The First 90 Days

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

🎨 Impressions

✍️ My Top Quotes

• Opinions of your effectiveness begin to form surprisingly quickly, and, once formed, they’re very hard to change.

• If you have inherited a disaster—the classic burning platform—you may be creating value from the moment your appointment is announced. If you have been hired from the outside into a very successful organization, it may take a year or more for you to be a net value contributor.

• But your objective is not only to avoid vicious cycles; you need to create virtuous cycles that help you create momentum and establish an upward spiral of increasing effectiveness

• Transition failures happen because new leaders either misunderstand the essential demands of the situation or lack the skill and flexibility to adapt to them.

• It’s a mistake to believe that you will be successful in your new job by continuing to do what you did in your previous job, only more so.

• They attribute the high failure rate of outside hires to several barriers, notably the following: Leaders from outside the company are not familiar with informal networks of information and communication. Outside hires are not familiar with the corporate culture and therefore have greater difficulty navigating. New people are unknown to the organization and therefore do not have the same credibility as someone who is promoted from within. A long tradition of hiring from within makes it difficult for some organizations to accept outsiders.

• The following domains are areas in which cultural norms may vary significantly from company to company. Transitioning leaders should use this checklist to help them figure out how things really work in the organizations they’re joining. Influence. How do people get support for critical initiatives? Is it more important to have the support of a patron within the senior team, or affirmation from your peers and direct reports that your idea is a good one? Meetings. Are meetings filled with dialogue on hard issues, or are they simply forums for publicly ratifying agreements that have been reached in private? Execution. When it comes time to get things done, which matters more—a deep understanding of processes or knowing the right people? Conflict. Can people talk openly about difficult issues without fear of retribution? Or do they avoid conflict—or, even worse, push it to lower levels, where it can wreak havoc? Recognition. Does the company promote stars, rewarding those who visibly and vocally drive business initiatives? Or does it encourage team players, rewarding those who lead authoritatively but quietly and collaboratively? Ends versus means. Are there any restrictions on how you achieve results? Does the organization have a well-defined, well-communicated set of values that is reinforced through positive and negative incentives?

• Business orientation checklist As early as possible, get access to publicly available information about financials, products, strategy, and brands. Identify additional sources of information, such as websites and analyst reports. If appropriate for your level, ask the business to assemble a briefing book. If possible, schedule familiarization tours of key facilities before the formal start date. Stakeholder connection checklist Ask your boss to identify and introduce you to the key people you should connect with early on. If possible, meet with some stakeholders before the formal start. Take control of your calendar, and schedule early meetings with key stakeholders. Be careful to focus on lateral relationships (peers, others) and not only vertical ones (boss, direct reports). Expectations alignment checklist Understand and engage in business planning and performance management. No matter how well you think you understand what you need to do, schedule a conversation with your boss about expectations in your first week. Have explicit conversations about working styles with bosses and direct reports as early as possible. Cultural adaptation checklist During recruiting, ask questions about the organization’s culture. Schedule conversations with your new boss and HR to discuss work culture, and check back with them regularly. Identify people inside the organization who could serve as culture interpreters. After thirty days, conduct an informal 360-degree check-in with your boss and peers to gauge how adaptation is proceeding.

• The first task in making a successful transition is to accelerate your learning. Effective learning gives you the foundational insights you need as you build your plan for the next 90 days. So it is essential to figure out what you need to know about your new organization and then to learn it as rapidly as you can. The more efficiently and effectively you learn, the more quickly you will close your window of vulnerability.

• Questions About the Past Performance How has this organization performed in the past? How do people in the organization think it has performed? How were goals set? Were they insufficiently or overly ambitious? Were internal or external benchmarks used? What measures were employed? What behaviors did they encourage and discourage? What happened if goals were not met? Root Causes If performance has been good, why has that been the case? What have been the relative contributions of strategy, structure, systems, talent bases, culture, and politics? 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? History of Change What efforts have been made to change the organization? What happened? Who has been instrumental in shaping this organization? Questions About the Present Vision and Strategy What is the stated vision and strategy? Is the organization really pursuing that strategy? If not, why not? If so, will the strategy take the organization where it needs to go? People Who is capable, and who is not? Who is trustworthy, and who is not? Who has influence, and why? Processes What are the key processes? Are they performing acceptably in quality, reliability, and timeliness? If not, why not? Land Mines What lurking surprises could detonate and push you offtrack? What potentially damaging cultural or political missteps must you avoid? Early Wins In what areas (people, relationships, processes, or products) can you achieve some early wins? Questions About the Future Challenges and Opportunities In what areas is the organization most likely to face stiff challenges in the coming year? What can be done now to prepare for them? What are the most promising unexploited opportunities? What would need to happen to realize their potential? Barriers and Resources What are the most formidable barriers to making needed changes? Are they technical? Cultural? Political? Are there islands of excellence or other high-quality resources that you can leverage? What new capabilities need to be developed or acquired? Culture Which elements of the culture should be preserved? Which elements need to change?

