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

by Michael D. Watkins

Opinions of your effectiveness begin to form surprisingly quickly, and, once formed, they’re very hard to change. If you’re successful in building credibility and securing early wins, the momentum likely will propel you through the rest of your tenure. But if you dig yourself into a hole early on, you will face an uphill battle from that point forward.

Your goal in every transition is to get as rapidly as possible to the break-even point. This is the point at which you have contributed as much value to your new organization as you have consumed from it. As shown in figure I-1, new leaders are net consumers of value early on; as they learn and begin to take action, they begin to create value. From the break-even point onward, they are (one hopes) net contributors of value to their organizations.

Sticking with what you know. You believe you will be successful in the new role by doing the same things you did in your previous role, only more so.

Falling prey to the “action imperative.” You feel as if you need to take action, and you try too hard,

Setting unrealistic expectations.

Attempting to do too much.

Coming in with “the” answer. You come in with your mind made up, or you reach conclusions too quickly about “the” problems and “the” solutions.

Engaging in the wrong type of learning. You spend too much time focused on learning about the technical part of the business and not enough about the cultural and political dimensions of your new role.

Neglecting horizontal relationships. You spend too much time focused on vertical relationships—up to the boss and down to direct reports—and not enough on peers and other stakeholders.

You don’t fully understand what it will take to succeed, and you miss early opportunities to build supportive alliances.

Prepare yourself. This means making a mental break from your old job and preparing to take charge in the new one.

Accelerate your learning. You need to climb the learning curve as fast as you can in your new organization.

Secure early wins.

In the first few weeks, you need to identify opportunities to build personal credibility. In the first 90 days, you need to identify ways to create value and improve business results that will help you get to the break-even point more rapidly.

Negotiate success. Because no other single relationship is more important, you need to figure out how to build a productive working relationship with your new boss (or bosses) and manage her expectations. This means carefully planning for a series of critical conversations about the situation, expectations, working style, resources, and your personal development.

Achieve alignment. The higher you rise in an organization, the more you must play the role of organizational architect. This means figuring out whether the organization’s strategic direction is sound, bringing its structure into alignment with its strategy, and developing the processes and skill bases necessary to realize your strategic intent.

You therefore should start right away to identify those whose support is essential for your success, and to figure out how to line them up on your side.

The right advice-and-counsel network is an indispensable resource.

Begin by thinking about your first day in the new job. What do you want to do by the end of that day? Then move to the first week. Then focus on the end of the first month, the second month, and finally the three-month mark. These plans will be sketchy, but the simple act of beginning to plan will help clear your head.

What will it take for you to reach the break-even point more quickly? What are some traps you might encounter, and how can you avoid them? What can you do to create virtuous cycles and build momentum in your new role? What types of transitions are you experiencing? Which are you finding most challenging, and why? What are the key elements and milestones in your 90-day plan?

you build a team of competent people whom you trust, you establish goals and metrics to monitor their progress, you translate higher-level goals into specific responsibilities for your direct reports, and you reinforce them through process.

Conventional wisdom says that the higher you go, the easier it is to get things done. Not necessarily. Paradoxically, when you get promoted, positional authority often becomes less important for pushing agendas forward. Like Julia, you may indeed gain increased scope to influence decisions that affect the business, but the way you need to engage may be quite different. Decision making becomes more political—less about authority, and more about influence.

Decisions are shaped more by others’ expert judgments and who trusts whom, as well as by networks of mutual support.

The bad news is that you are farther from the front lines and more likely to receive filtered information. To avoid this, you need to establish new communication channels to stay connected with what is happening where the action is. You might maintain regular, direct contact with select customers, for instance, or meet regularly with groups of frontline employees, all without undermining the integrity of the chain of command.

That’s why it’s important to get an early fix on what “leadership presence” means in your new role: what does a leader look like at your new level in the hierarchy? How does he act? What kind of personal leadership brand do you want to have in the new role? How will you make it your own? These are critical considerations, worth taking the time to explore.

