First 90 Days

Friday, September 21, 2007

11:13 AM

Author: Michael Watkins

The Five Propositions

1. The root causes of transition failures always lie in a pernicious interaction
between the situation, with its opportunities and pitfalls, and the individual,
with his or her strength and vulnerabilities.
2. There are systematic methods that leaders can employ to both lessen the
likelihood of failure and reach the breakeven point faster.
3. The over-riding goal of a transition is to build momentum by creating virtuous
cycles that build credibility and by avoiding getting caught in vicious cycles
that damage credibility.
4. Transitions are a crucible for leadership development and should be managed
accordingly.
5. Adoption of a standard framework for accelerating transitions can yield big
returns for organizations.

STARS Model
• Start-up
• Turnaround
• Realignment
• Sustaining Success

Chapter 1: Promote Yourself

A common mistake is to believe that the skills that got you the promotion will
continue to make you successful if you continue using them, only more so.

Rule #1 - Establish a Clear Breakpoint

Pick the date you will transition to the new role. Let your previous team and boss
know. Make it clear that you will be in the new position on this date.

This will help create mental clarity.

Key Questions from Chapter One

1. What has made you successful so far in your career?
2. Can you succeed in your new position by relying solely on those strengths?
3. If not, what are the critical skills you need to develop?
4. Are there aspects of your new job that critical to success but that you prefer
not to focus on? Why is that the case?
5. How will you compensate for your potential blind spots?
6. What do you need to do to ensure that you make the mental leap into the
new position?
7. From whom might you seek advice and counsel on this? What other activities
might help you do this?

1:1 Interviews
1. Introduce self
 a. Give background
b. Describe family and interests
2. Have interviewee describe background, family and interests
3. Ask five essential questions:
a. What are the biggest challenges the organization is facing (or will face)
in the near future?
b. Why is the organization facing (or will face) these challenges?
c. What are the most promising unexploited opportunities for growth?
d. What would need to happen for the organization to exploit the
potential of these opportunities?
e. If you were me, what would you focus attention on?
f. How do our customers perceive our team? What would they like
changed?

Once you have distilled these early discussions into a set of observations, questions,
and insights, convene your direct reports as a group. Feed back your impressions
and questions, and invite some discussion. You will learn more about team
dynamics, and substance by doing so, and will demonstrate how quickly you have
begun to identify key issues.

Chapter 2: Accelerate Your Learning

Overcome Learning Disabilities: When a new leader derails, failure to learn is

almost always a factor. Information overload can obscure the most telling issues.

To compound the problem, surprisingly few managers have received any training in
systematically diagnosing an organization.

A related problem is the failure to plan to learn. Planning to learn means figuring out
in advance what the important questions are and how you can best answer them.

One simple failure is the failure to try to understand the history of the organization.
Ask the question, "How did we get here?"

The compulsive need to take action is also a disability. MOST destructive of all is
arriving at the new job, with the answer!

Questions about the past

PERFORMANCE
• How has the 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 or
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 the organization's strategy. Its
structure, its technical capabilities, its culture, and its 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? It's 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 of the organization?
• Is it really pursuing that strategy? If not, why not? If so, is the strategy
going to take the organization where it needs to go?
PEOPLE
• Who is capable and who is not?
• Who can be trusted and who cannot?
• Who has influence and why?
PROCESS
• What are the key processes or the organization?
• Are they performing acceptably in terms of quality, reliability, and timeliness?
If not, why not?
LAND MINES
• What lurking surprises could detonate and push you off track?
• What potentially damaging cultural political missteps must you avoid making?
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 business 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?

The most valuable external sources of information are likely to be the

following:
• Customers - How do the customers perceive your organization? How do
your best customers assess your products or services?
• Distributors -You can learn about customer service and competitors'
practices and offerings.
• Suppliers - They can give you their perspective on your organization in its
role as a customer.
• Outside Analysts- Can give you a fairly objective assessment of your
company's strategy and capabilities, as well as those of your competitors.

Indispensable internal information sources are the following:

 • Frontline R&D and Operations
• Sales and Purchasing
• Staff
• Integrators
• Natural Historians

ADOPTING STRUCTURED LEARNING METHODS

When diagnosing a new organization, start by meeting with your direct reports one-
on-one. Ask direct reports the following six questions:
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 exploited opportunities for
growth?
5. What would need to happen for the organization to exploit the potential of
these opportunities?
6. If you were me, what would you focus attention on?

Learning should be the primary focus of your plan for the first 30 days!

Learning Plan Template

Before Entry
• Read whatever you can find about the organization's strategy, structure,
performance, and people.
• Look for external assessments of the performance of the organization. If you
are a manager at a lower level, talk to people who deal with your new group
as suppliers and customers.
• Find external observers who know the organization well, including former
employees, recent retirees, and people who have transacted business with
the organization.
• Talk with your new boss.
• As you learn about the organization, write down your first impressions and
eventually some hypotheses.
• Compile an initial set of questions to guide your structured inquiry once you
arrive.

