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

by Michael D. Watkins

Critically, you need to be willing to ask in the first place and not feel that you should know everything and be in complete control from the moment you walk through the door.

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.

But no good deed goes unpunished.

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

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. A turnaround is the classic burning platform, demanding rapid, decisive action.

In an accelerated-growth situation, the organization has begun to hit its stride, and the hard work of scaling up has begun. This typically means you’re putting in the structures, processes, and systems necessary to rapidly expand the business (or project, product, or relationship). You also likely need to hire and onboard a lot of people while making sure they become part of the culture that has made the organization successful thus far. The risks, of course, lie in expanding too much too fast.

In a realignment, your challenge is to revitalize a unit, product, process, or project that has been drifting into danger. The clouds are gathering on the horizon, but the storm has not yet broken—and many people may not even see the clouds. The biggest challenge often is to create a sense of urgency. There may be a lot of denial; the leader needs to open people’s eyes to the fact that a problem actually exists.

You cannot figure out where to take a new organization if you do not understand where it has been and how it got where it is.

Specifically, you must establish priorities, define strategic intent, identify where you can secure early wins, build the right leadership team, and create supporting alliances.

He accomplished that by putting more emphasis on facts and figures; he revamped the company’s performance metrics in manufacturing and customer service to focus employees’ attention on critical weaknesses in those areas, and he also introduced external benchmarks and hard-nosed assessments by respected consultants—drawing on impartial voices from outside the company to help make his case. These actions enabled him to pierce the unfounded optimism and send an important message to the rest of the organization.

turnarounds, leaders are often dealing with people who are hungry for hope, vision, and direction, and that necessitates a heroic style of leadership—charging against the enemy, sword in hand. People line up behind the hero in times of trouble and follow commands. The premium is on rapid diagnosis of the business situation (markets, technologies, products, strategies) and then aggressive moves to cut back the organization to a defensible core. You need to act quickly and decisively, often on the basis of incomplete information.

hardheaded

A successful start-up is a visible and easily measurable individual accomplishment, as is a successful turnaround. In a realignment, in contrast, success consists of avoiding disaster. It is hard to measure results in a realignment when success means that nothing much happens; it’s the dog that doesn’t bark. Also, success in realignment requires painstakingly building awareness of the need for change, and that often means giving credit to the group rather than taking it yourself. As for rewarding sustaining success, people seldom call their local power company to say, “Thanks for keeping the lights on today.” But if the power goes off, the screaming is immediate and loud.

Evaluating success and failure in realignment and sustaining-success situations is much more problematic. Performance in a realignment may be better than expected, but still poor. Or it may be that nothing much seems to happen, because a crisis was avoided. Sustaining-success situations pose similar problems. Success may consist of a small loss of market share in the face of a concerted attack by competitors or the eking out of a few percentage points of top-line growth in a mature business. The unknown in both realignments and sustaining-success situations is what would have happened if other actions had been taken or other people had been in charge—the “as compared to what?” problem. Measuring success in such situations takes much more work, because to assess the adequacy of their responses, you must have a deep understanding of the challenges new leaders face and the actions they are taking.

Vaughan

withering

Building on his momentum, Michael raised the question of style at their next meeting: “We have different styles, but I can deliver for you,” he said. “I want you to judge me on my results, not on how I get them.” It took nearly a year, but Michael built a solid, productive working relationship with Vaughan.

Many new leaders just play the game, reactively taking their situation as given—and failing as a result. The alternative is to shape the game by negotiating with your boss to establish realistic expectations, reach consensus, and secure sufficient resources.

The higher you rise, the more autonomy you’re likely to have. This is especially the case if you and your boss are situated in different locations. Lack of oversight can be a blessing if you get what you need to succeed. Or it can be a curse if you get enough rope to hang yourself.

If you have a boss who doesn’t reach out to you, or with whom you have uncomfortable interactions, you will have to reach out yourself. Otherwise, you risk potentially crippling communication gaps. It may feel good to be given a lot of rope, but resist the urge to take it. Get on your boss’s calendar regularly. Be sure your boss is aware of the issues you face and that you are aware of her expectations, especially whether and how they’re shifting.

It’s no fun bringing your boss bad news. However, most bosses consider it a far greater sin not to report emerging problems early enough. Worst of all is for your boss to learn about a problem from someone else. It’s usually best to give your new boss at least a heads-up as soon as you become aware of a developing problem.