What’s really changed? What should you do? Broader impact horizon. There is a broader range of issues, people, and ideas to focus on. Balance depth and breadth. Greater complexity and ambiguity. There are more variables, and there is greater uncertainty about outcomes. Delegate more deeply. Tougher organizational politics. There are more powerful stakeholders to contend with. Influence differently. Further from the front lines. There is greater distance between you and the people executing on the ground, potentially weakening communication and adding more filters. Communicate more formally. More scrutiny. There is more attention paid to your actions by more people, more frequently. Adjust to greater visibility.

To overcome these barriers and succeed in joining a new company, you should focus on four pillars of effective onboarding: business orientation, stakeholder connection, alignment of expectations, and cultural adaptation.

Planning to learn means figuring out in advance what the important questions are and how you can best answer them.

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.

If performance has been poor, why has that been the case? Do the primary issues reside in the organization’s strategy? Its structure? Its technical capabilities? Its culture? Its politics?

When you are diagnosing a new organization, start by meeting with your direct reports one-on-one. (This is an example of taking a horizontal slice across an organization by interviewing people at the same level in different functions.) Ask them essentially the 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?

Soon After Entry Review detailed operating plans, performance data, and personnel data. Meet one-on-one with your direct reports and ask them the questions you compiled. You will learn about convergent and divergent views and about your reports as people. Assess how things are going at key interfaces. You will hear how salespeople, purchasing agents, customer service representatives, and others perceive your organization’s dealings with external constituencies. You will also learn about problems they see that others do not. 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 hypotheses. Meet with your boss to discuss your hypotheses and findings.

By the End of the First Month Gather your team to feed back to them your preliminary findings. You will elicit confirmation and challenges of your assessments and will learn more about the group and its dynamics.

Meet with key integrators. You will learn how things work at interfaces among functional areas. What problems do they perceive that others do not? Seek out the natural historians. They can fill you in on the history, culture, and politics of the organization, and they are also potential allies and influencers.

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. Most people understand that substantial change is necessary, although they may be in disarray and in significant disagreement about what needs to be done. Turnarounds are ready-fire-aim situations: you need to make the tough calls with less than full knowledge and then adjust as you learn more.

Start-ups, turnarounds, and accelerated-growth situations involve much resource-intensive construction work;

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.

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

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.

Situational factors also played a large role in how Karl built his leadership teams in the two situations. To expeditiously turn around the European business, Karl cleaned house at the top of the organization and recruited most of the new senior talent from the outside. In North America, however, the leadership team he inherited was already quite strong. Still, he realized he needed to make a few high-payoff changes in the roster. A couple of central manufacturing roles required leaders with stronger technical skills to support the systems changes he planned to make, and there was an influential manager who, despite Karl’s best efforts, didn’t grasp the need for change; in fact, the manager’s inaction threatened to undermine Karl’s leadership. That person’s departure sent a crucial message to the rest of the organization. Meanwhile, Karl promoted from within to fill that role and others, and that helped rally the organization behind his plans.

In the realignment, in contrast, Karl’s most important early win was to raise people’s awareness of the need for change. 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.

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. 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.

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.

In his North America appointment, Karl needed to learn to temper some of his heroic tendencies; he had to make careful assessments, move deliberately toward change, ...

MATCH STRATEGY TO SITUATION—CHECKLIST What portfolio of STARS situations have you inherited? Which portions of your responsibilities are in start-up, turnaround, accelerated-growth, realignment, and sustaining-success modes? What are the implications for the challenges and opportunities you are likely to confront, and for the way you should approach accelerating your transition? What are the implications for your learning agenda? Do you need to understand only the technical side of the business, or is it critical that you understand culture and politics as well? What is the prevailing climate in your organization? What psychological transformations do you need to make, and how will you bring them about? How can you best lead change given the situations you face? Which of your skills and strengths are likely to be most valuable in your new situation, and which have the potential to get you into trouble? What are the implications for the team you need to build?