The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter

by Michael D. Watkins

Overcoming Learning Roadblocks

When a new leader derails, failure to learn effectively is almost always a factor.

Planning to learn means figuring out in advance what the important questions are and how you can best answer them.

“learning roadblocks,” internal barriers to learning.

primary symptom is a nearly compulsive need to take action. Effective leaders strike the right balance between doing (making things happen) and being (observing and reflecting).

Effective leaders strike the right balance between doing (making things happen) and being (observing and reflecting).

simply displaying a genuine desire to learn and understand translates into increased credibility and influence.

Leaders who are onboarding into new organizations must therefore focus on learning and adapting to the new culture. Otherwise they risk suffering the organizational equivalent of organ rejection syndrome (with the new leaders being the organs). They do things that trigger the organization’s immune system and find themselves under attack as a foreign body. Even in situations (such as turnarounds) when you have been brought in explicitly to import new ways of doing things, you still have to learn about the organization’s culture and politics to socialize and customize your approach.

Managing Learning as an Investment Process

An actionable insight is knowledge that enables you to make better decisions earlier and so helps you quickly reach the break-even point in personal value creation.

Devote some time to defining your learning agenda as early as possible, and return to it periodically to refine and supplement it.

Defining Your Learning Agenda

The starting point is to begin to define your learning agenda, ideally before you formally enter the organization. A learning agenda crystallizes your learning priorities: what do you most need to learn? It consists of a focused set of questions to guide your inquiry or the hypotheses you want to explore and test, or both. Of course, learning during a transition is iterative: at first, your learning agenda will consist mostly of questions, but as you learn more, you will hypothesize about what is going on and why. Increasingly, your learning will shift toward fleshing out and testing those hypotheses.

Questions About the Past Performance How has this organization performed in the past? How do people in the organization think it has performed? How were goals set? Were they insufficiently or overly ambitious? Were internal or external benchmarks used? What measures were employed? What behaviors did they encourage and discourage? What happened if goals were not met? Root Causes If performance has been good, why has that been the case? What have been the relative contributions of strategy, structure, systems, talent bases, culture, and politics? If performance has been poor, why has that been the case? Do the primary issues reside in the organization’s strategy? Its structure? Its technical capabilities? Its culture? Its politics? History of Change What efforts have been made to change the organization? What happened? Who has been instrumental in shaping this organization? Questions About the Present Vision and Strategy What is the stated vision and strategy? Is the organization really pursuing that strategy? If not, why not? If so, will the strategy take the organization where it needs to go? People Who is capable, and who is not? Who is trustworthy, and who is not? Who has influence, and why? Processes What are the key processes? Are they performing acceptably in quality, reliability, and timeliness? If not, why not? Land Mines What lurking surprises could detonate and push you offtrack? What potentially damaging cultural or political missteps must you avoid? Early Wins I...

think, too, about the right mix of technical, interpersonal, cultural, and political learning.1 In the technical domain, you may have to grapple with unfamiliar markets, technologies, processes, and systems. In the interpersonal domain, you need to get to know your boss, peers, and direct reports. In the cultural domain, you must learn about norms, values, and behavioral expectations, which are almost certainly different from those in the organization you came from, even if you’re moving between units in the same company. In the political domain, you must understand the shadow organization—the informal set of processes and alliances that exist in the shadow of the formal structure and strongly influence how work actually gets done.

In the technical domain, you may have to grapple with unfamiliar markets, technologies, processes, and systems. In the interpersonal domain, you need to get to know your boss, peers, and direct reports. In the cultural domain, you must learn about norms, values, and behavioral expectations, which are almost certainly different from those in the organization you came from,

In the political domain, you must understand the shadow organization—the informal set of processes and alliances that exist in the shadow of the formal structure and s...

Identifying the Best Sources of Insight You will learn from various types of hard data, such as financial and operating reports, strategic and functional plans, employee surveys, press accounts, and industry reports.

you also need “soft” information about the organization’s strategy, technical capabilities, culture, and politics. The only way to gain this intelligence is to talk to people who have critical knowledge about your situation.

Customers. How do customers—external or internal—perceive your organization? How do your best customers assess your products or services? How about your customer service? If your customers are external, how do they rank your company against your competitors?

