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

by Michael D. Watkins

Look for mutually beneficial exchanges. Seek resources that both support your boss’s agenda and advance your own. Look for ways to help peers advance their agendas in return for help with yours.

Link resources to results. Highlight the performance benefits that will result if more resources are dedicated to your unit. Create the menu described earlier, laying out what you can achieve (and cannot achieve) with current resour...

Even if your boss never becomes a close friend or mentor, it’s essential that you understand what it takes to build a productive working relationship.

How does your boss like to communicate? How often? What kinds of decisions does he want to be involved in, and when can you make calls on your own? Does your boss arrive at the office early and work late? Does he expect others to do the same? Pinpoint the specific ways in which your styles differ, and assess what those differences imply about how you will interact. Suppose you prefer to learn by talking with knowledgeable people, whereas your boss relies more on reading and analyzing hard data. What kinds of misunderstandings and problems might this difference in style cause, and how can you avoid them? Or suppose your new boss tends to micromanage, but you prefer a lot of independence. What can you do to manage this tension?

Observe, too, how your boss deals with others. Is there consistency? If not, why not? Does the boss have favorites? Is he particularly prone to micromanaging certain issues? Has he come down hard on a few people because of unacceptable performance?

Your boss will have a comfort zone about her involvement in decision making. Think of this zone as defining the boundaries of the decision-making box in which you will operate. What sorts of decisions does she want you to make on your own but tell her about?

When does she want to be consulted before you decide? Is it when your actions touch on broader issues of policy—for example, in granting people leave? Or when there are hot political issues associated with some of the projects you’re working on? When does she want to make the decision herself?

When in doubt, simply ask your boss how he would prefer you to proceed.

When serious style differences arise, it’s best to address them directly. Otherwise, you run the risk that your boss will interpret a style difference as disrespect or even incompetence on your part. Raise the style issue before it becomes a source of irritation, and talk with your boss about how to accommodate both your styles.

One proven strategy is to focus your early conversations on goals and results instead of how you achieve them. You might simply say that you expect to notice differences in how the two of you approach certain issues or decisions but that you’re committed to achieving the results to which you have both agreed. An assertion of this kind prepares your boss to expect differences.

Don’t make the mistake of trying to address all style issues in a single conversation. Nevertheless, an early dialogue explicitly devoted to style is an excellent place to start. Expect to continue to be attentive to, and adapt to, the boss’s style as your relationship evolves.

when your relationship with your boss has matured a bit (roughly the 90-day mark is a good rule of thumb), begin to discuss how you’re doing.

What are you doing well, and what do you need to do differently? What skills do you need to develop to do the job better? Are there shortcomings in your leadership capacities that you need to address? Are there projects or special assignments that you could get involved in (without sacrificing focus) that could strengthen your skills?

It’s especially critical that you do this when you’re making key career passages. If you’re a first-time manager, get into the habit early of asking your boss for feedback and help in developing your supervisory skills. Your willingness to seek candid feedback on your strengths and weaknesses—and, critically, your ability to act on the feedback—sends a powerful message.

Don’t restrict your focus to hard skills. The higher you rise, the more important the key soft skills of cultural and political diagnosis, negotiation, coalition building, and conflict management will become. Formal training can help, but developmental assignments—in project teams, in new parts of the organization, in different functions, in different locations—are indispensable in honing these key managerial skills.

Working with Multiple Bosses You face even more daunting challenges in managing expectations if you have more than one boss (direct or dotted-line). The same principles hold, but the emphasis shifts. If you have multiple bosses, you must be sure to carefully balance perceived wins and losses among them. If one boss has substantially more power, then it makes sense to bias yourself somewhat in her direction early on, as long as you redress the balance, to the greatest extent possible, later. If you can’t get agreement by working with your bosses one-on-one, you must essentially force them to come to the table together to thrash issues out. Otherwise, you will get pulled to pieces.

Working at a Distance Managing when you are located far from your boss presents a different set of challenges. The risk is greater of falling out of step without realizing it. This puts the onus on you to exert even more discipline over communication, scheduling calls and meetings to be sure you stay aligned. It also is even more critical to establish clear and comprehensive metrics so that your boss gets a reasonable picture of what is going on and you can more effectively manage by exception.

No matter what situation you’re entering, it can be useful to create a 90-day plan and get buy-in from your boss. Usually, you will be able to devise a plan after a couple of weeks in the new job, when you have begun to connect with the organization and get the lay of the land. Your 90-day plan should be written, even if it consists only of bullet points. It should specify priorities and goals as well as milestones. Critically, you should share it with your boss and seek buy-in for it. It should serve as a “contract” between the two of you about how you’re going to spend your time, spelling out both what you will do and what you will not do.

