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

by Michael D. Watkins

It’s also essential to develop the right relationship wiring as soon as possible. This means identifying key stakeholders and building productive working relationships. As with David, there is a natural but dangerous tendency for new leaders to focus on building vertical relationships early in their transitions—up to their bosses and down to their teams. Often, insufficient time is devoted to lateral relationship building with peers and key constituencies outside the new leader’s immediate organization. Remember: you don’t want to be meeting your neighbors for the first time in the middle of the night when your house is burning down.

No matter how well you think you understand what you’re expected to do, be sure to check and recheck expectations once you formally join your new organization. Why? Because understandings that are developed before you join—about mandates, support, and resources—may not prove to be fully accurate once you’re in the job. It isn’t that you’ve been actively misled; rather, it’s because recruiting is like romance, and employment is like marriage. As David learned, newly hired leaders can easily come to believe that they have more latitude to make changes than is actually the case. If they act on these sorts of incorrect assumptions, they easily can trigger unnecessary resistance and even derail themselves.

understand and factor in the expectations of key constituencies other than your new boss—for example, key people in finance at corporate headquarters if you’re working in a business unit. This is especially the case if they’re likely to influence how you’re evaluated and rewarded.

How do people get support for critical initiatives? Is it more important to have the support of a patron within the senior team, or affirmation from your peers and direct reports that your idea is a good one?

Are meetings filled with dialogue on hard issues, or are they simply forums for publicly ratifying agreements that have been reached in private?

When it comes time to get things done, which matters more—a deep understanding of processes o...

Can people talk openly about difficult issues without fear of retribution? Or do they avoid conflict—or, even worse, push it to lo...

Does the company promote stars, rewarding those who visibly and vocally drive business initiatives? Or does it encourage team players, rewarding those who lead aut...

Are there any restrictions on how you achieve results? Does the organization have a well-defined, well-communicated set of values that is reinforced ...

As early as possible, get access to publicly available information about financials, products, strategy, and brands. Identify additional sources of information, such as websites and analyst reports. If appropriate for your level, ask the business to assemble a briefing book. If possible, schedule familiarization tours of key facilities before the formal start date.

Ask your boss to identify and introduce you to the key people you should connect with early on. If possible, meet with some stakeholders before the formal start. Take control of your calendar, and schedule early meetings with key stakeholders. Be careful to focus on lateral relationships (peers, others) and not only vertical ones (boss, direct reports).

Understand and engage in business planning and performance management. No matter how well you think you understand what you need to do, schedule a conversation with your boss about expectations in your first week. Have explicit conversations about working styles with bosses and direct reports as early as possible.

One way to pinpoint your vulnerabilities is to assess your problem preferences—the kinds of problems toward which you naturally gravitate. Everyone likes to do some things more than others.

Your preferences have probably influenced you to choose jobs where you can do more of what you like to do. As a result, you’ve perfected those skills and feel most competent when you solve problems in those areas, and that reinforces the cycle.

You can do a lot to compensate for your vulnerabilities. Three basic tools are self-discipline, team building, and advice and counsel. You need to discipline yourself to devote time to critical activities that you do not enjoy and that may not come naturally. Beyond that, actively search out people in your organization whose skills are sharp in these areas, so that they can serve as a backstop for you and you can learn from them. A network of advisers and counselors can also help you move beyond your comfort zone.

Your weaknesses can make you vulnerable, but so can your strengths. To paraphrase Abraham Maslow, “To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”3 The qualities that have made you successful so far (it’s worth being clear in your own mind what your hammer is) can prove to be weaknesses in your new role.

“Suddenly I realized how much I didn’t know” is a common lament from leaders in transition.

Having to start learning again can evoke long-buried and unnerving feelings of incompetence or vulnerability, especially if you suffer early setbacks. You may find yourself mentally revisiting a juncture in your career when you had less confidence. Perhaps you will make some early missteps and experience failure for the first time in ages. So you unconsciously begin to gravitate toward areas where you feel competent and toward people who reinforce your feelings of self-worth.

denial and defensiveness are a sure recipe for disaster.

Early in your career, there is a premium on cultivating good technical advisers—experts in certain aspects of marketing or finance, for instance, who can help you get your work done. As you move to higher levels, however, it becomes increasingly important to get good political counsel and personal advice. Political counselors help you understand the politics of the organization, an understanding that is especially important when you plan to implement change.

Colleagues who have become subordinates may not want their relationships with you to change; this challenge is especially sharp when you’re promoted to lead former peers. But change they must, and the sooner you accept that (and help others accept it, too), the better. Others in your organization will be looking for signs of favoritism and will judge you accordingly.

