The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels

by Michael D. Watkins

If you approach your efforts to get up to speed as an investment process—and your scarce time and energy as resources that deserve careful management—you will realize returns in the form of actionable insights.

An actionable insight is knowledge that enables you to make better decisions earlier and so helps you reach the breakeven point in terms of personal value creation sooner.

Effective learning calls for figuring out what you need to learn so you can focus your efforts. Devote some time to defining your learning agenda as early as possible, and return to it periodically to refine and supplement it. Efficient learning means identifying the best available sources of insight and then figuring out how to extract maximum insight with the least possible outlay of your precious time.

The starting point is to begin to define your learning agenda, ideally before you even formally enter the organization.

A learning agenda crystallizes your learning priorities: What do you most need to learn? It consists of a focused set of questions to guide your inquiry, or hypotheses that you want to explore and test, or both.

How should you compile your early list of guiding questions? Start by generating questions about the past, questions about the present, and questions about the future.

Who can provide the best return on your learning investment? Identifying promising sources will make your learning process both more complete and more efficient.

Talking to people with different points of view will deepen your insight.

Staff. Talk with heads or key staff members of the finance, legal, and human resources functional areas.

Integrators. Integrators are people who coordinate or facilitate cross-functional interaction, including project managers, plant managers, and product managers.

Natural historians. Keep an eye out for “old-timers”

Many managers’ inclination is to dive in and start talking to people. You will pick up much soft information this way, but this method is not efficient.

you should consider using a structured learning process designed for new leaders.

When 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?

By asking everyone the same set of questions, you can identify prevalent and divergent views, and thus avoid being swayed by the first or most forceful or articulate person you talk to.

Once you have distilled these early discussions into a set of observations, questions, and insights, convene your direct reports as a group, feed back your impressions and questions, and invite some discussion.

The point is that even a modest amount of structure—a script and a sequence of interactions such as meeting with people individually, doing some analysis, and then meeting with them together—can dramatically accelerate your ability to extract actionable insights.

Your learning agenda defines what you want to learn. Your learning plan defines how you will go about learning it. It translates learning goals into specific sets of actions—identifying promising sources of insight and using systematic methods—that accelerate your learning.

learning should be a primary focus of your plan for your first 30 days on the job.

The heart of your learning plan is a cyclical learning process in which you collect information, analyze and distill it, develop hypotheses, and test them, thus progressively deepening your understanding of your new organization.

Learning Plan Template

You can’t hope to change your organization’s work culture if you don’t understand it. One useful framework for analyzing an organization’s work culture approaches it at three levels: symbols, norms, and assumptions.1

To understand a culture, you must peer below the surface of symbols and norms and get at underlying assumptions. To do this you need to carefully watch the way people interact with one another.

the most relevant assumptions for new leaders involve power and value.2 Regarding power, key questions are as follows: Who do key people in your organization think can legitimately exercise authority and make decisions? What does it take to earn your stripes? Regarding value, what actions are believed by employees to create (and destroy) value?

Divergent assumptions about power and value—for example, between workers and managers—can complicate efforts to align the organization.

You can also think about culture from three perspectives: organizational, professional, and geographic.

After identifying the organizational culture to which you’re moving, you need to decide whether to adapt to or alter that culture.

Are you effective at learning about new organizations? Do you sometimes fall prey to the action imperative? To coming in with “the answer”? If so, how will you avoid doing this? What is your learning agenda? Based on what you know now, compose a list of questions to guide your early inquiry. 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, which individuals are most likely to provide you with solid actionable insights? How might you increase the efficiency of your learning process? What are some ways you might extract more actionable insights for your investment of time and energy? Given your answers to the previous questions, start to create your learning plan.

The four broad types of business situations that new leaders must contend with are start-up, turnaround, realignment, and sustaining success. (From now on we will refer to this framework of transition types as the STARS model.)

In a start-up you are charged with assembling the capabilities (people, funding, and technology) to get a new business, product, or project off the ground.

In a turnaround you take on a unit or group that is recognized to be in trouble and work to get it back on track.

Realignments and sustaining-success situations, by contrast, are situations in which you enter organizations that have significant strengths, but also serious constraints on what you can and cannot do. In realignment, your challenge is to revitalize a unit, product, process, or project that is drifting into trouble. In a sustaining-success situation, you are shouldering responsibility for preserving the vitality of a successful organization and taking it to the next level.

Put another way, in realignments you have to reinvent the business; in sustaining-success situations, you have to invent the challenge.

Successful businesses tend, because of internal complacency or external challenges or both, to drift toward trouble.

Because of their differing imperatives, it is easy for hunters to stumble in realignment and sustaining-success situations and for farmers to stumble in start-ups and turnarounds.

How much emphasis will you place on learning as opposed to doing? How much emphasis will you place on offense as opposed to defense? What should you do to get some early wins?

To build momentum in your new job, you have to get some early wins. But what a “win” is differs dramatically among the four situations.

In realignments, gaining acceptance of the need for change and instilling a sense of urgency are often big early wins.

you will almost certainly discover that you are managing a portfolio—of products, projects, processes, plants, or people—that represents a mix of STARS situations.

The STARS framework has implications for how you should evaluate and reward the people who work for you.

Performance in a realignment may be better than expected, but still poor. Or it may be that nothing much seems to happen, because a crisis was avoided. Sustaining-success situations pose similar problems. Success may consist of a small loss of market share in the face of concerted attack by competitors or the eking out of a few percentage points of top-line growth in a mature business. The unknown in both realignments and sustaining-success situations is what would have happened if other actions had been taken or other people had been in charge—the “as compared to what” problem.

Finally, consider using the STARS framework as a basis for selecting and developing people in your organization. This should be part of a broader, four-dimensional approach to high-potential talent development. The four dimensions are: Managerial functions Geographic regions Career crossroads STARS business situations

ACCELERATION CHECKLIST Which of the four STARS situations are you facing— start-up, turnaround, realignment, or sustaining success? What are the implications for the challenges and opportunities you are likely to confront and for how you should approach accelerating your transition? What are the implications for your learning agenda? Do you only need to understand the technical side of the business, or is it critical that you understand culture and politics as well? 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 is the prevailing frame of mind? What psychological transformations do you need to make and how will you bring them about? Should your early focus be on offense or defense? When you dig deeper, what is the mix of types of situations that you are managing? Which portions of your unit are in start-up, turnaround, realignment, and sustaining-success modes? What are the implications for how you should manage and reward the people who work for you?

Early wins excite and energize people and build your personal credibility. Done well, early wins help you to create value for your new organization earlier and therefore reach the breakeven point much more quickly.

Above all, of course, you want to avoid early losses, because it is tough to recover once the tide is running against you.

Failing to focus. It is all too easy to take on too much during a transition, and the results can be ruinous.

cannot hope to achieve results in more than a couple of areas during your transition. Thus, it is essential to identify promising opportunities and then focus relentlessly on translating them into wins.

Not taking the business situation into account.

Think tactically about what will build momentum best.

Not adjusting for the culture. Leaders who come into an organization from the outside are most at risk of stumbling into this trap.