To begin to sketch out your plan, divide the 90 days into three blocks of 30 days. At the end of each block, you will have a review meeting with your boss. (Naturally, you’re likely to interact more often than that.) You should typically devote the first block of 30 days to learning and building personal credibility. Like Michael, you should negotiate for this early learning period and then try to hold your boss to that agreement. Then you can proceed to develop a learning agenda and learning plan for yourself. Set weekly goals for yourself, and establish a personal discipline of weekly evaluation and planning.

Your key outputs at the end of the first 30 days will be a diagnosis of the situation, an identification of key priorities, and a plan for how you will spend the next 30 days. This plan should address where and how you will begin to seek some early wins. Your review meeting with your boss should focus on the situation and expectations conversations, with an eye to reaching consensus about the situation, clarification of expectations, and buy-in to your plan for the next 30 days. Continue the weekly discipline of evaluation and planning. At the 60-day mark, your review meeting should focus on assessing your progress toward the goals of your plan for the previous 30 days. You should also discuss what you plan to achieve in the next 30 days (that is, by the end of 90 days). Depending on the situation and your level in the organization, your g...

The golden rule of transitions is to transition others as you would wish to be transitioned yourself (see “The Golden Rule of Transitions”). The same five-conversation framework can help you build productive relationships with the people who report to you. Introduce the framework to them right away, and schedule a first conversation with each of them to talk about the situation and about your expectations.

Think about how you would like new bosses to help you transition into new roles. Ideally, what kinds of guidance and support would they give you? Now think about how you deal with new direct reports. What kinds of guidance and support do you give them? Now juxtapose these assessments. Do you transition others as you would wish to be transitioned yourself? If there is a big inconsistency between how you prefer to be dealt with as a new direct report and how you deal with new direct reports, then you are part of the problem. Helping direct reports accelerate their transitions is about more than being a good manager and contributing to others’ development. The faster your direct reports get up to speed, the better able they will be to help you reach your goals.

To change your organization, you will likely have to change its culture. This is a difficult undertaking. Your organization may have well-ingrained bad habits that you want to break. But we know how difficult it is for one person to change habitual patterns in any significant way, never mind a mutually reinforcing collection of people. Simply blowing up the existing culture and starting over is rarely the right answer. People—and organizations—have limits on the change they can absorb all at once.

Avoiding Predictable Surprises Finally, all your efforts to secure early wins could come to naught if you don’t pay attention to identifying ticking time bombs and preventing them from exploding in your face. If they do explode, your focus will instantly shift to continuous firefighting, and your hopes for systematically getting established and building momentum will fly out the window.

Aligning an organization is like preparing for a long sailing trip. First, you need to be clear on whether your destination (the mission and goals) and your route (the strategy) are the right ones. Then you can figure out which boat you need (the structure), how to outfit it (the processes), and which mix of crew members is best (the skill bases). Throughout the journey, you keep an eye out for reefs that are not on the charts.

Between these two extremes 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.

To succeed in your new role, you will need the support of people over whom you have no direct authority. You may have little or no relationship capital at the outset, especially if you’re onboarding into a new organization. So you will need to invest energy in building new networks. Start early. Discipline yourself to invest in building up “relationship bank accounts” with people you anticipate needing to work with later. Think hard about whether there are people you haven’t met who are likely to be critical to your success.

Influence networks are channels for communication and persuasion that operate in parallel with the formal structure—a sort of shadow organization.2 Sometimes these informal channels support what the formal organization is trying to do; at other times, they act to subvert it.

The power of active listening as a persuasive technique is vastly underrated. It can not only promote acceptance of difficult decisions but also channel people’s thinking and frame choices. Because the questions leaders ask and the ways they summarize responses have a powerful effect on people’s perceptions, active listening and framing are a potent persuasive technique.

Framing means carefully crafting your persuasive arguments on a person-by-person basis. It’s well worth the time to get your framing right.

Your messages should take an appropriate tone, resonate with the motivations of influential players and the forces acting on them, and, critically, shape how the key players perceive their alternatives.

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.

Remain consistent with strongly held values and beliefs. These values tend to be shared with important reference groups. People asked to engage in behavior inconsistent with their values or beliefs experience internal psychological dissonance.

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.

Sequencing means being strategic about the order in which you seek to influence people to build momentum in desired directions.6 If you approach the right people first, you can set in motion a virtuous cycle of alliance building. Success in gaining one respected ally makes it easier to recruit others—and your resource base increases. With broader support, the likelihood increases that your agenda will succeed, making it easier still to recruit more supporters.

