The First 90 Days
Tags: #business #management #leadership #transitions #careers
Authors: Michael D. Watkins
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Overview
In ‘The First 90 Days,’ I present a practical framework for leaders navigating transitions, whether through promotions or onboarding into new roles. Recognizing that transitions are critical periods fraught with both opportunity and risk, I provide a roadmap for accelerating success and avoiding common pitfalls. The book emphasizes the importance of rapid learning, securing early wins, building strong relationships with key stakeholders, and aligning the organization for optimal performance. I introduce the STARS model, a tool for diagnosing five common business situations – start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, and sustaining success – and tailoring strategies accordingly. I also stress the criticality of self-management during transitions, addressing personal vulnerabilities and establishing effective disciplines for navigating uncertainty and ambiguity. Throughout the book, I offer practical tools and checklists for leaders to apply the framework to their specific situations. By embracing a proactive, systematic approach to transitions, leaders can accelerate their own success and create momentum for positive change within their organizations.
Book Outline
1. Introduction: The First 90 Days
Transitions, whether due to promotions or joining new companies, are crucial periods that can determine the success or failure of a leader. These transitions are opportunities for fresh starts but also present vulnerabilities due to a lack of established relationships and detailed understanding of the new role. To succeed, leaders must accelerate their learning, build credibility, secure early wins, and avoid common pitfalls like sticking with familiar practices or attempting to do too much too quickly.
Key concept: The break-even point is the point at which you have contributed as much value to your new organization as you have consumed from it.
2. Prepare Yourself
Preparing for a transition involves understanding the unique challenges it presents. Promotions require a shift in focus from depth to breadth, rethinking delegation, and adapting leadership styles to influence more effectively in a politically charged environment. Onboarding into a new company involves understanding the business, connecting with stakeholders, aligning expectations with the new boss and organization, and adapting to the new culture.
Key concept: Successful transitions involve making a mental break from the old job and embracing the imperatives of the new situation.
3. Match Strategy to Situation
New leaders must accurately diagnose the situation they’re entering to determine the right strategy. The STARS model identifies five common business situations, each with its own challenges and opportunities. Understanding the specific situation allows leaders to tailor their approach to leading change, setting priorities, securing early wins, and building their teams.
Key concept: STARS is an acronym for five common business situations: Start-up, Turnaround, Accelerated Growth, Realignment, and Sustaining Success.
4. Negotiate Success
Negotiating success involves proactively engaging with your new boss to shape the relationship and secure needed resources. Five key conversations are essential to establish clear expectations, understand working styles, gain support, and plan for personal development. These conversations are ongoing and should be tailored to the specific situation and the level of autonomy the leader has.
Key concept: Plan for five specific conversations with your new boss about transition-related subjects: situational diagnosis, expectations, resources, style, and personal development.
5. Secure Early Wins
Securing early wins is crucial for building momentum and establishing credibility. These wins should be visible, impactful, and aligned with the boss’s priorities. Leaders should avoid the ‘low-hanging fruit’ trap and instead focus on initiatives that contribute to long-term goals. It’s also vital to manage change effectively, considering both planned and collective learning approaches based on the specific situation.
Key concept: Early wins excite and energize people and build your personal credibility.
6. Achieve Alignment
Leaders must become organizational architects, aligning strategy, structure, systems, skills, and culture. Recognizing misalignments among these elements is crucial for identifying the root causes of poor performance. Addressing these misalignments requires careful consideration of trade-offs, sequencing of change initiatives, and an understanding of the organization’s capacity to absorb change.
Key concept: The higher you climb in organizations, the more you take on the role of organizational architect, creating and aligning the key elements of the organizational system: the strategic direction, structure, core processes, and skill bases that provide the foundation for superior performance.
7. Build Your Team
Building a strong team is paramount for success. Leaders must assess existing team members, make necessary personnel changes, and align and motivate team members toward shared goals. Avoiding common pitfalls like criticizing previous leadership, keeping the existing team too long, or neglecting team dynamics is crucial for successful team building.
Key concept: Building a team you’ve inherited is like repairing a leaky ship in mid-ocean.
8. Create Alliances
Creating alliances with key stakeholders, both inside and outside the organization, is crucial for influencing effectively. Leaders must identify key decision makers, understand informal influence networks, analyze motivations and situational pressures, and tailor their influence strategies accordingly. Building winning alliances requires a mix of consultation, framing, choice-shaping, social influence, incrementalism, sequencing, and action-forcing events.
Key concept: Influence networks are channels for communication and persuasion that operate in parallel with the formal structure — a sort of shadow organization.
