The First 90 Days: Succeeding as a New Leader (Book Digest)

Leadership transitions are among the most critical periods in any career: Your first few months strongly predict your overall performance in the role. Yet most leaders receive little formal training on how to navigate these transitions effectively.

Michael Watkins's The First 90 Days is a valuable book because it helps you approach transitions effectively by managing yourself, your team, your boss, and your colleagues. 

What Can Go Wrong: Common Transition Traps

New leaders consistently fall into predictable traps:

Sticking with what you know: Many leaders assume they can succeed by doing more of what worked in their previous role. What made you successful as an individual contributor may not work as a manager.

Coming in with "the" answer: Leaders who arrive convinced they already know the solution often fail to understand the unique culture, politics, and constraints of their new environment. What worked at your previous company may fail in the new context.

Focusing on the wrong type of learning: Most leaders spend too much time learning about technical aspects of the business and not enough understanding cultural and political dynamics. Technical competence is necessary but insufficient for leadership success.

The Process of Structured Learning

Effective transitions require disciplined learning. Focus on two critical areas:

Understanding Your Organization

• For the past, understand how the organization performed and why. What efforts have been made to change things, and what happened? 

• For the present, assess the current vision, strategy, people, and processes. 

• For the future, identify the biggest challenges and opportunities ahead.

The Five Essential Questions for Your Team

Meet with each team member and ask them the same five questions to gather consistent insights:

1. What are the biggest challenges the organization is facing (or will face in the near future)?

2. Why is the organization facing (or going to face) these challenges?

3. What are the most promising unexploited opportunities for growth?

4. What would need to happen for the organization to exploit the potential of these opportunities?

5. If you were me, what would you focus attention on?

Matching Strategy to Situation: The STARS Framework

Your approach must match the context you're entering. The STARS model identifies five common business situations:

Start-up: Assembling capabilities to get a new business, product, or initiative off the ground. The challenge is channeling excited confusion into productive directions while deciding what not to do.

Turnaround: Taking on a unit in deep trouble that needs to get back on track. This is a "ready-fire-aim" situation requiring rapid, decisive action with incomplete information.

Accelerated Growth: Scaling up an organization that has begun to hit its stride. Success requires building systems and structures to support continued expansion.

Realignment: Revitalizing a unit that has been drifting into danger. The challenge is convincing people that change is necessary when there's no obvious crisis.

Sustaining Success: Preserving the vitality of a successful organization while taking it to the next level. This requires playing good defense while avoiding complacency.

Each situation demands different approaches: Turnarounds require heroic leadership and rapid decision-making while realignments need more diplomatic, consensus-building approaches.

The TOWS Framework

When assessing your strategic situation, use TOWS (not SWOT) analysis. Unlike SWOT, which often starts with internal strengths, TOWS begins by examining external Threats and Opportunities, then assesses internal Weaknesses and Strengths. 

This outside-in approach ensures you're responding to market realities rather than just leveraging existing capabilities.

Negotiating Success with Your Boss

Your relationship with your new boss is critical to your success.

The Five Structured Conversations

Use these conversations to shape your relationship with your boss:

1. The Situational Diagnosis Conversation: Align on whether your situation is a turnaround, realignment, etc. using the STARS framework.

2. The Expectations Conversation: Clarify short and medium-term goals, timing, and success metrics. Aim for early wins in areas important to your boss, identify any "untouchables" you shouldn't change, and bias toward underpromising and overdelivering.

3. The Resource Conversation: Negotiate for the resources you need to succeed. Use a menu approach: lay out costs and benefits of different levels of investment. \

4. The Style Conversation: Adapting your boss’s style is 100% your responsibility. Diagnose their preferences for communication, decision-making involvement, and information flow. 

5. The Personal Development Conversation: Once your relationship has matured (around the 90-day mark), discuss how you're performing and what you need to develop further.

