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

Armed with an understanding of your A-item priorities and objectives for behavior change, you can proceed to create detailed plans for how you will secure early wins during your first 90 days and beyond. You should think about what you need to do in two phases: building credibility in the first 30 days and deciding where you will focus your energy to achieve early performance improvements in the following 60 days.

Building Credibility

In your first few weeks in your new job, you cannot hope to have a measurable impact on performance, but you can score small victories and signal that things are changing. Your objective at this early stage is to build personal credibility.

Because your earliest actions will have a disproportionate influence on how you are perceived, think through how you will get connected to your new organization. What messages do you want to get across about who you are and what you represent? What are the best ways to convey those messages?

Identify your key audiences ”direct reports , other employees , key outside constituencies ”and craft a few messages tailored to each. These need not be about what you plan to do; that s premature. They should focus instead on who you are, the values and goals you represent, your style, and how you plan to conduct business.

Think about modes of engagement too. How will you introduce yourself? Should your first meetings with direct reports be one-on-one or in a group ? Will these meetings be informal get-to-know-you sessions or will they immediately focus on business issues and assessment? What other channels, such as e-mail and video, will you use to introduce yourself more widely? Will you have early meetings at other locations where your organization has facilities?

As you make progress in getting connected, identify and act as quickly as you can to remove minor but persistent irritants in your new organization. Focus on strained external relationships and begin to repair them. Cut out redundant meetings, shorten excessively long ones, or improve physical-space problems. All this helps you to build personal credibility early on.

When you arrive , people will rapidly begin to assess you and your capabilities. Your credibility, or lack of it, will depend on how people in the organization would answer the following questions about you:

• Do you have the insight and steadiness to make tough decisions?

• Do you have values that they relate to, admire, and want to emulate?

• Do you have the right kind of energy?

• Do you demand high levels of performance from yourself and others?

For better or worse , they will begin to form opinions based on little data. Your early actions, good and bad, will shape perceptions. Once opinion about you has begun to harden, it is difficult to change. And the opinion-forming process happens remarkably quickly.

So how do you build personal credibility? In part it is about marketing yourself effectively, much akin to building equity in a brand. You want people to associate you with attractive capabilities, attitudes, and values. There s no single right answer for how to do this. In general, though, new leaders are perceived as more credible when they are

• demanding but able to be satisfied. Effective leaders press people to make realistic commitments and then hold them to those promises. But if you are never satisfied, you ll sap people s motivation.

• accessible but not too familiar. Being accessible does not mean making yourself available indiscriminately. It means being approachable, but in a way that preserves your authority.

• decisive but judicious. New leaders communicate their capacity to take charge without jumping too quickly into decisions that they are not ready to handle. Early in your transition, you want to project decisiveness but defer important decisions until you know enough to make them.

• focused but flexible. Avoid setting up a vicious cycle and alienating others by coming across as rigid and unwilling to consider multiple solutions to a problem. Effective new leaders establish authority by zeroing in on issues but consulting others and encouraging input.

• active without causing commotion . There s a fine line between building momentum and overwhelming your group or unit. Make things happen, but avoid pushing people to the point of burnout.

• willing to make tough calls but humane. You may have to make tough calls right away, including letting marginal performers go. Effective new leaders do what needs to be done, but they do it in ways that preserve peoples dignity and that others perceive as fair.

Leveraging Teachable Moments

Your actions during your first few weeks in the organization will have symbolic resonance . To illustrate this, consider the experience of Lara Moore, who took over an underperforming unit at a major financial services company. Based on her early diagnosis, Lara knew the unit suffered from a severe case of bureaucratic sclerosis. This problem was symbolized by the floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets that her predecessor had maintained , documenting all his transactions and decisions, however trivial. One of Lara s first acts was to have all these cabinets removed, as people in the office looked on in amazement.

Early actions often get transformed into stories, which can define you as hero or villain. Do you take the time to informally introduce yourself to the support staff or do you focus only on your boss, peers, and direct reports? Something as simple as this can help to brand you as accessible or remote. How you introduce yourself to the organization, how you treat support staff, how you deal with small irritants ”all of these pieces of behavior can become the kernels of stories that circulate widely.

To nudge the mythology in a positive direction, look for and leverage teachable moments . These are actions ”such as the way that Elena Lee dealt with recalcitrant supervisors ”that clearly display what you are about; they also model the kinds of behavior you want to encourage . They need not be dramatic statements or confrontations . It can be as simple, and as hard, as asking the penetrating question that crystallizes your group s understanding of some key problem they are confronting .