The life of a leader is always a balancing act, but never more so than during a transition. The uncertainty and ambiguity can be crippling. You don’t know what you don’t know. You haven’t had a chance to build a support network.

If you have a family, they, too, are in transition. Amid all this turmoil, you’re expected to get acclimated quickly and begin to effect positive change in your new organization. For all these reasons, managing yourself is a key transition challenge.

Now take a step back. If things are not going completely the way you want, why is that? Is it only the inevitable emotional roller coaster you will experience when taking a new role? It’s inevitable that your initial enthusiasm will wane as the excitement of taking on a new challenge wears off and the reality sets in of the challenges you face. It’s common for leaders to go into a valley three to six months after taking a new role.

It’s also possible, however, that the difficulties you face are the result of deeper personal vulnerabilities that could take you offtrack. That’s because transitions tend to amplify your weaknesses.

Undefended boundaries. If you fail to establish solid boundaries defining what you are willing and not willing to do, the people around you—bosses, peers, and direct reports—will take whatever you have to give. The more you give, the less they will respect you and the more they will ask of you—another vicious cycle. Eventually you will feel angry and resentful that you’re being nibbled to death, but you will have no one to blame but yourself. If you cannot establish boundaries for yourself,

Isolation. To be effective, you must be connected to the people who make action happen and to the subterranean flow of information. It’s surprisingly easy for new leaders to end up isolated, and isolation can creep up on you. It happens because you don’t take the time to make the right connections, perhaps by relying overmuch on a few people or on official information. It also happens if you unintentionally discourage people from sharing critical information with you. Perhaps they fear your reaction to bad news, or they see you as having been captured by competing interests. Whatever the reason, isolation breeds uninformed decision making, which damages your credibility and further reinforces your isolation.

Work avoidance. You will have to make tough calls early in your new job. Perhaps you must make major decisions about the direction of the business based on incomplete information. Or perhaps your personnel decisions will have a profound impact on people’s lives. Consciously or unconsciously, you may choose to delay by burying yourself in other work or fool yourself into believing that the time isn’t ripe to make the call. The result is what leadership thinkers have termed work avoidance: the tendency to avoid taking the bull by the horns, which results in tough problems becoming even tougher.

As you begin to experience pressure, your performance improves, at least at first. Eventually you reach a point (which varies from person to person) at which further demands, in the form of too many balls to juggle or too heavy an emotional load, start to undermine your performance. This dynamic creates more stress, further reducing your performance and creating a vicious cycle as you go over the top of your stress curve. Rarely, exhaustion sets in and you burn out. Much more common is chronic underperformance: you work harder and achieve less.

Are you figuring out what you need to learn, whom to learn it from, and how to speed up the learning process?

Are you building your relationship with your new boss, managing expectations, and marshaling the resources you need?

Are you identifying and fixing frustrating misalignments of strategy, structure, systems, and skills?

Knowing what you should be doing is not the same thing as doing it. Ultimately, success or failure emerges from the accumulation of daily choices that propel you in productive directions or push you off a cliff. This is the territory of the second pillar of personal efficacy: personal disciplines. Personal disciplines are the regular routines you enforce on yourself ruthlessly.

Plan to Plan. Do you devote time daily and weekly to a plan-work-evaluate cycle? If not, or if you do so irregularly, you need to be more disciplined about planning. At the end of each day, spend ten minutes evaluating how well you met your goals and then planning for the next day. Do the same thing at the end of each week. Get into the habit of doing this. Even if you fall behind, you will be more in control.

Focus on the Important. Do you devote time each day to the most important work that needs to be done? It’s easy for the urgent to crowd out the important. You get caught up in the flow of transactions—phone calls, meetings, e-mail—and never find time to focus on the medium term, let alone the long term. If you’re having trouble getting the real work done, discipline yourself to set aside a particular time each day, even as little as half an hour, when you will close the door, turn off your phone, ignore e-mail, and focus, focus, focus.

Judiciously Defer Commitment. Do you make commitments on the spur of the moment and later regret them? Do you blithely agree to do things in the seemingly remote future, only to kick yourself when the day arrives and your schedule is full? If you do, you must learn to defer commitment. Whenever anybody asks you to do something, say, “Sounds interesting. Let me think about it and get back to you.” Never say yes on the spot. If you’re being pressed (perhaps by someone who knows your vulnerability to such pressure), say, “Well, if you need an answer now, I’ll have to say no. But if you can wait, I will give it more thought.” Begin with no; it’s easy to say yes later. It’s difficult (and damaging to your reputation) to say yes and then change your mind. Keep in mind that people will ask you to make commitments far in advance, knowing that your schedule will look deceptively open.