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

by Michael D. Watkins

To the greatest extent possible, your early wins should advance longer-term goals.

successive waves of change. Each wave should consist of distinct phases: learning, designing the changes, building support, implementing the changes, and observing results.

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.

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.

Leaders in transition understandably are eager to get things moving. Thus, they naturally tend to focus on the problems that are easiest to fix quickly. This tactic is fine, up to a point. But be careful not to fall into the low-hanging fruit trap. This trap catches leaders when they expend most of their energy seeking early wins that don’t contribute to achieving their longer-term business objectives.

It’s like trying to launch a rocket into orbit with nothing except a very big first stage; the risk is great that you’ll fall back to earth once the initial momentum fades.

The implication: when you’re deciding where to seek early wins, you may have to forgo some of the low-hanging fru...

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 ...

Your agreed-to goals are the destination, but the behavior of people in your organization is a key part of how you do (or don’t) get there. Put another way, if you are to achieve your goals in the allotted time, you may have to change dysfunctional patterns of behavior.

Start by identifying the unwanted behaviors;

Then work out, as Elena did, a clear vision of how you would like people to behave by the end of your tenure in the job, and plan how your actions in purs...

group can’t clearly define its priorities, or it has too many priorities.

Resources are spread too thin, leading to frequent crises and firefighting.

Employees are rewarded for maintaining stable performance, not for pushing the envelope.

Team members ignore the needs of external and internal customers.

“It doesn’t matter if we respond immediately; it won’t make any difference.”

It’s crucial to get early wins, but it’s also important to secure them in the right way.

Above all, of course, you want to avoid early losses,

Focus on a few

identify the most promising opportunities and then focus relentlessly on translating them into wins.

Get wins that matter to your boss.

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.

When you arrive, people will rapidly begin to assess you and your capabilities. In part, this evaluation will be based on what people think they already “know” about you.

like it or not, you will start your role with a reputation, deserved or not.

Close personal relationships are rarely compatible with effective supervisory ones.

Focus early on rites of passage. The first days are about symbolism more than substance.

Establish your authority deftly. You must walk the knife’s edge between over- and underasserting yourself.

adopt a relentless, principled focus on doing what is right for the business.

In your first few weeks in your new job, you cannot hope to have a measurable impact on performance, but you can score small victories and signal that things are changing. Think of this as an effort to secure early, early wins by building your personal credibility.

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?

So how do you build personal credibility? In part, it’s about marketing yourself effectively,

You want people to associate you with attractive capabilities, attitudes, and values.

satisfied. Effective leaders get people to make realistic commitments and then hold them responsible for achieving results.

Know when to celebrate success and when to push for more.

Being accessible does not mean making yourself available indiscriminately. It means being approachable, but in a w...

New leaders communicate their capacity to take charge, perhaps by rapidly making some low-consequence decisions, without jumping too quickly into ...

Effective new leaders establish authority by zeroing in on issues but consulting others and encouraging input.

They also know when to give people the flexibility to achieve results in their own ways.

There’s a fine line between building momentum and overwhelming...

Because your earliest actions will have a disproportionate influence on how you’re perceived, think through how you will get connected to your new organization in the first few days in your new role.

Identify your key audiences—direct reports, other employees, key outside constituencies—and craft a few messages tailored to each.

need not be about what you plan to do; that’s premature. They should focus instead on who you are, the values and goals you represent, your style, and how you plan to conduct business.

As you make progress in getting connected, identify and act as quickly as you can to remove minor but persistent irritants.

Cut out redundant meetings, shorten excessively long ones, or improve problems with physical work spaces. All this helps you build personal credibility early on.

It’s never a bad thing to be seen as genuinely committed to understanding your new organization.

Your actions during your first few weeks inevitably will have a disproportionate impact, because they are as much about symbolism as about substance. Early actions often get transformed into stories, which can define you as hero or villain.

To nudge your mythology in a positive direction, look for and leverage teachable moments.

actions—such as the way Elena dealt with recalcitrant supervisors—that clearly display what you’re about; they also model the kinds of behavior you want to encourage.

Think about risk management: build a promising portfolio of early-win initiatives so that big successes in one will balance disappointments in others. Then focus relentlessly on getting results.

The result will be a number between 0 and 16 that is a rough measure you can use to compare the attractiveness of candidate focal points. Use common sense in interpreting these numbers. If the candidate scores 0 on the first question, for example, it doesn’t matter if it scores 4’s on all the others.