That said, you don’t want to be perceived as bringing nothing but problems for your boss to solve. You also need to have plans for how you will proceed. This emphatically does not mean that you must fashion full-blown solutions: the outlay of time and effort to generate solutions can easily lure you down the rocky road to surprising your boss. The key here is to give some thought to how to address the problem—even if it is only gathering more information—and to your role and the help you will need. (This is a good thing to keep in mind in dealing with direct reports, too. It can be dangerous to say, “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.” Far better is, “Don’t just bring me problems, bring me plans for how we can begin to address them.”)

There is a tendency, even for senior leaders, to use meetings with a boss as an opportunity to run through your checklist of what you’ve been doing. Sometimes this is appropriate, but it is rarely what your boss needs or wants to hear. You should assume she wants to focus on the most important things you’re trying to do and how she can help. Don’t go in without at most three things you really need to share or on which you need action.

You and your new boss may have very different working styles. You may communicate in different ways, motivate in different ways, and prefer different levels of detail in overseeing your direct reports. But it’s your responsibility to adapt to your boss’s style;...

Begin managing expectations from the moment you consider taking a new role. Focus on expectations during the interview process. You are in trouble if your boss expects you to fix things fast when you know the business has serious structural problems. It’s wise to get bad news on the table early and to lower unrealistic expectations. Then check in regularly to make sure your boss’s expectations have not shifted. Revisiting expectations is especially important if you’re onboarding from the outside and don’t have a deep understanding of the culture and politics.

This is the flip side of “Don’t stay away.” Don’t expect your boss to reach out or to offer you the time and support you need. It’s best to begin by assuming that it’s on your shoulders to make the relationship work. If your boss meets you partway, it will be a welcome surprise.

Don’t let yourself get caught up immediately in firefighting or be pressured to make calls before you’re ready. Buy yourself some time, even if it’s only a few weeks, to diagnose the new organization and come up with an action plan.

Whatever your own priorities, figure out what your boss cares about most. What are his priorities and goals, and how do your actions fit into this picture? Once you know, aim for early results in those areas. One good way is to focus on three things that are important to your boss and discuss what you’re doing about them every time you interact. In that way, your boss will feel ownership of your success.

Your new boss’s opinion of you will be based in part on direct interactions and in part on what she hears about you from trusted others. Your boss will have preexisting relationships with people who are now your peers and possibly your subordinates. You needn’t curry favor with the people your boss trusts. Simply be alert to the multiple channels through which information and opinion about you will reach your boss.

In this conversation, you seek to understand how your new boss sees the STARS portfolio you have inherited. Are there elements of start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, and sustaining success? How did the organization reach this point? What factors—both soft and hard—make this situation a challenge? What resources within the organization can you draw on? Your view may differ from your boss’s, but it is essential to grasp how she sees the situation.

Your goal in this conversation is to understand and negotiate expectations. What does your new boss need you to do in the short term and in the medium term? What will constitute success? Critically, how will your performance be measured? When? You might conclude that your boss’s expectations are unrealistic and that you need to work to reset them. Also, as part of your broader campaign to secure early wins, discussed in the next chapter, keep in mind that it’s better to underpromise and overdeliver.

What do you need to be successful? What do you need your boss to do? The resources need not be limited to funding or personnel. In a realignment, for example, you may need help from your boss to persuade the organization to confront the need for change. Key here is to focus your boss on the benefits and costs of what you can accomplish with different amounts of resources.

This conversation is about how you and your new boss can best interact on an ongoing basis. What forms of communication does he prefer, and for what? Face-to-face? Voice, electronic? How often? What kinds of decisions does he want to be consulted on, and when can you make the call on your own? How do your styles differ, and what are the implications for the ways you should interact?

Once you’re a few months into your new role, you can begin to discuss how you’re doing and what your developmental priorities should be. Where are you doing well? In what areas do you need to improve or do things differently? Are there projects or special assignments you could undertake (without sacrificing focus)?

Whatever your own priorities, pinpoint what your boss cares about most, and aim for early wins in those areas. If you want to succeed, you need your boss’s help; in turn, you should help her succeed. When you pay attention to your boss’s priorities, she will feel ownership in your success. The most effective approach is to integrate your boss’s goals with your own efforts to get early wins. If this is impossible, look for early wins based solely on your boss’s priorities.

