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

by Michael D. Watkins

Focus.

Relationships.

Trust.

handle on their competence in their respective areas.

In a sustaining-success situation, for example, you may have the time to develop one or two high-potential members of your team.

In a turnaround, by contrast, you need people who can perform at the A-player level right away.

Meet one-on-one with each member of your new team as soon as possible.

Make sure you are assessing judgment and not only technical competence or basic intelligence.

Evolving Your Team

you should be able to provisionally assign people to one of the following categories:

Keep in place.

Keep and d...

Move to another position.

Replace (low priority).

Replace (high priority).

Observe for a while.

Use skip-level meetings and regular reporting sessions to evaluate the talent pool.

Aligning Your Team

you need to define how each team member can best support those key goals. This process calls for breaking down large goals into their components and working with your team to assign responsibility for each element.

Push tools, such as goals, performance measurement systems, and incentives, motivate people through authority, loyalty, fear, and expectation of reward for productive work. Pull tools, such as a compelling vision, inspire people by invoking a positive and exciting image of the future.

The relative sizes of individual and group-based performance compensation depend on the extent of interdependence of contributions. If superior performance comes from the sum of independent efforts, then individual performance should be rewarded (for example, in a sales group). If group cooperation and integration are critical, then group-based incentives should get more weight (for example, in a new-product development team). Note that there may be several levels of group-based incentives: team, unit, and company as a whole.

Articulate Your Vision

It taps into sources of inspiration.

It makes people part of “the story.”

It contains evocative language.

principles

Off-site meetings are often a powerful way to create and generate commitment to a shared vision,

Develop stories and metaphors to communicate it.

Reinforce it. Research on persuasive communication heavily underlines the power of repetition.

Develop channels for communicating it.

Leading Your Team

As you make progress in assessing, evolving, and aligning the team, think, too, about how you want to work with the team on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis.

Target Team Processes for Change Once you grasp how your team functioned in the past—and what did and did not work well—use what you learn to establish the new processes you judge necessary.

approaches can be arrayed on a spectrum ranging from unilateral decision making at one end to unanimous consent at the other.

At the other extreme, processes that require unanimous consent from more than a few people tend to suffer from decision diffusion.

Between these two extremes are the decision-making processes that most leaders use: consult-and-decide and build consensus.

When a leader solicits information and advice from direct reports—individually, as a group, or both—but reserves the right to make the final call,

seeks buy-in from the group for any decision.

“If I am under time pressure, I will use consult-and-decide.”

To succeed in your new role, you will need the support of people over whom you have no direct authority.

Discipline yourself to invest in building up “relationship bank accounts” with people you anticipate needing to work with later.

through persuasion and alliance building—than

Defining Your Influence Objectives

The first step is to be clear about why you need the support of others.

Understanding the Influence Landscape

Start to map your influence landscape by identifying influential players, what you need them to do, and when you need them to do it.

these people are your winning alliances

potential blocking alliances

Map Influence Networks

Senior decision makers usually are influenced to a significant degree by the opinions of others on whom they rely for advice and counsel. So the next step is to map influence networks—who influences whom on the issues of concern to you.