Frontline R&D and operations.

can familiarize you with the organization’s basic processes and its relationships with key external constituencies. They can also shed light on how the rest of the organization supports or undermines efforts on the front line.

Sales and procurement.

accelerate the onboarding process before you arrive.

leverage the rich array of resources available online, including background information and analysis of the organization, biographies of key people, and information available on the organization’s own website.

reach out to current or former employees to get a bead on the ...

keep to the same script in all your meetings.

start with brief opening remarks about yourself and your approach, followed by questions about the other person (background, family, and interests) and then a standard set of questions about the business.

What are the biggest challenges the organization is facing (or will face in the near future)? Why is the organization facing (or going to face) these challenges? What are the most promising unexploited opportunities for growth? What would need to happen for the organization to exploit the potential of these opportunities? If you were me, what would you focus attention on?

By asking everyone the same set of questions, you can identify prevalent and divergent views and thus avoid being swayed by the first or most forceful or articulate person you talk to.

even a modest structure—a script and a sequence of interactions, such as meeting with people individually, doing some analysis, and then meeting with them together—can dramatically accelerate your ability to extract actionable insights.

tailored for the groups you meet.

What do our customers want that they’re getting from our competitors an...

Creating a Learning Plan

Your learning agenda defines what you want to learn. Your learning plan defines how you will go about learning it.

learning should be a primary focus of your plan for your first 30 days on the job (unless, of course, there is a disaster in progress).

The heart of your learning plan is a cyclical learning process in which you collect information, analyze and distill it, and develop and test hypotheses, thus progressively deepening your understanding of your new organization.

Learning Plan Template Before Entry Find out whatever you can about the organization’s strategy, structure, performance, and people. Look for external assessments of the performance of the organization. You will learn how knowledgeable, fairly unbiased people view it. If you are a manager at a lower level, talk to people who deal with your new group as suppliers or customers. Find external observers who know the organization well, including former employees, recent retirees, and people who have transacted business with the organization. Ask these people open-ended questions about history, politics, and culture. Talk with your predecessor if possible. Talk to your new boss. As you begin to learn about the organization, write down your first impressions and eventually some hypotheses. Compile an initial set of questions to guide your structured inquiry after you arrive. Soon After Entry Review detailed operating plans, performance data, and personnel data. Meet one-on-one with your direct reports and ask them the questions you compiled. You will learn about convergent and divergent views and about your reports as people. Assess how things are going at key interfaces. You will hear how salespeople, purchasing agents, customer service representatives, and others perceive your organization’s dealings with external constituencies. You will also learn about problems they see that others do not. Test strategic alignment from the top down. Ask people at the top what the company’s v...

you need to be clear about what you’re trying to do and how they can help.

figure out where to get some early wins, or build supportive coalitions, it will be critical for you to gain additional insights.

ACCELERATE YOUR LEARNING—CHECKLIST How effective are you at learning about new organizations? Do you sometimes fall prey to the action imperative? To coming in with “the” answer? If so, how will you avoid doing this? What is your learning agenda? Based on what you know now, compose a list of questions to guide your early inquiries. If you have begun to form hypotheses about what is going on, what are they, and how will you test them? Given the questions you want to answer, who is likely to provide you with the most useful insights? How might you increase the efficiency of your learning process? What are some structured ways you might extract more insight for your investment of time and energy? What support is available to accelerate your learning, and how might you best leverage it? Given your answers to the previous questions, start to create your learning plan.

STARS is an acronym for five common business situations leaders may find themselves moving into: start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, and sustaining success.

start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, and sustaining success.

In a start-up, you are charged with assembling the capabilities (people, funding, and technology) to get a new business, product, project, or relationship off the ground.

employees of a start-up are typically much less focused on key issues than those in a turnaround, simply because the vision, strategy, structures, and systems that channel organizational energy are not yet in place.

The STARS model

In a turnaround, you take on a unit or group that is recognized to be in deep trouble and work to get it back on track.

Turnarounds are ready-fire-aim situations:

realignments (and sustaining-success assignments) are more ready-aim-fire situations.

In an accelerated-growth situation, the organization has begun to hit its stride, and the hard work of scaling up has begun.