If there are parts of the organization—products, facilities, people—about which your new boss is proprietary, it is essential to identify them as soon as possible. You don’t want to find out that you’re pressing to shut down the product line your boss started up or to replace someone who has been his loyal ally. So try to deduce what your boss is sensitive about. You can do this by understanding your boss’s personal history, by talking to others, and by paying close attention to facial expression, tone, and body language. If you’re uncertain, float an idea gently as a trial balloon, and then watch his reactions closely.

One of your immediate tasks is to shape your boss’s perceptions of what you can and should achieve. You may find her expectations unrealistic, or simply at odds with your own beliefs about what needs to be done. If so, you must work hard to make your views converge. In a realignment, for example, your boss might attribute the worst problems to a certain part of the business, whereas you believe they lie elsewhere. In this case, you would need to educate your boss about the underlying problems to reset expectations. Proceed carefully—especially if your boss feels invested in the way things have always been or is responsible in part for the problems.

Whether you and your boss agree on expectations, try to bias yourself somewhat toward underpromising achievements and overdelivering results. This strategy contributes to building credibility. Consider how your organization’s capacity for change might affect your ability to deliver on the promises you make. Be conservative in what you promise. If you deliver more, you will delight your boss. But if you promise too much and fail to deliver, you risk undermining your credibility. Even if you accomplish a great deal, you will have failed in the boss’s eyes.

Even if you’re sure you know what your boss expects, you should go back regularly to confirm and clarify. Some bosses know what they want but are not good at expressing it. You don’t want to achieve clarity only after you have headed down the wrong road. So you must be prepared to keep asking questions until you’re sure you understand. Try, for example, asking the same questions in different ways to gain more insight. Work at reading between the lines accurately and developing good hypotheses about what your boss is likely to want. Try to put yourself in his shoes and understand how his boss will evaluate him. Figure out how you fit into the larger picture. Above all, don’t let key issues remain ambiguous. Ambiguity about goals and expectations is dangerous. A tie in a conflict over what was said about expectations in an earlier conversation doesn’t go to you. It goes to your boss.

The sooner you can articulate the resources you need, the sooner you can broach these requests.

Try using the menu approach: lay out the costs and benefits of different levels of resource commitment. “If you want my sales to grow seven percent next year, I need investment of X dollars. If you want ten percent growth, I will need Y dollars.” Going back for more too often is a sure way to lose credibility. If it takes more time to get a handle on the resources you need to achieve specific goals, then so be it.

Clarify your needs in your own mind before you enter these discussions, back them up with as much hard data as you can get, and prepare to explain exactly why you see certain resources as essential. Then stick to your guns. Keep coming back. Enlist others to help make your case. Seek out allies within and outside your organization. It is better to push too hard than to slowly bleed to death.

Seek resources that both support your boss’s agenda and advance your own. Look for ways to help peers advance their agendas in return for help with yours.

Highlight the performance benefits that will result if more resources are dedicated to your unit. Create the menu described earlier, laying out what you can achieve (and cannot achieve) with current resources and what different-sized increments would allow you to do.

Even if your boss never becomes a close friend or mentor, it’s essential that you understand what it takes to build a productive working relationship.

jibes

If you leave messages for her about an urgent problem, and she doesn’t respond quickly but then reproaches you for not giving her a heads-up about the problem, take note: your boss doesn’t use that mode of communication!

Stick to less fraught issues, such as how the boss prefers to communicate. Listen to others’ perspectives, but base your evolving strategy chiefly on your own experience.

Initially, expect to be confined to a relatively small box. As your new boss gains confidence in you, the dimensions of the box should increase. If not, or if it remains too small to allow you to be effective, you may have to address the issue directly.

Assume that the job of building a positive relationship with your new boss is 100 percent your responsibility. In short, this means adapting to his style. If your boss hates voice messages, don’t leave them. If he wants to know in detail what is going on, overcommunicate. Of course you should not do anything that could compromise your ability to achieve superior business results, but do look for opportunities to smooth the day-to-day workings of your relationship. Others who have worked with your boss can tell you what approaches they found successful. Then judiciously experiment with the tactics that seem most promising in your case. When in doubt, simply ask your boss how he would prefer you to proceed.