Starting A New Leadership Role? How To Negotiate The Conditions For Your Success

If you’ve landed a great leadership position, you’ll certainly want to negotiate a competitive salary, benefits, shares and anything else that will help protect your financial interest now and in the future. But your negotiations shouldn’t stop there. It is just as important to negotiate the conditions you’ll need to be successful in your leadership role. This article drills down on how to ensure your contract includes provisions that will help set you up for success as a leader.

Support To Restructure The Executive Team

Coming into a new leadership role means inheriting an existing team. If the fit with the executive team isn’t good, you may be unsuccessful in your new role. After all, even the best efforts will backfire if the executive team isn’t moving in the same direction.

Before agreeing to lead an organization, get to know the executive team. What roles are on the team? Are there obvious gaps (e.g., are there key players missing from the table)? Are there new executive-level positions that might help support your mandate (e.g., would the business benefit from the creation of a chief design officer or chief culture officer)? Who really runs the company? Where is power consolidated? Do you anticipate the need to immediately restructure the organizational chart?

If you arrive with the ability to immediately engage in new hires, oversee exits and or restructure the organizational chart, you’re unlikely to regret it. Baking these conditions into your conditions of employment will help you hit the ground running faster and do so knowing the board and other senior leaders support your plan of action.

Support To Enhance The Workplace Culture

As a senior leader, fit is one of the most important initial considerations. Before coming into an organization, don’t just do your due diligence at the financial level. Discover what the real culture is like. To do this, you might ask for an opportunity to return to the organization post-offer to talk to additional team members and spend time on the ground. If you strongly suspect the culture is suffering from low trust or low engagement and the organization is investing little or nothing to support its culture, resources to bolster the culture may also be something you want to secure in terms of employment.

A Realistic And Competitive Incentive Structure

Coming into a new leadership role, you shouldn’t just be thinking about incentives for yourself. In fact, if you want to drive change, you’ll also need to have the ability to incentivize team members. If the bonus structure isn’t realistic (it’s not financially viable given the current fiscal state of the organization) or isn’t competitive in the current market (too low to attract and retain top talent and keep them pursuing key company goals), you may also want to negotiate a shift in the incentive structure as part of your terms of employment.

Access To Resources

While there is often a perception that leaders are close enough to organizational purse strings to make key decisions, this isn’t always the case. Leaders in some fields (e.g., higher education and health care) often have little direct control over how and when major financial decisions can move forward, even when they occupy a top-level role. However, even in the corporate world, the ability to make financial decisions can, at times, get bogged down, depending on the organization’s structure. Coming into a new role, clarify how financial decisions are made and how much agency you’ll have as a leader. Also, investigate what types of resources, including discretionary funds, you’ll have to immediately invest in new initiatives.

Final Thoughts

The bottom line is that when you arrive in a new leadership role, while an attractive executive compensation package is important, so are the conditions to set yourself up for success. If you can’t assemble the right team, build a strong culture, attract and retain top talent and make at least some decisions about where to invest resources, your ability to drive change and have an impact will likely suffer. Negotiating conditions for success upfront will help ensure you’re not only able to assume a leadership role with adequate compensation but also build a strong legacy while occupying the position.