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

by Michael D. Watkins

Launch early-win projects. Manage your early-win initiatives as projects, targeted at your chosen focal points. This is what Elena did when she appointed a team to improve customer service in her new position. Elevate change agents. Identify the people in your new unit, at all levels, who have the insight, drive, and incentives to advance your agenda. Promote them or appoint them to lead key projects, as Elena did. Leverage the early-win projects to introduce new behaviors. Your early-win projects should serve as models of how you want your organization, unit, or group to function in the future. Elena understood this when she engaged a consultant to help the team use the right methods to pursue the project so they could learn how best to do this.

FOGLAMP is an acronym for focus, oversight, goals, leadership, abilities, means, and process. This tool can help you cut through the haze and plan your critical projects. Complete the table for each early-win project you set up. Project: __________________________ Question Answer Focus: What is the focus for this project? For example, what goal or early win do you want to achieve? Oversight: How will you oversee this project? Who else should participate in oversight to help you get buy-in for implementing results? Goals: What are the goals and the intermediate milestones, and time frames for achieving them? Leadership: Who will lead the project? What training, if any, do they need in order to be successful? Abilities: What mix of skills and representation needs to be included? Who needs to be included because of their skills? Because they represent key constituencies? Means: What additional resources, such as facilitation, does the team need to be successful? Process: Are there change models or structured processes you want the team to use? If so, how will they become familiar with the approach?

Secure Early Wins—Checklist Given your agreed-to business goals, what do you need to do during your transition to create momentum for achieving them? How do people need to behave differently to achieve these goals? Describe as vividly as you can the behaviors you need to encourage and those you need to discourage. How do you plan to connect yourself to your new organization? Who are your key audiences, and what messages would you like to convey to them? What are the best modes of engagement? What are the most promising focal points to get some early improvements in performance and start the process of behavior change? What projects do you need to launch, and who will lead them? What predictable surprises could take you off track?

sclerotic complexity.

Defining Strategic Direction Strategic direction encompasses mission, vision, and strategy. Mission is about what will be achieved, vision is about why people should feel motivated to perform at a high level, and strategy is about how resources should be allocated and decisions made to accomplish the mission. If you keep in mind the what, the why, and the how, you won’t get lost in debates about what a mission is, what a vision is, and what a strategy is.

Some fundamental questions about strategic direction concern what the organization will do and, critically, what it will not do. Focus on customers, capital, capabilities, and commitments: Customers. Which set of existing customers (external or internal) will we continue to serve? What is our value proposition? Which markets are we going to exit? What new markets are we going to enter, and when? Capital. Of the businesses we will remain in, which will we invest in, and which will we draw cash from? What additional capital is likely to be required, and when? Where will it come from? Capabilities. What are we good at and not good at? What existing organizational capabilities (for example, a strong new-product development organization) can we leverage? Which do we need to build up? Which do we need to create or acquire? Commitments. What critical decisions do we need to make about resource commitments? When? What difficult-to-reverse past commitments do we have to live with or try to unwind?

How do you evaluate the logic of the organization’s strategic direction? Start by looking at documents that describe your group’s mission, vision, and strategy. Then disassemble them into their components: markets, products, technologies, functional plans, and goals. Ask yourself, Do the various dimensions support one another? Is there a logical thread connecting the various parts? To be more specific, is there an obvious connection between market analysis and the group’s objectives?

Ask probing questions. Does your boss believe the current direction will provide enough return on the effort your group will expend to implement it? Are there plans in place to secure, develop, and preserve resources for carrying it out? Are profit and other targets high enough to keep the group on the right track? Is enough money earmarked for capital investment? For research? Use a variation on the well-known SWOT method. See the box “From SWOT to TOWS.” Probe the history of how strategic direction got defined. Find out who drove the process of defining strategic direction. Was it done in a rush? If so, the developers might not have thought through all the ramifications. Did it take a long time? If so, it might represent a lowest-common-denominator compromise that emerged from a political battle. Any mistakes during the development process could compromise the strategy’s adequacy.

Assess Implementation Have the mission, vision, and strategy of your organization been pursued energetically? If not, why not? Look at how your group’s strategic direction is being implemented—what people are doing and not what they are saying. This approach will help you pinpoint whether problems stem from inadequacies in formulation or implementation. Ask yourself these kinds of questions: Is our overall pattern of decisions consistent with our defined direction? What goals does the organization actually seem to be pursuing? Are we using the specified performance metrics to make day-to-day decisions? If implementation requires teamwork and cross-functional integration, are people acting as teams and collaborating across functions? If implementation requires the development of new employee skills, is a learning-and-development infrastructure in place to develop those skills? Your answers to these kinds of questions will tell you whether to push for changes in your group’s strategic direction or in its implementation.