9. Manage Yourself
Managing oneself effectively during transitions is crucial for navigating challenges and avoiding derailment. Leaders should be aware of potential vulnerabilities such as undefended boundaries, brittleness, isolation, and work avoidance. Establishing personal disciplines like planning, focusing on the important, deferring commitment, and taking time for reflection can help mitigate these risks and manage stress levels.
Key concept: Transitions tend to amplify your weaknesses.
10. Accelerate Everyone
Companies should focus on accelerating transitions at all levels to reduce risk, improve performance, and gain a competitive advantage. Building an effective acceleration system involves identifying critical transitions, diagnosing set-up-to-fail dynamics, clarifying roles and aligning incentives, integrating with other talent management systems, and institutionalizing the framework companywide.
Key concept: The magnitude of these costs is such that a state-of-the-art transition acceleration system (‘acceleration system’) can reduce enterprise risk, create competitive advantage, and speed up change implementation.
Essential Questions
1. Why are the first 90 days critical for new leaders, and what makes this period so vulnerable?
The first 90 days in a new leadership role are critical, as the actions taken during this period significantly impact success or failure. This period is marked by acute vulnerability as new leaders lack established relationships and deep understanding of their new role. To counter this, new leaders must accelerate their learning, focusing on both technical and cultural aspects of the new environment. They need to secure early wins, demonstrate their competence, and build credibility to gain momentum and influence within the organization.
2. How can leaders diagnose the situation they’re entering, and why is this diagnosis so crucial?
The STARS model helps leaders diagnose the business situation they are entering - Start-up, Turnaround, Accelerated Growth, Realignment, or Sustaining Success. Each situation presents unique challenges and requires a tailored approach. Understanding the situation allows leaders to set appropriate priorities, secure relevant early wins, adapt their leadership style, and build the right team to succeed.
3. How can new leaders effectively build a relationship with their new boss and secure their support?
Building a productive relationship with the new boss is critical for securing support, resources, and aligning expectations. The five conversations framework provides a structure for proactively shaping this relationship: discussing the situation, clarifying expectations, negotiating resources, understanding working styles, and planning for personal development. This ongoing dialogue ensures alignment, avoids surprises, and facilitates a successful transition.
4. What are early wins, and how can new leaders secure them effectively to build momentum and credibility?
Securing early wins builds momentum, enhances credibility, and creates a positive perception of the new leader. Leaders should identify a few promising focal points for improvement, launch targeted projects, and elevate change agents within the organization. These wins should be visible, relevant to the boss’s priorities, and aligned with long-term goals while exemplifying desired behaviors. It’s important to avoid getting caught in the ‘low-hanging fruit’ trap by pursuing wins that don’t contribute to broader objectives.
5. Why is it important for leaders to become organizational architects, and how can they effectively diagnose and address misalignments?
Leaders are organizational architects, responsible for aligning the strategic direction, structure, systems, skills, and culture of their units. Misalignment among these elements leads to inefficiency, frustration, and poor performance. Recognizing and addressing these misalignments requires a deep understanding of organizational dynamics, stakeholder interests, and the appropriate sequencing of change initiatives.
Key Takeaways
1. Matching strategy to situation is crucial for transition success.
The STARS model helps leaders understand the context they’re operating in and tailor their approach accordingly. It highlights the importance of not applying a one-size-fits-all approach to leadership. By understanding the specific challenges and opportunities presented by each situation, leaders can make more informed decisions and prioritize their efforts effectively.
Practical Application:
An AI product engineer transitioning to a product management role can use the STARS model to understand the product’s lifecycle stage. If it’s a new product (Start-up), they might focus on building the core functionality and securing early adopters. If the product is struggling (Turnaround), the focus might shift to identifying root causes and implementing corrective measures.
2. Building strong relationships is essential, and the five conversations framework provides a roadmap for doing so.
The five conversations framework provides a structured approach to building productive working relationships with key stakeholders. It emphasizes the importance of open communication, clarity of expectations, and mutual understanding. By proactively engaging in these conversations, leaders can foster trust, collaboration, and alignment within their teams.
Practical Application:
An AI product engineer leading a new team can use the five conversations framework to build relationships with their team members. They can initiate discussions about the project’s goals and expectations, understand individual working styles, discuss resource allocation, and create a plan for each member’s professional development.
3. Creating alliances and navigating organizational politics are critical for success, especially when driving change.
Influence is essential for driving change within organizations. Leaders need to understand that formal authority is not the only source of power. Mapping influence networks, identifying opinion leaders, and understanding individual motivations are crucial for effective persuasion and alliance building.
