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The First 90 Days (Book Summary)

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

Introduction: The First 90 Days

  • The actions you take during your first few months in a new role will largely determine whether you succeed or fail.
  • Every successful career is a series of successful assignments, and every successful assignment is launched with a successful transition.
  • The most dangerous transition can be the one you don’t recognize is happening.
  • List of common traps,
    • Sticking with what you know: Success in the new role requires you to stop doing some things and to embrace new competencies.
    • Falling prey to the “action imperative.”: By trying too hard, too early, you make bad decisions and catalyze resistance to your initiatives.
    • Setting unrealistic expectations: You don’t negotiate your mandate or establish clear, achievable objectives.
    • Attempting to do too much.
    • Coming in with “the” answer.
    • Engaging in the wrong type of learning: You spend too much time focused on learning about the technical part of the business and not enough about the cultural and political dimensions of your new role.
    • Neglecting horizontal relationships.
  • Leadership ultimately is about influence and leverage.
  • Essential transition tasks
    • Prepare yourself. This means making a mental break from your old job and preparing to take charge in the new one.
    • Accelerate your learning: Understanding its markets, products, technologies, systems, and structures, as well as its culture and politics.
    • Match your strategy to the situation
    • Secure early wins. Early wins build your credibility and create momentum.
    • Negotiate success: This means carefully planning for a series of critical conversations about the situation, expectations, working style, resources, and your personal development.
    • Achieve alignment: This means figuring out whether the organization’s strategic direction is sound, bringing its structure into alignment with its strategy, and developing the processes and skill bases necessary to realize your strategic intent.
    • Build your team.
    • Create coalitions: You therefore should start right away to identify those whose support is essential for your success, and to figure out how to line them up on your side.
    • Keep your balance: Maintain your equilibrium and preserve your ability to make good judgments.
    • Accelerate everyone: The people you work with (and your family) are in transition too.
  • Begin by thinking about your first day in the new job. What do you want to do by the end of that day? Then move to the first week. Then focus on the end of the first month, the second month, and finally the three-month mark.

CHAPTER 1 Prepare Yourself

  • 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.
  • You also need to learn to strike the right balance between keeping the wide view and drilling down into the details.
  • The keys to effective delegation remain much the same:
    • You build a team of competent people whom you trust
    • You establish goals and metrics to monitor their progress
    • You translate higher-level goals into specific responsibilities for your direct reports
    • You reinforce them through process.
  • You need to establish new communication channels to stay connected with what is happening where the action is. You might maintain regular, direct contact with select customers, for instance, or meet regularly with groups of frontline employees, all without undermining the integrity of the chain of command.
  • Exhibit the right kind of leadership presence at all times.
  • Joining a new company is akin to an organ transplant — and you’re the new organ.
  • Focus on four pillars of effective onboarding:
    • Business orientation: Getting oriented to the business means learning about the company as a whole and not only your specific parts of the business.
    • Stakeholder connection: This means identifying key stakeholders and building productive working relationships.
    • Alignment of expectations
    • Cultural adaptation.
  • To figure out how things really work in the organization
    • Influence. How do people get support for critical initiatives?
    • 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
    • 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?
  • Ask your boss to identify and introduce you to the key people you should connect with early on.
  • Be careful to focus on lateral relationships (peers, others) and not only vertical ones (boss, direct reports).
  • 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.
  • After thirty days, conduct an informal 360-degree check-in with your boss and peers to gauge how adaptation is proceeding.
  • Assess Your Vulnerabilities: One way to pinpoint your vulnerabilities is to assess your problem preferences — the kinds of problems toward which you naturally gravitate.
  • Assessing your preferences for different kinds of business problems.
    • Technical (ex: product or service quality)
    • Political (ex: relationships with customers)
    • Cultural (ex: cross-functional cooperation)
  • Early in your career, there is a premium on cultivating good technical advisers — experts in certain aspects of marketing or finance, for instance, who can help you get your work done. As you move to higher levels, however, it becomes increasingly important to get good political counsel and personal advice.
  • Take a few minutes to think hard about your personal vulnerabilities in your new role. How will you compensate for them?

CHAPTER 2 Accelerate Your Learning

  • The first task in making a successful transition is to accelerate your learning.
  • Planning to learn means figuring out in advance what the important questions are and how you can best answer them.
  • Simply displaying a genuine desire to learn and understand translates into increased credibility and influence.
  • Being too busy to learn results in a death spiral.
  • Begin to define your learning agenda before you formally enter the organization
  • Think about the right mix of technical, interpersonal, cultural, and political learning.
    • In the technical domain, you may have to grapple with unfamiliar markets, technologies, processes, and systems.
    • In the interpersonal domain, you need to get to know your boss, peers, and direct reports.
    • In the cultural domain, you must learn about norms, values, and behavioral expectations, which are almost certainly different from those in the organization you came from, even if you’re moving between units in the same company.
    • In the political domain, you must understand the shadow organization — the informal set of processes and alliances that exist in the shadow of the formal structure and strongly influence how work actually gets done. The political domain is both important and difficult to understand, because it isn’t easily visible to those who have not spent time in the organization and because political land mines can easily stymie your efforts to establish a solid base of support during the transition.
  • When you are diagnosing a new organization, start by meeting with your direct reports one-on-one. 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?

