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

by Michael D. Watkins

One way to assess judgment is to work with a person for an extended time and observe whether he or she is able to (1) make sound predictions and (2) develop good strategies for avoiding problems.

Establishing—and sticking to—clear and explicit performance metrics is the best way to encourage accountability.

Assess Your Team’s Existing Processes

Team meetings.

Decision making.

Leadership style.

Decision making is another fertile area for potential improvement. Few team leaders do a good job of managing decision making. In part, this is because different types of decisions call for different decision-making processes; most team leaders stick with one approach.

ACCELERATION CHECKLIST What are your criteria for assessing the performance of members of your team? How do the people you inherited stack up against these criteria? What personnel changes do you need to make? Which changes are urgent and which can wait? How will you create backups and options? What process will you put in place to make the high-priority changes? What can you do to preserve the dignity of the people affected? What help will you need with the restructuring process, and where are you going to find it? Do you need to amend existing incentives and measures? Do people in your unit have incentives to cooperate and compete in productive ways? How do you want your new team to operate? What roles do you want people to play? Do you need to shrink the core team or expand it? How do you plan to manage decision making? Will you start off emphasizing a consult-and-decide or a build-consensus approach?

One common mistake of new leaders is to devote too much of their transition time to the vertical dimension of influence— upward to bosses and downward to direct reports—and not enough to the horizontal dimension, namely, peers and external constituencies.

Start by identifying the key interfaces between your unit or group and others.

Another strategy is to get your boss to connect you. Request a list of ten key people outside your group whom he or she thinks you should get to know.

Another productive approach is to diagnose informal networks of influence, or what has been called “the shadow organization” and “the company behind the organization chart.”1

As a first step in coalition building, analyze patterns of deference and the sources of power that underlie them. How? Watch carefully in meetings and other interactions to see who defers to whom on crucial issues. Try to trace alliances.

The usual sources of power in an organization are Expertise Access to information Status Control of resources, such as budgets and rewards Personal loyalty

Eventually you will be able to pick out the opinion leaders: people who exert disproportionate influence through formal authority, special expertise, or sheer force of personality.

It can be instructive to summarize what you learn about patterns of influence by drawing an influence map like the one illustrated in figure 8-1.

The point of doing influence mapping is to help you identify supporters, opponents, and “convincibles”—people who can be persuaded with the right influence strategy.

To identify your potential supporters, look for the following: People who share your vision for the future.

People who have been quietly working for change on a small scale,

People new to the company who have not yet become acculturated

Whatever supporters’ reasons for backing you, do not take their support for granted.

Opponents will oppose you no matter what you do. They may believe that you are wrong. Or they may have other reasons

One approach is to set up action-forcing events—events that induce people to make commitments or take actions. Those who make commitments should be locked into timetables with incremental implementation milestones.

Regular meetings to review progress, and tough questioning of those who fail to reach agreed-on goals, increase the psychological pressure to follow through.

You could adopt entanglement strategies that move people from A to B in a series of small steps rather than a single leap.

One approach is to leverage small commitments into larger ones.

The fundamental insight is that you can leverage knowledge of influence networks into disproportionate influence on a group with what my colleague Jim Sebenius termed a sequencing strategy.

If you approach the right people first, you can set in motion a virtuous cycle (figure 8-4). Therefore, you need to decide carefully who you will approach first, and how you will do it. Who should you approach first? Focus on the following: People with whom you already have supportive relationships Individuals whose interests are strongly compatible with yours

People who have the critical resources you need to make your agenda succeed People with important connections who can recruit more supporters

Whose support do you most need to succeed? What existing coalitions seem most powerful? What influence networks are most important to you? Who defers to whom on key issues? Who are your potential supporters? Potential opponents? Convincibles? How will you test your hypotheses about support and opposition? What tools of influence will you employ to convince the convincibles? How will you shape potential supporters’ perceptions of their interests? Of their options? How can you sequence interactions to build momentum for your initiatives? Are there patterns of deference that you can exploit? Can your supporters help you to recruit other key people?

Riding off in all directions. You can’t hope to focus others if you can’t focus yourself. You can be busy and still fail every single day. Why? Because there is an infinite number of tasks you could do during your transition, but only a few that are vital.

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.

Brittleness. The uncertainty inherent in transitions breeds rigidity and defensiveness, especially in new leaders with a high need for control.

Isolation. To be effective, you have to be connected to the people who make action happen and to the subterranean flow of information.

Biased judgment. Biased judgment—a loss of perspective because of well-recognized weaknesses in human decision making—can take several forms.

Work avoidance. You will have to make tough calls early in your new job. Perhaps you have to 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 fooling yourself that the time isn’t ripe to make the call. Ron Heifetz uses the term work avoidance to characterize this tendency to avoid taking the bull by the horns,