• ACCELERATE YOUR LEARNING—CHECKLIST How effective are you 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 inquiries. 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, who is likely to provide you with the most useful insights? How might you increase the efficiency of your learning process? What are some structured ways you might extract more insight for your investment of time and energy? What support is available to accelerate your learning, and how might you best leverage it? Given your answers to the previous questions, start to create your learning plan.

• STARS is an acronym for five common business situations leaders may find themselves moving into: start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, and sustaining success.

• To succeed as Michael did with a new boss, it’s wise to negotiate success. It’s well worth investing time in this critical relationship up front, because your new boss sets your benchmarks, interprets your actions for other key players, and controls access to resources you need. He will have more impact than any other individual on how quickly you reach the break-even point, and on your eventual success or failure.

• Negotiating success means proactively engaging with your new boss to shape the game so that you have a fighting chance of achieving desired goals.

• 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?

• In planning for your transition (and beyond), focus on making successive waves of change. Each wave should consist of distinct phases: learning, designing the changes, building support, implementing the changes, and observing results.

• Finally, keep in mind that effective learning builds personal credibility. It’s never a bad thing to be seen as genuinely committed to understanding your new organization. It helps immunize you against the perception that you have come in with your mind made up about the organization’s problems and have “the” answer.

• Specifically all four elements of organizational architecture need be aligned to work together.1 Strategic direction. The organization’s mission, vision, and strategy Structure. How people are organized in units and how their work is coordinated, measured, and incentivized Core processes. The systems used to add value through the processing of information and materials Skill bases. The capabilities of key groups of people in the organization

• One caution: much of an organization’s power gets allocated via its structure, because it defines who has the authority to do what. So take care not to take on structural change unless it is obvious that it’s needed—for example, in turnaround or rapid-growth scenarios. Tackling structural change early on can be particularly perilous in realignments, where there isn’t a burning platform to drive the change process.

• For more on the transition to enterprise leadership and its challenges, see Michael Watkins, “How Managers Become Leaders,” Harvard Business Review, June 2012.

• The first step is to be clear about why you need the support of others. Start by thinking about the alliances you need to build in order to secure your early wins. For which of these wins will you need to gain the support of others over whom you have no (or insufficient) authority?

• To identify your potential supporters, look for the following: People who share your vision for the future. If you see a need for change, look for others who have pushed for similar changes in the past. People who have been quietly working for change on a small scale, such as a plant engineer who has found an innovative way to significantly reduce waste. People new to the company who have not yet become acculturated to its mode of operation.

• Consultation promotes buy-in, and good consultation means engaging in active listening. You pose questions and encourage people to voice their real concerns, and then you summarize and feed back what you’ve heard.

• Framing means carefully crafting your persuasive arguments on a person-by-person basis. It’s well worth the time to get your framing right. Indeed, if Alexia can’t develop and communicate a compelling case in support of her proposed changes, nothing else she does will have much impact.

• 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.

• Choices that preserve or enhance one’s reputation are viewed favorably, whereas those that could jeopardize one’s reputation are viewed negatively.

• 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.

• What are the most important transitions in your organization, and how often do they occur? Is the organization able to identify where and when transitions are occurring? Is there a common core transition acceleration framework, language, and toolkit? Do leaders have the support they need, when they need it, and throughout their transitions? What could be done to provide focused resources for onboarding and promotion transitions? Are the company’s systems for recruiting and accelerating transitions linked in appropriate ways? Should transition acceleration be part of your organization’s curriculum for developing high-potential leaders? How might the 90-day framework be used to accelerate organizational change—for example, restructuring or post-acquisition integration?