CHAPTER 3 Match Strategy to Situation

  • To take charge successfully, you must have a clear understanding of the situation you are facing and the implications for what you need to do and how you need to do it. From the outset, focus on answering two fundamental questions.
    • What kind of change am I being called upon to lead? Only by answering this question will you know how to match your strategy to the situation.
    • The second question is, What kind of change leader am I?
  • STARS is an acronym for five common business situations leaders may find themselves moving into:
    • Start-up: Assembling the capabilities (people, financing, and technology) to get a new business or initiative off the ground
    • Turnaround: Saving a business or initiative widely acknowledged to be in serious trouble
    • Accelerated growth: Managing a rapidly expanding business
    • Realignment: Reenergizing a previously successful organization that now faces problems
    • Sustaining success: Preserving the vitality of a successful organization and taking it to the next level
  • In a start-up, you are charged with assembling the capabilities (people, funding, and technology) to get a new business, product, project, or relationship off the ground.
  • A turnaround is the classic burning platform, demanding rapid, decisive action.
  • In an accelerated-growth situation, the organization has begun to hit its stride, and the hard work of scaling up has begun. This typically means you’re putting in the structures, processes, and systems necessary to rapidly expand the business
  • Realignments (and sustaining-success assignments) are more ready-aim-fire situations.
  • Success in transitioning depends, in no small measure, on your ability to transform the prevailing organizational psychology in predictable ways.
  • Good leaders can succeed in all five of the STARS situations, although no one is equally good at all of them.

CHAPTER 4 Negotiate Success

  • If you have a boss who doesn’t reach out to you, or with whom you have uncomfortable interactions, you will have to reach out yourself.
  • Get on your boss’s calendar regularly.
  • Be sure your boss is aware of the issues you face and that you are aware of her expectations, especially whether and how they’re shifting.
  • Don’t surprise your boss.
  • Assume your boss wants to focus on the most important things you’re trying to do and how she can help.
  • Don’t expect your boss to change.
  • Clarify expectations early and often.
  • Take 100 percent responsibility for making the relationship work.
  • Negotiate timelines for diagnosis and action planning.
  • Aim for early wins in areas important to the boss.
  • Pursue good marks from those whose opinions your boss respects.
  • It’s valuable to include plans for five specific conversations with your new boss about transition-related subjects in your 90-day plan.
    • The situational diagnosis conversation. In this conversation, you seek to understand how your new boss sees the STARS portfolio you have inherited.
    • The expectations conversation. Your goal in this conversation is to understand and negotiate expectations. Bias yourself somewhat toward under-promising achievements and over-delivering results.
    • The resource conversation. This conversation is essentially a negotiation for critical resources. Link resources to results.
    • The style conversation. This conversation is about how you and your new boss can best interact on an ongoing basis.
    • The personal development conversation. Your willingness to seek candid feedback on your strengths and weaknesses — and, critically, your ability to act on the feedback — sends a powerful message.
  • One of your immediate tasks is to shape your boss’s perceptions of what you can and should achieve.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • You should typically devote the first block of 30 days to learning and building personal credibility
    • 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.
    • 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. Your goals at this juncture might include identifying the resources necessary to pursue major initiatives, fleshing out your initial assessments of strategy and structure, and presenting some early assessments of your team.
  • Set weekly goals for yourself and establish a personal discipline of weekly evaluation and planning.
  • The golden rule of transitions is to transition others as you would wish to be transitioned yourself

CHAPTER 5 Secure Early Wins

  • To the greatest extent possible, your early wins should advance longer-term goals.
  • 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.
  • The goal of the first wave of change is to secure early wins. The second wave of change typically addresses more fundamental issues of strategy, structure, systems, and skills to reshape the organization
  • Above all, of course, you want to avoid early losses, because it’s tough to recover once the tide is running against you.
  • Here are some basic principles to consider.
    • Focus on a few promising opportunities
    • Get wins that matter to your boss.
    • Get wins in the right ways.
    • Take your STARS portfolio into account
    • Adjust for the culture.
  • You need to figure out what role people are expecting you to play and then make an explicit decision about whether you will reinforce these expectations or confound them.
  • Leading Former Peers
    • Accept the fact that relationships must change
    • Focus early on rites of passage.
    • Reenlist your (good) former peers.
    • Establish your authority deftly.
  • New leaders are perceived as more credible when they display these characteristics:
    • Demanding but able to be satisfied
    • Accessible but not too familiar.
    • Decisive but judicious.
    • Focused but flexible.
    • Active without causing commotion
    • Willing to make tough calls but humane.
  • Your actions during your first few weeks inevitably will have a disproportionate impact, because they are as much about symbolism as about substance.
  • If you take on too many initiatives, you risk losing focus.
  • FOGLAMP is an acronym for focus, oversight, goals, leadership, abilities, means, and process.
  • To change your organization, you will likely have to change its culture.
  • The choice of behavior-change techniques should be a function of your group’s structure, processes, skills, and — above all — situation.

