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

by Michael D. Watkins

One way to pinpoint your vulnerabilities is to assess your problem preferences—the kinds of problems toward which you naturally gravitate.

Assessment of problem preferences Assess your intrinsic interest in solving problems in each of these domains on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 means very little interest and 10 means a great deal of interest. Design of appraisal and reward systems __________ Employee morale __________ Equity/fairness __________ Management of financial risk __________ Budgeting __________ Cost-consciousness __________ Product positioning __________ Relationships with customers __________ Organizational customer focus __________ Product or service quality __________ Relationships with distributors and suppliers __________ Continuous improvement __________ Project management systems __________ Relationships among R&D, marketing, and operations __________ Cross-functional cooperation

potential blind spots. TABLE 1-3 Preferences for problems and functions Technical Political Cultural Total Human Resources Finance Marketing Operations Research and Development

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

(it’s worth being clear in your own mind what your hammer is)

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.

Preparing yourself for a new role calls for proactively restructuring your advice-and-counsel network.

So you must negotiate clear expectations, as soon as you know when you will be transitioning, about what you will do to close things out. This means being specific about the issues or projects that will be dealt with and to what extent—and, critically, what is not going to be done.

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. Getting others to accept your move is an essential part of preparing yourself.

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.

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.

What has made you successful so far in your career? Can you succeed in your new position by relying solely on those strengths? If not, what are the critical skills you need to develop?

How can you ensure that you make the mental leap into the new position? From whom might you seek advice and counsel on this? What other activities might help you do this?

“the Dura way.”

“the way we did things at Dura.”

Perhaps most destructive of all, some new leaders arrive, as Chris did at Phoenix, with “the” answer.

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.

If you approach your efforts to get up to speed as an investment process—and your scarce time and energy as resources that deserve careful management—you will realize returns in the form of actionable insights. An actionable insight is knowledge that enables you to make better decisions earlier and so helps you quickly reach the break-even point in personal value creation. Chris would have acted differently if he had known that (1) senior management at Phoenix had systematically underinvested in the past, despite energetic efforts by local managers to upgrade, (2) the operation had achieved remarkable results in quality and productivity given what it had to work with, and (3) the supervisors and workforce were justifiably proud of what they had accomplished.

Devote some time to defining your learning 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.

If Chris had it to do over, what might he have done? He would have planned to engage in a systematic learning process—creating a virtuous cycle of information gathering, analyzing, hypothesizing, and testing.

learning during a transition is 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.

How should you compile your early list of guiding questions? Start by generating questions about the past, the present, and the future (see boxes, “Questions About the Past,” “Questions About the Present,” and “Questions About the Future”).

Questions About the Past

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

What are the most promising unexploited opportunities? What would need to happen to realize their potential?

As you work to answer these questions, think, too, about the right mix of technical, interpersonal, cultural, and political learning.

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.

You will learn from various types of hard data, such as financial and operating reports, strategic and functional plans, employee surveys, press accounts, and industry reports. But to make effective decisions, you also need “soft” information about the organization’s strategy, technical capabilities, culture, and politics. The only way to gain this intelligence is to talk to people who have critical knowledge about your situation.

Who can provide the best return on your learning investment? Identifying promising sources will make your learning both comprehensive and efficient.

FIGURE 2-1 Sources of knowledge

Integrators. 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.

Natural historians. 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.

If you are new to the organization, there often is much you can do to accelerate the onboarding process before you arrive. The starting point, beyond the recruiting process, is to leverage the rich array of resources available online, including background information and analysis of the organization, biographies of key people, and information available on the organization’s own website. Beyond that, it is highly d...

Many leaders tend to dive in and start talking to people. You will pick up much soft information in this way, but it is not efficient. That’s because it can be time-consuming and because its lack of structure makes it difficult to know how much weight to place on various individuals’ observations. 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.

When you are diagnosing a new organization, start by meeting with your direct reports one-on-one.

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?

Once you have distilled these early discussions into a set of observations, questions, and insights, convene your direct reports as a group, feed them back your impressions and questions, and invite discussion. You will learn about both substance and team dynamics and will simultaneously demonstrate how quickly you have begun to identify key issues.

Another example of a structured learning method is the use of a framework such as SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis to guide your diagnostic work.

Effective new leaders employ a combination of methods, tailoring their learning strategy to the demands of the situation.

TABLE 2-1 Structured methods for learning

consider setting up a regular survey of employee perceptions.

Usefulness depends on the granularity of the collection and analysis. This also assumes the survey instrument is a good one and the data have been collected carefully and analyzed rigorously.

Whichever dimension you choose, ask everybody the same questions, and look for similarities and differences in people’s responses.

Gathering groups of people who work together also lets you see how they interact and identify who displays leadership.

Illuminating decision-making patterns and sources of power and influence. Select an important recent decision, and look into how it was made. Who exerted influence at each stage? Talk with the people involved, probe their perceptions, and note what is and is not said.

assessing the efficiency of a process.

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.

Learning Plan Template Before Entry Find out whatever you can about the organization’s strategy, structure, performance, and people. Look for external assessments of the performance of the organization. You will learn how knowledgeable, fairly unbiased people view it. If you are a manager at a lower level, talk to people who deal with your new group as suppliers or customers. Find external observers who know the organization well, including former employees, recent retirees, and people who have transacted business with the organization. Ask these people open-ended questions about history, politics, and culture. Talk with your predecessor if possible.