Some may even work to undermine you. This kind of thing may subside with time. But expect early tests of your authority, and plan to meet them by being firm and fair. If you don’t establish limits early, you will live to regret it.

if you conclude that the people in question are never going to accept your new role and the resulting situation, then you must find a way to move them out of your organization as quickly as possible.

you should engage with HR and your new boss about creating a 90-day transition plan. If you have been promoted, find out whether there are competency models describing the requirements of your new role (but don’t assume they tell the whole story). If you have been hired from the outside, ask for help in identifying and connecting with key stakeholders or finding a cultural interpreter. These people often are natural historians who can give you insight into how the organization has evolved and changed.

Preparing yourself for a new role turns out to be hard work, and some of the barriers may lie within you. Take a few minutes to think hard about your personal vulnerabilities in your new role, as revealed by your analysis of your problem preferences. How will you compensate for them? Then think about the external forces, such as commitments to your current boss, that could hold you back.

To borrow an old saw, preparing yourself is a journey and not a destination. You will have to work constantly to ensure that you’re engaging with the real challenges of your new position and not retreating to your comfort zone. It is easy to backslide into habits that are both comfortable and dangerous. Plan to reread this chapter and its questions periodically, asking, Am I doing all I can to prepare myself?

The first task in making a successful transition is to accelerate your learning. Effective learning gives you the foundational insights you need as you build your plan for the next 90 days. So it is essential to figure out what you need to know about your new organization and then to learn it as rapidly as you can. The more efficiently and effectively you learn, the more quickly you will close your window of vulnerability. You can identify potential problems that might erupt and take you offtrack. The faster you climb the learning curve, the earlier you can begin to make good business decisions.

Planning to learn means figuring out in advance what the important questions are and how you can best answer them. Few new leaders take the time to think systematically about their learning priorities. Fewer still explicitly create a learning plan when entering a new role.

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

Remember: 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.

agenda as early as possible, and return to it periodically to refine and supplement it. Efficient learning means identifying the best available sources of insight and then figuring out how to extract maximum insight with the least possible outlay of time.

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.

Start by generating questions about the past, the present, and the future

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?

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 In what areas (people, relationships, processes, or products) can you achieve some early wins?

Challenges and Opportunities In what areas is the organization most likely to face stiff challenges in the coming year? What can be done now to prepare for them? What are the most promising unexploited opportunities? What would need to happen to realize their potential? Barriers and Resources What are the most formidable barriers to making needed changes? Are they technical? Cultural? Political? Are there islands of excellence or other high-quality resources that you can leverage? What new capabilities need to be developed or acquired? Culture Which elements of the culture should be preserved? Which elements need to change?

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. The political domain is both important and difficult to understand, because it isn’t easily visible to those who have not spent time in the organization and because political land mines can easily stymie your efforts to establish a solid base of support during the transition.

Integrators are people who coordinate or facilitate cross-functional interaction, including project managers, plant managers, and product managers. You can learn from them how links within the company work and how the functions mesh. These people also can help you discover the true political hierarchies and identify where internal conflicts lie.

Keep an eye out for “old-timers” or natural historians—people who have been with the organization for a long time and who naturally absorb its history. From these people, you can learn about the company’s mythology (key stories about how the organization came to be and trials it has gone through) and the roots of its culture and politics.

get a bead on

Your views may be shaped excessively by the first few people (or last few) with whom you talk. And people may seek you out early precisely to influence you.

You might 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. This approach is powerful, because the responses you get are comparable. You can line them up side by side and analyze what is consistent and inconsistent about the responses. This comparison helps you gain insight into which people are being more or less open.

Ask them essentially the same five questions: 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. How people answer can also tell you a lot about your new team and its politics. Who answers directly, and who is evasive or prone to tangents? Who takes responsibility, and who points fingers? Who has a broad view of the business, and who seems stuck in a silo?

Naturally, the questions you ask will be tailored for the groups you meet. If you’re meeting with salespeople, for example, consider asking, What do our customers want that they’re getting from our competitors and not getting from us?

Your learning agenda defines what you want to learn. Your learning plan defines how you will go about learning it. It translates learning goals into specific sets of actions—identifying promising sources of insight and using systematic methods—that accelerate your learning. Your learning plan is a critical part of your overall 90-day plan. In fact, as you will discover later, 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).

Test strategic alignment from the top down. Ask people at the top what the company’s vision and strategy are. Then see how far down into the organizational hierarchy those beliefs penetrate. You will learn how well the previous leader drove vision and strategy down through the organization. Test awareness of challenges and opportunities from the bottom up. Start by asking frontline people how they view the company’s challenges and opportunities. Then work your way up. You will learn how well the people at the top check the pulse of the organization.