rule of business conduct; when it’s just you and your first team in the room, the gloves are off and it’s open dialogue, criticism has its place, as does heated debate. As soon as another group are in the room however (the sales team if you’re in marketing, or the finance team if you’re running the factory) you stick together. I don’t mean you become like a Roman phalanx, being obstructive and unhelpful to people – that would be unprofessional. I mean you stand up for each other when under unfair attack, you make sure you’re whole group is being adequately represented, and you do not at any cost make yourself look good at the expense of your team-mates.

Just as important is your relationship with your direct team. You need your team to be with you, but you’ve also got to take tough decisions (up to and including performance management) depending on what kind of people you inherit. You’re the new boss, paid to give direction and leadership. But in a brand new role they know far, far more than you do about the intricacies and nuances of working life in the new organisation.

There is a fine balance to be maintained therefore, with humility, through the tough decisions that must be made, the need to establish yourself as leader, and the need to establish trust. In all this I believe the importance of communication, both one-to-one and team sessions, cannot be over-stated.

This may sound like an obvious statement, but remember you are dealing with enormous change, and a high level of ambiguity – you don’t know what’s really going on most of the time. There is a fine line to be taken therefore between abdicating completely “I just don’t know what we should do in this situation” which could hand all authority over to the more outspoken in the team to the detriment of your own position, and loudly declaring that you “know exactly what to do” when you don’t. I have made both mistakes over the years! The best approach I have learned is to use 1-2-1 sessions to dig deep into the personal, team and corporate issues, to really find out the messy details of what’s getting in the way of peak performance, and to use team sessions as moments to try and draw common themes together and form consensus. This doesn’t mean you don’t have open discussion in the team meeting, just that there is always a different level of openness and honesty in a 1-2-1 which you won’t find in a team meeting – particularly when you are brand new. The “Inner Coach” comes in handy here, but more of that later.

A large part of the communication between you and your team is developing and sharing your plan. There are different views on this. I have heard some management thinkers say that it is pointless making and communicating a plan in the first three to six months, as you will get it wrong due to a lack of real insight, and this will only waste time through mis-directing people. There are also those, particularly Michael Watkins (“Your First 90 Days”), who talk about making a plan pretty much straight away, and sticking with it. My view is somewhere in the middle. I do like to make plans, and I break it into short (next month), medium (next 3 months) and long (next 6 months). The Chinese would say this is desperately short-term and I should be thinking about at least a twenty-year plan, and there is of course a clear need to think longer-term and ready your department for future challenges, but you have also got to deliver next quarter’s earnings! As one manager said to me, “you need to have one foot in the reeds, and one foot on the mountain”.

Much has been written on plans and planning and I am not going to add too much here, all I will say is that in the transition phase your plans and priorities will change, have to change, because what you write down at the end of your first month will be fifty percent wrong – and you won’t realise that until six months down the track. So make a plan, review it regularly, communicate it – but don’t hold on too tightly to it in the transition phase. By the end of your first year you will have a far better grasp of your issues and what you really need to do to resolve them.
By about the second or third month, you will have figured out the difference between the version of the job described to you in your interviews, and reality! You realise that things are far from perfect, and some things needs to change. So over the next month or so, you start off one or two initiatives to “fix” certain areas of your business. Some of these ideas work and some really, really don’t! Now if you’re human, and depending on the amount of hubris that accompanied the announcement of your great idea that has just failed, this leads you to start questioning yourself. “Have I really got this figured out? Am I the right person for this role? Have I been found out?”

In your old job, assuming you were there for a decent stretch of time, you had people around you who knew you, and who could offer you honest and helpful feedback in this situation. You could road-test ideas, both before and after you start putting your plans into action. And if they go wrong or don’t work you can get an honest appraisal of why. In the new company you haven’t got this network of trust yet – but you desperately need it. This is where the Inner Coach comes in. The key in these situations (both before and after launching the grand scheme) is to regularly take time out to assess your yourself, your understanding, your relationships – your performance as a leader. You need to do this as objectively as you can, and give yourself the honest, insightful feedback that your old colleagues would have given you. I find it helpful to talk to myself in the second person singular, remembering all the great coaches I have had in the past. “What would “x” person have said to me in this situation? What would they have done? What am I trying to do, and what are the risks I need to be aware of?”. Please note – the inner coach is never perfect, you must still use your 1-2-1 times with both your team and your boss to check-in these ideas (remember your “I need to prove myself” side is fighting against this). But your inner coach can be an essential guide for making a final decision on something once all that feedback has been gathered.

Finally, let people help you; your peers, your boss and their colleagues, your wider stakeholders – people generally love to help so allow them to, but don’t let them take the reins away from you. Don’t get so caught up in what all these wise, experienced people all think you should do in a situation that you forget to sit down and do your own thinking, come to your own conclusions and then act. There is something of a “cop-out” to be avoided here. In the transition period some managers are desperate to grab hold of solutions, quick wins, and easy fixes. If someone with more experience than me tells me I need to cancel a particular initiative, and start up something else, which will then lead to a major upswing in revenues, I would be foolish not to listen. If someone tells me the real issue in my department is a dysfunctional team member who I need to move on – I need to listen to that. A lazy manager who doesn’t want to do the hard yards, or a manager desperate to prove themselves by delivering a quick win may grasp at these so-called “silver bullets” and go after them without doing the proper thinking.

Get in a quiet place, close the door, and think. If you’ve been following the steps I recommend, starting with listening and building relationships – you will know better than anyone else what the truth of the matter is, and what value these suggestions really have. After all the listening and observing, your job is to make up your own mind, share your thinking and your plan with the team so they will come with you on the journey, and then get the team and the organization completely lined up and energised to deliver it. Go for it!

Ben Thompson is the founder and CEO of 9 Degrees West