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

by Michael D. Watkins

The president of the United States gets 100 days to prove himself; you get 90. The actions you take during your first few months in a new role will largely determine whether you succeed or fail.

Opinions of your effectiveness begin to form surprisingly quickly, and, once formed, they’re very hard to change. If you’re successful in building credibility and securing early wins, the momentum likely will propel you through the rest of your tenure.

A long career at a single company (or even two or three companies) is increasingly a thing of the past. Leaders experience many transitions, so the ability to transition quickly and effectively into a new role has become a critical skill.

Beyond these easily identified milestones, leaders also experience many hidden transitions. These transitions occur when there are substantial changes in leaders’ roles and responsibilities without corresponding changes in titles. These are common occurrences, often the result of organizational shifts due to rapid growth, restructuring, and acquisition. Hidden transitions can be particularly perilous, because leaders do not always recognize them or give them the attention they deserve. The most dangerous transition can be the one you don’t recognize is happening.

The most dangerous transition can be the one you don’t recognize is happening.

This is the point at which you have contributed as much value to your new organization as you have consumed from it.

If you have inherited a disaster—the classic burning platform—you may be creating value from the moment your appointment is announced. If you have been hired from the outside into a very successful organization, it may take a year or more for you to be a net value contributor. However, even though the time varies (and I explore in depth the challenges of different types of transitions), the goal is the same: to get there as quickly and effectively as possible.

You believe you will be successful in the new role by doing the same things you did in your previous role, only more so. You fail to see that success in the new role requires you to stop doing some things and to embrace new competencies.

try too hard, too early to put your own stamp on the organization. You are too busy to learn, and you make bad decisions and catalyze resistance to your initiatives.

You don’t negotiate your mandate or establish clear, achievable objectives. You may perform well but still fail to meet the expectations of your boss and other key stakeholders.

You spend too much time focused on learning about the technical part of the business and not enough about the cultural and political dimensions of your new role. You don’t build the cultural insight, relationships, and information conduits you need if you’re to understand what is really going on.

You spend too much time focused on vertical relationships—up to the boss and down to direct reports—and not enough on peers and other stakeholders. You don’t fully understand what it will take to succeed, and you miss early opportunities to build supportive alliances.

By failing to learn the right things in the right ways at the outset, for example, you can make bad initial decisions that damage your credibility. Then, because people don’t trust your judgment, it can become still more difficult to learn what you need to know. You consume energy compensating for early miscalculations, and the downward spiral takes hold.

Leadership ultimately is about influence and leverage. You are, after all, only one person. To be successful, you need to mobilize the energy of many others in your organization.

Transition failures happen because new leaders either misunderstand the essential demands of the situation or lack the skill and flexibility to adapt to them.

curve as fast as you can in your new organization. This means understanding its markets, products, technologies, systems, and structures, as well as its culture and politics. Learning about a new organization can feel like drinking from a fire hose. You must be systematic and focused about deciding what you need to learn and how you will learn it most efficiently.

product, process, plant, or business—present challenges quite different from those you would face while turning around a product, process, or plant in serious trouble. A clear diagnosis of the situation is an essential prerequisite for developing your action plan.

Early wins build your credibility and create momentum. They create virtuous cycles that leverage the energy you put into the organization to create a pervasive sense that good things are happening. In the first few weeks, you need to identify opportunities to build personal credibility. In the first 90 days, you need to identify ways to create value and improve business results that will help you get to the break-even point more rapidly.

Because no other single relationship is more important, you need to figure out how to build a productive working relationship with your new boss (or bosses) and manage her expectations. This means carefully planning for a series of critical conversations about the situation, expectations, working style, resources, and your personal...

The higher you rise in an organization, the more you must play the role of organizational architect. This means figuring out whether the organization’s strategic direction is sound, bringing its structure into alignment with its strategy, and developing the ...

If you are inheriting a team, you need to evaluate, align, and mobilize its members. You likely also need to restructure it to better meet the demands of the situation. Your willingness to make tough early personnel calls and your capacity to select the right people for the right positions are among the most important drivers of success during your transition and ...

Your success depends on your ability to influence people outside your direct line of control. Supportive alliances, both internal and external, are necessary if you are to achieve your goals. You therefore should sta...

In the personal and professional tumult of a transition, you must work hard to maintain your equilibrium and preserve your ability to make good judgments. The risks of losing perspective, becoming isolated, and making bad calls are ever present during transitions. There is much you can do to accelerate your personal transition and to gain more control over your work environment. The right advice-and-counsel network is an indispensable resource.

Finally, you need to help all those in your organization—direct reports, bosses, and peers—accelerate their own transitions. The fact that you’re in transition means they are too.

No matter how much preparation time you get, start planning what you hope to accomplish by specific milestones. Even a few hours of preentry planning can go a long way. Begin by thinking about your first day in the new job. What do you want to do by the end of that day? Then move to the first week. Then focus on the end of the first month, the second month, and finally the three-month mark. These plans will be sketchy, but the simple act of beginning to plan will help clear your head.

What will it take for you to reach the break-even point more quickly? What are some traps you might encounter, and how can you avoid them? What can you do to create virtuous cycles and build momentum in your new role? What types of transitions are you experiencing? Which are you finding most challenging, and why? What are the key elements and milestones in your 90-day plan?

Unfortunately, Julia ran into trouble early on. Her earlier success in marketing was the result of extraordinary attention to detail. Accustomed to managing with authority and making the calls, she had a high need for control and a tendency to micromanage. When she tried to continue making decisions, members of the team initially said nothing. But soon two key members challenged her knowledge and authority. Stung, she focused on the area she knew best: the marketing aspects of the launch. Her efforts to micromanage the members of the marketing team alienated them. Within a month and a half, Julia was back in marketing, and someone else was leading the team.

the strengths that had made her successful in marketing could be liabilities in a role that required her to lead without direct authority or superior expertise.