Practical Application:
An AI product engineer leading a complex project can benefit from creating an influence map. By identifying key decision makers, understanding their motivations, and mapping their influence networks, the engineer can tailor their communication strategy to gain buy-in for critical decisions and overcome potential resistance.
4. Self-management, including developing personal disciplines, is crucial for navigating the challenges and stress of transitions.
Transitions are often stressful and can amplify personal vulnerabilities. Establishing and enforcing personal disciplines is essential for managing stress, maintaining focus, and avoiding burnout. Prioritizing important tasks, deferring commitment judiciously, and taking time for reflection can significantly contribute to personal effectiveness and well-being.
Practical Application:
An AI product engineer working on a high-pressure project can benefit from establishing personal disciplines like setting aside dedicated time for focused work, planning and reviewing progress weekly, and learning to say ‘no’ to avoid overcommitment. These disciplines help manage stress, maintain focus, and avoid burnout.
5. Accelerating everyone’s transitions can be a source of competitive advantage and a key element of building a high-performance organization.
Companies can benefit significantly by implementing a systematic approach to transition acceleration. A well-designed system can reduce risk, improve performance, and speed up change implementation. It involves identifying critical transitions, providing just-in-time support, customizing resources based on the type of transition, and aligning incentives across different levels of the organization.
Practical Application:
Companies developing AI products can institutionalize a transition acceleration system for onboarding new hires and promoting engineers to leadership roles. This might involve providing pre-entry resources, assigning mentors, conducting workshops on navigating the organizational culture and politics, and clarifying expectations through structured conversations.
Suggested Deep Dive
Chapter: Match Strategy to Situation
This chapter is particularly valuable for AI product engineers as it introduces the STARS model, a framework for diagnosing different business situations and adapting leadership styles accordingly. Understanding whether a product or project is in a start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, or sustaining success phase can guide decision-making and prioritization.
Memorable Quotes
Introduction: The First 90 Days. 15
The actions you take during your first few months in a new role will largely determine whether you succeed or fail.
Prepare Yourself. 28
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.
Accelerate Your Learning. 50
The first task in making a successful transition is to accelerate your learning.
Negotiate Success. 81
To succeed … it’s wise to negotiate success.
Secure Early Wins. 104
Elena succeeded in quickly creating momentum and building personal credibility by securing early wins.
Comparative Analysis
Compared to other leadership books like ‘Good to Great’ by Jim Collins or ‘Leaders Eat Last’ by Simon Sinek, which focus on more general leadership principles, ‘The First 90 Days’ provides a specific framework for navigating the unique challenges of transitions. It shares similarities with ‘Your Next Move’ by the same author, focusing on different types of career transitions but with less emphasis on organizational context. Unlike ‘The Lean Startup’ by Eric Ries, which centers on building new businesses, this book addresses a broader range of leadership transitions within existing organizations. However, like ‘The Lean Startup,’ ‘The First 90 Days’ emphasizes the importance of rapid learning and adaptation.
Reflection
While ‘The First 90 Days’ offers a compelling framework and actionable advice, it’s important to recognize potential limitations. The book primarily focuses on transitions within traditional hierarchical organizations and may require adaptation for more agile or flat structures. Its emphasis on ‘heroic’ leadership in certain situations might not resonate with everyone and could be perceived as outdated in contemporary leadership discourse. Additionally, the book’s reliance on anecdotal evidence, while illustrative, could benefit from more rigorous empirical support. Despite these caveats, ‘The First 90 Days’ remains a valuable resource for leaders navigating transitions. Its practical tools, checklists, and frameworks provide a clear roadmap for accelerating success. Its emphasis on self-awareness, relationship building, and strategic alignment remains highly relevant in today’s rapidly changing business environment. By applying the book’s principles thoughtfully and adapting them to their specific contexts, leaders can significantly enhance their effectiveness and create lasting positive impact.
Flashcards
What does preparing yourself for a transition mean?
A mental shift from the old role to the new one, involving letting go of past practices and embracing the imperatives of the new situation.
What are the five common business situations in the STARS model?
Start-up, Turnaround, Accelerated Growth, Realignment, and Sustaining Success.
What is the break-even point?
The point at which a new leader has contributed as much value to the organization as they have consumed.
What framework helps negotiate success with a new boss?
Five conversations about the situation, expectations, resources, style, and personal development.
What are the key objectives of the first wave of change in a transition?
Building personal credibility, establishing key relationships, and identifying and harvesting quick wins.
What are the four elements of organizational architecture?
Strategic direction, structure, core processes, and skill bases.
What are the four types of knowledge that make up a skill base?
Individual expertise, relational knowledge, embedded knowledge, and metaknowledge.
What is the golden rule of transitions?
To transition others as you would wish to be transitioned yourself.