ACHIEVE ALIGNMENT—CHECKLIST What are your observations about misalignments among strategic direction, structure, processes, and skills? How will you dig deeper to confirm or refine your impressions? What decisions about customers, capital, capabilities, and commitments do you need to make? How and when will you make these decisions? What is your current assessment of the coherence of the organization’s strategic direction? Of its adequacy? What are your current thoughts about changing direction? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the organization’s structure? What potential structural changes are you thinking about? What are the core processes in your organization? How well are they performing? What are your priorities for process improvement? What skill gaps and underutilized resources have you identified? What are your priorities for strengthening key skill bases?

Create an interview template. Ask people the same set of questions, and see how their answers vary. Here are sample questions. – What are the strengths and weaknesses of our existing strategy? – What are the biggest challenges and opportunities facing us in the short term? In the medium term? – What resources could we leverage more effectively? – How could we improve the way the team works together? – If you were in my position, what would your priorities be?

Push tools, such as goals, performance measurement systems, and incentives, motivate people through authority, loyalty, fear, and expectation of reward for productive work. Pull tools, such as a compelling vision, inspire people by invoking a positive and exciting image of the future.

An inspiring vision has the following attributes: It taps into sources of inspiration. It is built on a foundation of intrinsic motivators, such as teamwork and contribution to society. One orthopedic medical device company, for example, had “Restoring the joy of motion” as its vision statement, accompanied by stories about injured athletes being able to compete again, and grandparents being able to hold their grandkids. It makes people part of “the story.” The best statements of vision connect people to a larger narrative that provides meaning—for example, a quest to recapture the organization’s past glories. It contains evocative language. The vision must describe in graphic terms what the organization will achieve and how people will feel to have achieved it. Launching twelve rockets in ten years is a goal; putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth by the end of the decade, as President John F. Kennedy put it, is a vision.

As you work to create and communicate a shared vision, keep the following principles in mind: Use consultation to gain commitment. Be clear on which elements of your vision are nonnegotiable, but beyond these, be flexible enough to consider the ideas of others and allow them to have input and to influence the shared vision. In that way, they share ownership. Off-site meetings are often a powerful way to create and generate commitment to a shared vision, as long as you take care to ensure they are well designed. (See box, “Off-Site Planning Checklist.”) Develop stories and metaphors to communicate it. Stories and metaphors are potent ways to communicate the essence of a vision. There is something surprisingly powerful in a parable. The best of these stories crystallize core lessons and provide models for the kind of behavior you want to encourage. Reinforce it. Research on persuasive communication heavily underlines the power of repetition. Your vision is more likely to take root in people’s minds if it consists of a few core themes that are repeated until they sink in. Even when people have begun to understand the message, you should not stop. Strive constantly to deepen people’s commitment to the vision. Develop channels for communicating it. You cannot hope to communicate your vision directly to each person in your organization. This means that in addition to working with small groups such as a top team, you must be effective in persuading from a distance. This means dev...

are the decision-making processes that most leaders use: consult-and-decide and build consensus. When a leader solicits information and advice from direct reports—individually, as a group, or both—but reserves the right to make the final call, she is using a consult-and-decide approach. In effect she separates the “information gathering and analysis” process from the “evaluating and reaching closure” process, harnessing the group for one but not the other. In the build-consensus process, the leader both seeks information and analysis and seeks buy-in from the group for any decision. The goal is not full consensus but sufficient consensus. This means that a critical mass of the group believes the decision to be the right one and, critically, that the rest agree they can live with and support implementation of the decision.

The following rules of thumb can help you figure out which decision-making process to use: If the decision is likely to be highly divisive—creating winners and losers—then you usually are better off using consult-and-decide and taking the heat. A build-consensus process will fail to reach a good outcome and will get everyone mad at one another in the process. Put another way, decisions about sharing losses or pain among a group of people are best made by the leader. If the decision requires energetic support for implementation from people whose performance you cannot adequately observe and control, then you usually are better off using a build-consensus process. You may get to a decision more quickly using consult-and-decide, but you may not get the desired outcome. If your team members are inexperienced, then you usually are better off relying more on consult-and-decide until you’ve taken the measure of the team and developed their capabilities. If you try to adopt a build-consensus approach with an inexperienced team, you risk getting frustrated and imposing a decision anyway, and that undercuts teamwork. If you’re put in charge of a group with whom you need to establish your authority (such as supervising former peers), then you’re better off relying on consult-and-decide to make some key early decisions. You can relax and rely more on building consensus once people see that you have the steadiness and insight to make tough calls. Your approach to decision making will a...

