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

by Michael D. Watkins

Expect to continue to be attentive to, and adapt to, the boss’s style as your relationship evolves.

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By the end of the first few months, you want your boss, your peers, and your subordinates to feel that something new, something good, is happening. Early wins excite and energize people and build your personal credibility. Done well, they help you create value for your new organization earlier and reach the break-even point much more quickly.

Following an early period of focused learning, these leaders begin an early wave of changes. The pace then slows to allow consolidation and deeper learning about the organization, and to allow people to catch their breath. Armed with more insight, these executives then implement deeper waves of change. A final, less extreme wave focuses on fine-tuning to maximize performance. By this point, most of these leaders are ready to move on.

This research has direct implications for how you should manage your transition. It suggests that you should keep your ends clearly in mind when you devise your plan to secure early wins. The transition lasts only a few months, but you typically will remain in the same job for two to four years before moving on to a new position. To the greatest extent possible, your early wins should advance longer-term goals.

Each wave should consist of distinct phases: learning, designing the changes, building support, implementing the changes, and observing results. Thinking in this way can release you to spend time up front to learn and prepare, and afterward to consolidate and get ready for the next wave.

The goal of the first wave of change is to secure early wins. The new leader tailors early initiatives to build personal credibility, establish key relationships, and identify and harvest low-hanging fruit—the highest-potential opportunities for short-term improvements in organizational performance. Done well, this strategy helps the new leader build momentum and deepen his own learning. The second wave of change typically addresses more fundamental issues of strategy, structure, systems, and skills to reshape the organization; deeper gains in organizational performance are achieved. But you will not get there if you don’t secure early wins in the first wave.

As you strive to create momentum, therefore, keep in mind that your early wins must do double duty: they must help you build momentum in the short term and lay a foundation for achieving your longer-term business goals. So be sure that your plans for securing early wins, to the greatest extent possible, (1) are consistent with your agreed-to goals—what your bosses and key stakeholders expect you to achieve—and (2) help you introduce the new patterns of behavior you need to achieve those goals.

The point is to define your goals so that you can lead with a distinct end point in mind.

if you are to achieve your goals in the allotted time, you may have to change dysfunctional patterns of behavior.

it’s essential to identify the most promising opportunities and then focus relentlessly on translating them into wins. Think of it as risk management: pursue enough focal points to have a good shot at getting a significant success, but not so many that your efforts get diffused.

It’s essential to get early wins that energize your direct reports and other employees. But your boss’s opinion about your accomplishments is crucial too. Even if you do not fully endorse her priorities, you must make them central in thinking through which early wins you will aim for. Addressing problems that your boss cares about will go a long way toward building credibility and cementing your access to resources.

An early win that is accomplished in a way that exemplifies the behavior you hope to instill in your new organization is a double win.

In some organizations, a win must be a visible individual accomplishment. In others, individual pursuit of glory, even if it achieves good results, is viewed as grandstanding and destructive of teamwork. In team-oriented organizations, early wins could come in the form of leading a team in the development of a new product idea or being viewed as a solid contributor and team player in a broader initiative. Be sure you understand what is and is not viewed as a win, especially if you’re onboarding into the organization.

You should think about what you need to do in two phases: building personal credibility in roughly the first 30 days, and deciding which projects you will launch to achieve early performance improvements beyond that. (The actual time frames will of course depend on the situation.)

you need to figure out what role people are expecting you to play and then make an explicit decision about whether you will reinforce these expectations or confound them.

Focus on figuring out who can work for you and who can’t.

You must walk the knife’s edge between over- and underasserting yourself. It can be effective to adopt a consult-and-decide approach when dealing with critical issues until former peers get used to making the calls, as long as you don’t make uninformed decisions.

From the moment your appointment is announced, some former peers will be straining to discern whether you will play favorites or will seek to advance political agendas at their expense. One antidote is to adopt a relentless, principled focus on doing what is right for the business.

Your credibility, or lack of it, will depend on how people would answer the following questions about you: Do you have the insight and steadiness to make tough decisions? Do you have values that they relate to, admire, and want to emulate? Do you have the right kind of energy? Do you demand high levels of performance from yourself and others? For better or worse, they will begin to form opinions based on little data.