She believes we need to move from mentors to sponsors because a sponsor advocates on your behalf.

Sallie says, ‘All the important decisions about your career are made when you’re not in the room. People decide to hire you, fire you, promote you, fund you, send you on the overseas assignment, all when you’re not there. So how do you ensure that you have someone in the room fighting for you? I would strongly argue that you need to have in place your Personal Board of Directors. Those are your mentors, your sponsors, your confidants, the people you can turn to when you’re thinking about a career transition—for the kind of advice your boyfriend, your parents, and your best friend from college just can’t give you.

Two, take the time to listen before you do anything else. You will set the tone; it will be very difficult to reset it. If you start off by imposing your views on people, you’re not going to have what you most need when you most need it - namely, the commitment of the people you need to get the work done. Even if you’re right and you end up in exactly the same place as you thought you were going to end up, the experience of stopping and doing nothing but being a very good listener for as long as you can stand it is the most important thing to do. The whole act of talking to the top people is the first step towards gaining their commitment and understanding, which you must have if you don’t get it the first time. Until you get a consensus, that everyone agrees on - these are our priorities, and here’s who’s going to work on them, and here’s how our midcourse correction is going to be if we’re not right, and here are the things we can’t put off - take as long as you can stand to get that front end clear, committed, understood, communicated, massaged, and changed.” - Henry Schacht

Most likely you have more time than you think to develop your strategic agenda. While people expect fresh perspective from a new leader, a new style, and probably a new energy level, most do not expect a wholesale new direction, at least early on.

There’s a lot to be said for effective listening and for not sharing plans prematurely. Not only does it tamp down the amount of potential distraction within the organization, it also nips public scrutiny and second-guessing in the bud. The last thing a new leader needs, especially in a crisis situation, is to have the media and industry pundits questioning, analyzing, and deconstructing your plans even more than they already will be doing. Big pronouncements, especially early in your tenure, make big impressions that can come back to haunt you. “If you’re going to make big calls, you better be right,” counsels Steve Bennett. “Because if you come in early and you make big calls and you’re wrong, the whole organization is going to lose a lot of confidence in you.”

Vision for vision’s sake is counterproductive. Determining a course for the organization is a process that usually requires more time than most people foresee. It should be iterative, building off your strategic agenda, sharpening and clarifying the path based in experimentation and feedback.

A frenetic approach just makes the company even more unstable. One, you’re not likely to be right. Two, even if you are right, nobody knows what the heck you’re doing. Three, you haven’t bothered to listen to anybody, so you have strained relationships you want to cement. Now, if you’re going to run out of money in five or six days, you’ve got a bit of a different story than if you’re going to run out of money in ninety days. That’s what I call the ‘burning platform’ problem. If you’ve got a burning platform problem, you don’t have a lot of time, so you have to take things in two steps. You have to gather your team together and say, ‘Guys, before we do anything else, we had better put this fire out. Then we’ll take a deep breath.’” - Henry Schacht.

Another factor at work here, though, is the status quo bias, a powerful and widespread psychological force in business. The concept was introduced by researchers William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser, who showed in studies with many kinds of decision-makers, including managers, that “when making an important choice, people are more likely to pick the option that maintains things as they are currently.” When you’re enjoying success, your status quo bias is reinforced, which might be just fine. But given that after five, six, or seven years, market conditions will surely have evolved, it usually won't be fine to stick with the status quo later. When responding to those changes would involve making a substantial alteration to or even reversal of a winning strategy or to operational engineering you have orchestrated, the status quo bias makes recognizing the need for change and making the case for it to your team and board a good deal more challenging.