Even if you have significant positional authority in your new role, however, you should focus on building support for your early-win objectives. This means figuring out whom you must influence, pinpointing who is likely to support (and who is likely to resist) your key initiatives, and persuading swing voters. Plans for doing this should be an integral part of your overall 90-day plan.

How do you map influence networks? To a degree, they will become obvious as you get to know the organization—by, for example, working with your peers. But you can accelerate the process. One good way to start is by identifying the key points of contact between your organization and others. Customers and suppliers, within the business and outside, are natural focal points for alliance building. Another strategy is to get your boss to connect you to key stakeholders. Request a list of the key people outside your group whom he thinks you should get to know.

As you frame your arguments, keep in mind Aristotle’s rhetorical categories of logos, ethos, and pathos.5 Logos is about making logical arguments—using data, facts, and reasoned rationales to build your case for change. Ethos is about elevating the principles that should be applied (such as fairness) and the values that must be upheld (such as a culture of teamwork) in making decisions. Pathos is about making powerful emotional connections with your audience—for example, putting forth an inspiring vision of what cooperation could accomplish.

Effective framing focuses on a few core themes, which are repeated until they sink in. It is a sure sign of success when people begin to echo your themes without knowing they’re doing so. Focus and repetition are effective because we learn through repetition.

hear a song so much that we get sick of it. Similarly, using precisely the same words over and over makes it apparent that you’re trying to persuade, and that can provoke a backlash. The art of effective communication is to repeat and elaborate core themes without sounding like a parrot.

As you frame your arguments, think about how you can inoculate people against counterarguments you expect opponents to make. Presenting and decisively refuting weak forms of expected counterarguments immunizes audiences against the same arguments when they’re advanced in more potent forms.

Framing arguments Use the following categories and questions to identify the types of arguments you need to make to convince people. Logos—data and reasoned arguments What data or analysis might they find persuasive? What logic(s) might appeal to them? Are there biases to which they are falling prey and, if so, how might you demonstrate this? Ethos—principles, policies, and other “rules” Are there principles or policies that they could be convinced should operate here? If you are asking them to act counter to a principle or policy, can you help them justify making an exception? Pathos—emotions and meaning Are there emotional “triggers,” for example loyalty or contribution to the common good, to which you could appeal? Can you help them create a sense of meaning by supporting or opposing a cause? If they are reacting too emotionally, can you help them step back and get perspective?

Choice-shaping is about influencing how people perceive their alternatives. Think hard about how to make it hard to say no. Sometimes choices are best posed broadly, at other times more narrowly. If you’re asking someone to support something that could be seen as setting an undesirable precedent, it might best be framed as a highly circumscribed, isolated situation independent of other decisions. Other choices might be better situated within the context of a higher-level set of issues.

Selling choices perceived as win-lose propositions is particularly difficult. Broadening the range of issues or options under consideration can facilitate mutually beneficial trades that enlarge the pie. Progress likewise can be stalled by the presence of toxic issues. These sometimes can be neutralized by explicitly setting them aside for future consideration or by making up-front commitments that allay anxieties.

Incrementalism refers to the notion that people can move in desired directions step-by-step when they wouldn’t go in a single leap. Mapping out a pathway from A to B is highly effective, because each small step taken creates a new psychological reference point for people in deciding whether to take the next one.

Getting people involved in shared diagnosis of organizational problems is a form of incrementalism: involvement in the diagnosis makes it difficult for people to deny the need for tough decisions. Once there is agreement on the problem, you can shift to defining the options and then the criteria that will be used to evaluate them. By the end of such a process, people are often willing to accept outcomes they would never have accepted at the outset.

Action-forcing events get people to stop deferring decisions, delaying, and avoiding commitment of scarce resources. When your success requires the coordinated action of many people, delay by a single individual can have a cascade effect, giving others an excuse not to proceed. You must therefore eliminate inaction as an option. You do this by setting up action-forcing events—events that induce people to make commitments or take actions. Meetings, review sessions, teleconferences, and deadlines can all help create and sustain momentum: regular meetings to review progress, and tough questioning of those who fail to reach agreed-to goals, increase the psychological pressure to follow through.