The 90-Day Review Process

Structure your first 90 days in three 30-day blocks:

• First 30 days: Focus on learning and building personal credibility. Your key outputs are a situation diagnosis, identification of priorities, and a plan for the next 30 days.

• 60-day review: Assess progress toward your previous 30-day goals and present your updated plan for the final 30 days.

• 90-day review: Evaluate overall progress and establish longer-term objectives.

Building Your Team

Balance stability and change. Move too slowly and performance suffers; move too quickly and you may lose good people or damage morale.

Common Team Building Traps

Avoid these predictable mistakes:

• Criticizing previous leadership: There's nothing to gain by badmouthing your predecessors

• Keeping the existing team too long: More leaders err by keeping people too long rather than moving too quickly

• Not balancing stability and change: Focus only on truly high-priority personnel changes early on

• Not holding onto good people: When you "shake the tree," good people can fall out too

• Team building before the core is in place: Wait until your desired team is largely assembled before formal team-building activities

Assessing Your Team

Evaluate each team member on three dimensions:

1. Competence: Do they have the technical skills and experience to do the job effectively? Look beyond credentials to actual results and decision-making capability.

2. Trustworthiness: Can you count on them to keep commitments and follow through? This includes both reliability and honesty about bad news.

3. Energy: Do they bring positive energy to the role and energize others, or do they drain energy from the team?

Decision-Making Approaches

Choose your decision-making style based on the situation. Two approaches are commonly useful:

• Consult-and-Decide: You gather input but make the final call. Best for divisive decisions that create winners and losers, or when you need to make tough calls quickly.

• Build Consensus: You facilitate the group to reach agreement. Use when decisions require energetic support for implementation from people whose performance you can't easily observe and control.

  
  

Building Alliances: Navigating Organizational Politics

Success in leadership requires the support of people over whom you have no direct authority like peers and stakeholders in other departments. Building these alliances requires understanding influence networks and deploying the right influence strategies.

Understanding Influence Networks

Start by mapping who influences whom on the issues that matter to you. Categorize key stakeholders into three groups:

• Supporters: People who are already aligned with your agenda. Ask supporters to be "force multipliers" by helping you influence others and providing them with persuasive arguments to share. 

• Opponents: Those who actively resist your initiatives. Resistance often stems from legitimate concerns about implementation, resource constraints, or competing priorities rather than fundamental disagreement with your goals.

• Persuadables: The uncommitted middle. These are often your highest-leverage targets since they haven't yet taken firm positions. Focus your influence efforts on understanding what would motivate them to support your initiatives.

Influence Strategies

Once you understand the network, deploy appropriate influence tactics based on individual motivations and situational factors:

• Consultation: Ask questions, encourage them to voice real concerns, then summarize and feed back what you've learned. This process often reveals hidden objections and creates opportunities to address them.

• Framing: Tailor your message to what each audience cares most about.. The same proposal can be presented as a cost-cutting measure to finance-oriented stakeholders, a customer satisfaction initiative to sales teams, or a competitive advantage to strategy-focused executives. 

• Social influence: People want to remain consistent with their values and prior commitments, repay obligations, and preserve their standing with others. 

• Action-forcing events: Create deadlines or decision points. External pressures like customer complaints, regulatory requirements, or competitive threats can motivate people to stop deferring difficult decisions.

Classical Rhetoric - Logos, Ethos, and Pathos

Principles of classical rhetoric can also be helpful as you look for ways to influence your colleagues:

• Logos: Make logical arguments using data, facts, and reasoned analysis.

• Ethos: Appeal to principles: Frame your proposals in terms of fairness, organizational values, or professional standards.

• Pathos: Create emotional connections through inspiring visions, compelling stories, or appeals to shared aspirations. 

  
  

Conclusion

The first 90 days set the trajectory for your entire tenure in a new role. The investment you make in getting your transition right will pay dividends throughout your time in the role.

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If you liked this article, check out our other book digests in our series Required Reading for Salespeople. You can also check out the P.S.I. Selling Content Page for more insights on sales communication, strategy, and leadership.

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