It’s a mistake to believe that you will be successful in your new job by continuing to do what you did in your previous job, only more so. “They put me in the job because of my skills and accomplishments,” the reasoning goes. “So that must be what they expect me to do here.” This thinking is destructive, because doing what you know how to do (and avoiding what you don’t) can appear to work, at least for a while. You can exist in a state of denial, believing that because you’re being efficient, you’re being effective. You may keep believing this until the moment the walls come crashing down around you.

At the broadest level, preparing yourself means letting go of the past and embracing the imperatives of the new situation to give yourself a running start. It can be hard work, but it is essential. Often, promising managers fail in new roles because they’ve failed to prepare themselves by embracing the necessary changes in perspective.

You must figure out what it takes to be excellent in the new role, how to exceed the expectations of those who promoted you, and how to position yourself for still greater things. Specifically, every promotion presents new leaders with a core set of challenges to be surmounted.

Each time you’re promoted, your horizon broadens to encompass a wider set of issues and decisions. So you need to gain and sustain a high-level perspective in your new role. To be successful, Julia needed to shift her focus from her marketing function to the full array of issues relating to the product launch. You also need to learn to strike the right balance between keeping the wide view and drilling down into the details. This juggling act can be challenging, because what had been the fifty-thousand-foot view in your previous role may be equivalent to the world at five thousand feet, or even five hundred feet, in your new job.

you build a team of competent people whom you trust, you establish goals and metrics to monitor their progress, you translate higher-level goals into specific responsibilities for your direct reports, and you reinforce them through process.

change. If you’re leading an organization of five people, it may make sense to delegate specific tasks such as drafting a piece of marketing material or selling to a particular customer. In an organization of fifty people, your focus may shift from tasks to projects and processes. At five hundred people, you often need to delegate responsibility for specific products or platforms. And at five thousand people, your direct reports may be responsible for entire businesses.

Conventional wisdom says that the higher you go, the easier it is to get things done. Not necessarily. Paradoxically, when you get promoted, positional authority often becomes less important for pushing agendas forward. Like Julia, you may indeed gain increased scope to influence decisions that affect the business, but the way you need to engage may be quite different. Decision making becomes more political—less about authority, and more about influence. That isn’t good or bad; it’s simply inevitable.

issues you’re dealing with become much more complex and ambiguous when you move up a level—and your ability to identify “right” answers based solely on data and analysis declines correspondingly. Decisions are shaped more by others’ expert judgments and who trusts whom, as well as by networks of mutual support.

at a higher level of the organization, the other players are more capable and have stronger egos. Remember, you were promoted because you are able and driven; the same is true for everyone around you. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the decision-making game becomes much more bruising and politically charged the higher up you go. It...

The good news about moving up is that you get a broader view of the business and more latitude to shape it. The bad news is that you are farther from the front lines and more likely to receive filtered information. To avoid this, you need to establish new communication channels to stay connected with what is happening where the action is. You might maintain regular, direct contact with select customers, for instance, or meet regularly with groups of frontline employees, all without undermining the integrity of the chain of command.

“All the world’s a stage,” as William Shakespeare put it in the play As You Like It, “and all the men and women merely players.” One inescapable reality of promotion is that you attract much more attention and a higher level of scrutiny than before. You become the lead actor in a crucial public play. Private moments become fewer, and there is mounting pressure to exhibit the right kind of leadership presence at all times.

Leaders joining new companies often are making lateral moves: they’ve been hired to do things that they’ve been successful doing elsewhere. Their difficulties lie in adjusting to new organizational contexts that have different political structures and cultures.

David came away from his first couple of weeks wondering just what or who had held Energix together—and feeling more convinced than ever that he could push this company to the next level. But then he began to hit roadblocks. The senior management committee (SMC) meetings started out frustrating and got worse. David, who was used to highly disciplined meetings with clear agendas and actionable decisions, found the committee members’ elliptical discussions and consensus-driven process agonizing.

When David raised a sensitive or provocative issue with the SMC, or pressed others in the room for commitments to act, people would either fall silent or recite a list of reasons why things couldn’t be done a certain way.

Given the conversations he’d had with the CEO during recruiting and the clear mandate he felt he’d been given, David was shocked by the stonewalling he encountered. The attendees listened but wouldn’t commit themselves or their people to David’s plan. Instead, they urged David to bring his plan before the whole SMC because it affected many parts of the company and had the potential to be disruptive if not managed carefully. (He later learned that two of the participants had gone to the CEO soon after the meeting to register their concerns; David was “a bull in a china shop,” according to one. “We have to be careful not to upset some delicate balances as we get out the next-gen turbine,” said the other. And both were of the firm opinion that “letting Jones run things might not be the right way to go.”) Even more troubling, David experienced a noticeable and worrisome chill in his relationship with the CEO.

Joining a new company is akin to an organ transplant—and you’re the new organ. If you’re not thoughtful in adapting to the new situation, you could end up being attacked by the organizational immune system and rejected.

When surveyed, senior HR practitioners overwhelmingly assess the challenge of coming in from the outside as “much harder...

To overcome these barriers and succeed in joining a new company, you should focus on four pillars of effective onboarding: business orientation, stakeholder connection, alignment of expectations, and cultural adaptation.

Regardless of your position, for example, it’s beneficial to learn about the brands and products you will be supporting, whether or not you’re directly involved in sales and marketing. Focus, too, on understanding the operating model, planning and performance evaluation systems, and talent management systems, because they often powerfully influence how you can most effectively have an impact.