CHAPTER 6 Achieve Alignment

  • The higher you climb in organizations, the more you take on the role of organizational architect, creating and aligning the four key elements of the organizational system. All four elements of organizational architecture need be aligned to work together:
    • strategic direction
    • structure
    • core processes
    • skill bases
  • Strive, where possible, for clear lines of accountability
  • Simplify the structure to the greatest degree possible without compromising core goals.
  • Strategic direction encompasses mission, vision, and strategy. Mission is about what will be achieved, vision is about why people should feel motivated to perform at a high level, and strategy is about how resources should be allocated and decisions made to accomplish the mission. Focus on customers, capital, capabilities, and commitments.
  • From SWOT to TOWS: The correct approach is to start with the environment (threats & opportunities) and then analyze the organization (strengths & weaknesses).
  • Take care not to take on structural change unless it is obvious that it’s needed
  • Structure consists of the following elements:
    • Units: How your direct reports are grouped, such as by function, product, or geographical area
    • Reporting relationships and integration mechanisms:
    • Decision rights and rules: Performance measurement and incentive systems
  • To evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of each core process, you should examine four aspects:
    • Productivity.
    • Timeliness.
    • Reliability.
    • Quality.

CHAPTER 7 Build Your Team

  • The most important decisions you make in your first 90 days will probably be about people.
  • Avoiding Common Traps
    • Criticizing the previous leadership.
    • Keeping the existing team too long.
    • Not balancing stability and change.
    • Not working on organizational alignment and team development in parallel.
    • Not holding on to the good people.
    • Undertaking team building before the core is in place.
    • Making implementation-dependent decisions too early.
    • Trying to do it all yourself.
  • Assessing Your Team
    • Establish Your Evaluative Criteria across: Competence; Judgment (Make sure you are assessing judgment and not only technical competence or basic intelligence); Energy; Focus; Relationships; Trust.
  • Evolving Your Team – By the end of roughly the first 30 days, you should be able to provisionally assign people to one of the following categories
    • Keep in place.
    • Keep and develop.
    • Move to another position.
    • Replace (low priority).
    • Replace (high priority).
    • Observe for a while.
  • Aligning Your Team: This process calls for breaking down large goals into their components and working with your team to assign responsibility for each element. Then it calls for making each individual accountable for managing his goals.
  • Use consultation to gain commitment.
  • Research on persuasive communication heavily underlines the power of repetition.
  • Above all, take care to live the vision you articulate.
  • Different types of decisions call for different decision-making processes, but most team leaders stick with one approach (esp. consultative decision making).
  • Have a framework for understanding and communicating why different decisions will be approached in different ways.
  • If the decision is likely to be highly divisive — creating winners and losers — then you usually are better off using consult-and-decide and taking the heat.
  • If the decision requires energetic support for implementation from people whose performance you cannot adequately observe and control, then you usually are better off using a build-consensus process.
  • Don’t engage in a charade of consensus building — an effort to build support for a decision already made.

CHAPTER 8 Create Alliances

  • To succeed in your new role, you will need the support of people over whom you have no direct authority.
  • Discipline yourself to invest in building up “relationship bank accounts “with people you anticipate needing to work with later.
  • Understand the Influence Landscape: Influence networks are channels for communication and persuasion that operate in parallel with the formal structure — a sort of shadow organization.
  • Win and block alliances:
    • For each of your early-win initiatives, ask yourself which decision makers are essential for things to move forward.
    • It also pays to think hard about potential blocking alliances — those who collectively have the power to say no.
  • Identify Supporters, Opponents, and Persuadables
    • It’s never enough merely to identify support; you must solidify and nurture it.
    • Be careful not to assume that people are adversaries. When you meet resistance, probe for the reasons behind it before labeling people as implacably opposed.
  • Understanding people’s motivations is only part of the story. You also need to assess situational pressures: the driving and restraining forces acting on them because of the situation they’re in.
  • Armed with deeper insight into the people you need to influence, you can think about how to apply classic influence techniques such as consultation, framing, choice-shaping, social influence, incrementalism, sequencing, and action-forcing events.

CHAPTER 9 Manage Yourself

  • Plan to Plan: 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.
  • Focus on the Important.
  • Judiciously Defer Commitment: 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.
  • You need a network of trusted advisers within and outside the organization with whom to talk through what you’re experiencing.
  • You need to cultivate three types of advisers: technical advisers, cultural interpreters, and political counselors.

CHAPTER 10 Accelerate Everyone

(just a wrap up)

Further Reading

“How Managers Become Leaders,“ a June 2012 Harvard Business Review article summarizing the research I did on “the seven seismic shifts“ that leaders experience as they make the very challenging transition from a senior functional role to running an entire business:

  • Specialist to Generalist
  • Analyst to Integrator
  • Tactician to Strategist
  • Bricklayer to Architect
  • Problem Solver to Agenda Setter
  • Warrior to Diplomat
  • Supporting Cast Member to Lead Role

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