In The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, Michael Watkins writes about the four STARS (start-ups, turnarounds, ralignment, and sustaining-success) situations, challenges, and opportunities.

The Four STARS Situations
Watkins writes about the four STARS situations:

• Start-up. You are charged with assembling the capabilities (people, funding and technology) to get a new business, product or project off the ground.
• Turnaround. You take on a unit or group that is recognized to be in trouble and work to get it back on track.
• Realignment. Your challenge is to revitalize a unit, product, process or project that is drifting into trouble.
• Sustaining-success. You are shouldering responsibility for preserving the vitality of a successful organization and taking it to the next level.

Start-up
Watkins rights about the challenges and opportunities of the Start-up situation.

Key Challenges:

• Building Structures and systems from scratch without a clear framework or boundaries.
• Welding together a cohesive high-performing team.
• Making do with limited resources.

Key Opportunities:

• You can do things right from the beginning.
• People are energized by the possibilities.
• There is no preexisting rigidity in people’s thinking.

Turnaround
Watkins rights about the challenges and opportunities of the Turnaround situation.

Key Challenges:

• Reenergizing demoralized employees and other stakeholders.
• Handling time pressure and having a quick and decisive impact.
• Going deep enough with painful cuts and difficult personnel choices.

Key Opportunities

• Everyone recognizes that change is necessary.
• Affected constituencies (such as suppliers who want the company to stay in business) may offer significant external support.
• A little success goes a long way.

Realignment
Watkins rights about the challenges and opportunities of the Turnaround situation.

Key Challenges:

• Dealing with deeply ingrained cultural norms that no longer contribute to high performance.
• Convincing employees that change is necessary.
• Restructuring the top team and refocusing the organization.

Key Opportunities

• The organization has significant pockets of strength.
• People want to continue to see themselves as successful.

Sustaining Success
Key Challenges:

• Playing good defense by avoiding decisions that cause problems.
• Living in the shadow of a revered leader and dealing with the team they created.
• Finding ways to take the business to the next level.

Key Opportunities

• A strong team may already be in place.
• People are motivated to succeed.
• Foundations for continued success (such as the product pipeline) may be in place.

Key Take Aways
Here’s my key take aways:

• Identifying which situation you’re in helps you anticipate what to expect.
• Different situations call for different actions.
• Having a shared vocabulary for the situations, helps get the team on the same page.

My Related Posts

• STARS Model of Business Evolution