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

by Michael D. Watkins

As you begin to learn about the organization, write down your first impressions and eventually some hypotheses. Compile an initial set of questions to guide your structured inquiry after you arrive.

Meet one-on-one with your direct reports and ask them the questions you compiled.

Assess how things are going at key interfaces.

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.

Update your questions and ...

By the End of the First Month

Gather your team to feed back to them your preliminary findings.

learn how people on the outside (suppliers, customers, distributors, and others) perceive your organization and its strengths and weaknesses.

Meet with key integrators.

Seek out the natural historians.

Update your questions and hypotheses.

There is much that bosses, peers, and even direct reports can do to accelerate your learning. However, to enlist their aid you need to be clear about what you’re trying to do and how they can help.

you likely will enter a different culture and will lack the political wiring you had in your previous role.

Your learning priorities and strategies will inevitably shift as you dig deeper. As you start to interact with your new boss, figure out where to get some early wins, or build supportive coalitions, it will be critical for you to gain additional insights. So plan to return to this chapter periodically to reassess your learning agenda

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 l...

The first question is, What kind of change am I being called upon to lead? Only by answering this question will you know how to match your strategy to the situation.

The second question is, What kind of change leader am I? Here the answer has implications for how you should adjust your leadership style.

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

the eventual goal is the same: a successful and growing business. However, the challenges and opportunities, summarized in table 3-1, vary in predictable ways depending on which situation you are experiencing.

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 need to understand, at a deep level, what has made the business successful and position it to meet the inevitable challenges so that it will continue to grow and prosper.

the key to sustaining success often lies in continuously starting up, accelerating, and realigning parts of the business.

success in transitioning depends, in no small measure, on your ability to transform the prevailing organizational...

In realignments, you will likely have to pierce the veil of denial that is preventing people from confronting the need to reinvent the business. Finally, in sustaining-success situations, you must invent the challenge by finding ways to keep people motivated, combat complacency, and find new direction for growth—both organizational and personal.

as you drill down, you will almost certainly discover that you’re managing a portfolio—of products, projects, processes, plants, or people—that represents a mix of STARS situations.

diagnose your STARS portfolio; you must figure out which parts of your new organization belong in each of the five categories. Take time to assign the pieces of your new responsibilities (such as products, processes, projects, plants, and people) to the five categories using table 3-2. Given this arrangement, how will you manage the various pieces differently?

First, identify which elements (projects, processes, products, perhaps even complete businesses) in your new responsibilities fall into the various STARS situations in the first column; list those elements in the second column.

use the third column to estimate the percentage of your effort that should be allocated to each category in the next 90 days, making sure it adds up to 100%.

Finally, think about which of these situations you most prefer to do. If you also assigned that situation the highest priority, be sure that your preferences are not overly influencing your priorities.

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

Technical comprehension was still important, obviously, but cultural and political learning mattered more. That’s because internal social dynamics often cause successful organizations to drift into trouble, and because getting people to acknowledge the need for change is much more a political challenge than a technical one.

Key differences between leading change in turnaround and realignment situations are summarized in table 3-3. TABLE 3-3 Leading change in turnarounds versus realignments

Organize to learn Figure out what you most need to learn, from whom, and how you can best learn

Focus on cultural and political learning.

Define strategic intent Develop and communicate a compelling vision for what the organization will become. Outline a clear strategy for achieving that vision.

Establish A-item priorities Identify a few vital goals and pursue them relentlessly. Think about what you need to have accomplished by the end of year 1 in the new position.

Shift the organizational mind-set from denial to awareness.

Create supporting alliances Identify how the organization really works and who has influence. Create key coalitions in support

Build alliances sideways and down to ensure better execution.

figuring out whether you are reflexively a “hero” or a “steward.”

In 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.

Realignments, in contrast, demand from leaders something more akin to stewardship or servant leadership—a more diplomatic and less ego-driven approach that entails building consensus for the need for change.

More subtle influence skills come into play; skilled stewards have deep understandings of the culture and politics of their organizations. Stewards are more patient and systematic than heroes in deciding which people, processes, and other resources to preserve and which to discard. They also painstakingly cultivate awareness of the need for change by promoting shared diagnosis, influencing opinion leaders, and encouraging benchmarking.

it is easy for heroes to stumble in realignment and sustaining-success situations and for stewards to struggle in start-ups and turnarounds.

It is essential to make a hardheaded assessment of which of your skills and inclinations will serve you well in your particular situation and which are likely to get you into trouble.

remember that leadership is a team sport.