Securing Tangible Results

Building personal credibility and developing some key relationships helps you get some immediate wins. Soon, however, you should be identifying opportunities to get some quick, tangible performance improvement in the business. The best candidates are problems that you can tackle reasonably quickly with modest expenditure and that will yield visible operational and financial gains. Examples include bottlenecks that restrict productivity and incentive programs that undermine performance by causing conflict.

Identify two or three key areas, at most, where you will seek to achieve rapid improvement. If you take on too many initiatives, you risk losing focus. But don t put all your eggs in one basket . Think about risk management: Build a promising portfolio of early-win initiatives so that big successes in one will balance disappointments in others. Then focus relentlessly on getting results.

To set the stage for securing early wins, your learning agenda should specifically address how you will identify promising opportunities for improvement. To translate your goals into specific initiatives to secure early wins, work through the following guidelines:

• Keep your long- term goals in mind. The actions that you take to secure early wins should, to the greatest extent possible, serve your A-item priorities and long-term goals for behavior change.

• Identify a few promising focal points. Focal points are areas or processes (such as the customer service processes for Elena Lee) where improvement can dramatically strengthen the organization s overall operational or financial performance. Other examples of focal points might include a mutual fund company s process for reporting to the Securities and Exchange Commission or a pharmaceutical company s handoff from research to marketing.

• Concentrate on the most promising focal points. Mastering a few focal points you identify will reduce the time and energy needed to achieve tangible results. Improving performance early in these areas will win you freedom and space to pursue more extensive changes.

• Launch pilot projects. Design promising pilot initiatives, targeted at your chosen focal points, that you can undertake right away. Successful early projects set your overall plan in motion, energize your people, and yield real improvements. This is what Elena Lee did first to begin to improve customer service in her new organization.

• 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, as Elena Lee did, to positions of increasing responsibility. Then send a message to everyone else by rewarding them lavishly for success.

• Leverage the pilot projects to introduce new behaviors. Your early pilot projects, like Elena Lee s, should serve as models of how you want your organization, unit, or group to function in the future. Use the checklist in the accompanying box to help plan pilot projects with maximum impact.

For each pilot project you set up to secure early wins, use this checklist to be sure you are setting high standards for the kinds of behavior you want to encourage.

• What is the right mix of people, in terms of knowledge, skills, and personal chemistry ?

• Who has the credibility, the project management skills, and the creativity to lead the project?

• What are achievable stretch goals?

• What are achievable deadlines?

• What coaching or framework will you provide to guide team problem solving and decision making?

• What other resources are necessary for success?

• How will you hold people accountable for achieving superior results?

• How will you reward success?

Avoiding Predictable Surprises

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.

Some bolts from the blue really do come out of the blue. When this happens, you simply have to gird your loins and mount the best crisis response that you can. But far more often new leaders are taken off track by what my colleague Max Bazerman and I call predictable surprises. These are situations in which people have all the information necessary to identify the problem and take corrective action but fail to do so. ^[4]

This often happens because the new leader simply doesn t look in the right places or ask the right questions. As discussed in chapter 1, we have preferences about the types of problems we like to work on and those we prefer to avoid or don t feel competent to address. If you are a marketing person and are taking on leadership of a new product launch team, it would not be surprising if you focused more on the marketing aspects than on the manufacturing ramp-up . But you will also have to discipline yourself either to dig into areas in which you are not fully comfortable or to find trustworthy people with the necessary expertise to do so.

Another reason for predictable surprises is that different parts of the organization have different pieces of the puzzle, but no one puts them together. Every organization has its information silos . If you don t put processes in place to make sure that critical information is surfaced and integrated, then you are putting yourself at risk of being predictably surprised.

Use the following set of questions to identify areas where potential problems may be lurking:

• External environment. Could trends in public opinion, government action, or economic conditions precipitate major problems for your unit? Examples: A change in government policy that favors competitors or unfavorably influences your prices or costs; a major shift in public opinion about the health or safety implications of using your product; an emerging economic crisis in a developing country.

• Customers, markets, competitors, and strategy. Are there developments in the competitive situation confronting your organization that could pose major challenges? Examples: A study suggesting that your product is inferior to that of a competitor; a new competitor that is offering a lower-cost substitute; a price war.

• Internal capabilities. Are there potential problems with your unit s processes, skills, and capabilities that could precipitate a crisis? Examples: An unexpected loss of key personnel; major quality problems at a key plant; a product recall.

• Organizational politics. Are you in danger of unwittingly stepping on a political land mine? Examples: Certain people in your unit are untouchable, but you don t know it; you fail to recognize that a key peer is subtly undermining you.

^[4] See Michael Watkins and Max Bazerman, Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming, Harvard Business Review, March 2003.