Soon after Entry

• Review detailed operating plans, performance data, and personnel data.
• Meet one-on-one with your direct reports and ask them the questions you
compiled. You will learn about convergent and divergent views, and about
them as possible.
• Assess how things are going at key interfaces from the inside. You will learn
about problems that customers perceive but the team does not know about.
• Test strategic alignment from the top down. Ask people at the top what the
company’s vision and strategy are. Then see how far down into the
organizational hierarchy those beliefs penetrate.
• Test awareness of challenges and opportunities from the bottom up.
• Update your questions and hypotheses.
• Meet with your boss to discuss your hypotheses and findings
By the End of the First Month
• Gather your team to feed back your preliminary findings. You will elicit
confirmations and challenges of your assessments, and will learn more about
the group and its dynamics.
• Now analyze key interfaces from the outside in. You will learn how people on
the outside (suppliers, customers, distributors and others) perceive your
organization and its strengths and weaknesses.
• Analyze a couple of key processes. Convene representatives of the
responsible groups to map out and evaluate the processes you selected. You
will learn about productivity, quality, and reliability.
• Update your questions and hypotheses.
• Meet with your boss again to discuss your observations.

Three perspectives of Culture

• Organizational
• Professional
• Geographic

Key Questions from Chapter Two

1. Are you effective at learning about new organizations?
2. Do you sometimes fall prey to the active imperatives? To coming up with "the
answer"? If so, how will you avoid doing this?
3. What is your learning agenda? Based on what you know now, compose a list
of questions to guide your early inquiry. If you have begun to form
hypotheses about what is going on, what are they and how will you test
them?
4. Given the questions you want to answer, which individuals are most likely to
provide you with solid actionable insights?
5. How might you increase the efficiency of your learning process? What are
some ways you might extract more actionable insights for your investment of
time and energy?
6. Given your answers to the previous questions, start to create your learning
plan.

Chapter Three - Matching Strategy to Situation

For a team in which you want to sustain the high level of success it is best to be
defensive and continue the work they have been doing. Do not come in and make
rapid changes. Learn as much as you can about what they are doing great, good, ok
and not well and work on the easy wins.

Securing an early win in a high performing team is to gain an understanding of what

has made the team successful because it gives you the right to make decisions that
affect the teams future.

The Four Dimensional Approach to Potential Talent Development

1. Managerial functions
2. Geographic Areas
3. Career Crossroads
4. STARS Business Situations
Key Questions from Chapter Three
1. Which of the four STARS situations are you facing- start-up, turnaround,
realignment, or sustaining success.
2. What are the implications for the challenges and opportunities you are likely
to confront and for how you should approach accelerating your transition?
3. What are the implications for your learning agenda? Do you need to
understand the technical side of the business, or is it critical that you
understand culture and politics as well?
4. Which of your skills and strengths are likely to be most valuable in your
situation and which have the potential to get you into trouble?
5. What is the prevailing frame of mind? What psychological transformations do
you need to make an how will you bring them about?
6. Should your early focus be on offense or defense?
7. When you dig deeper what is the mix of types of situations that you are
managing? Which portions of your unit are in start-up turnaround,
realignment, and sustaining-success modes? What are the implications for
how you should manage and reward the people working for you?

Chapter Four- Secure Early Wins

In the first 90 days, a key goal is to build personal credibility and create
organizational momentum. You do this by securing some early wins. Early wins
leverage your energy and expand the potential scope of your subsequent actions.
Plan your early wins so they help you build credibility in the short term and lay the
foundation for your longer term goals.

Avoid Common Traps

• Failing to Focus - It is essential to identify promising opportunities and then
focus relentlessly on translating them into wins.
• Not taking the business situation into account.
• Not adjusting for the culture
• Failing to get wins that matter to your boss
• Letting your means undermine your ends-Process matters. An early win that
is accomplished in a way that exemplifies the behavior you to instill in your
new organization is a double win.

A-Item Priorities
A-item priorities constitute the destination you are striving to reach in terms of
measurable business objectives.
• A-item priorities should follow naturally from core problems. Pinpoint critical
areas in your organization that demand attention, as well as those that offer
the greatest opportunities to contribute to dramatic improvement in
performance.
• A-item priorities should be neither too general nor too specific.
• A-item priorities should offer clear direction yet allow for flexibility while you
learn more about your situation.

Building Credibility
Craft a few messages tailored to each of the different constituencies. These
messages should focus on who you are, the values and goals you represent, your
style, and how you plan to conduct business.
When you arrive, people will rapidly begin to assess you and your capabilities. Your
credibility, or lack there of, 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?

In general, new leaders are perceived as more credible when they are:

• Demanding but able to be satisfied

• Accessible but not too familiar - be approachable, but in a way that preserves
your authority.
• Decisive but judicious- communicate your ability to take charge without
jumping too quickly into decisions that you are not ready to handle.
• Focused but flexible - Establish authority by zeroing in on issues but
consulting others and encouraging input.
• Active without causing commotion - Make things happen but avoid pushing
your people to the point of burnout.
• Willing to make tough calls but humane - Do what needs to be done, but
preserve peoples dignity and that others perceive as fair.

Securing Tangible Results

Identify two or three key areas, at most, where you will seek to achieve rapid
improvement. Do not take too many on as it will overwhelm you. Also do not put all
your eggs in one basket.
But do the following:

• Keep your long term goals in mind

• Identify a few promising focal points-Focal points are areas or processes
where improvement can dramatically strengthen the organizations overall
operational or financial performance.
• Concentrate on the most promising focal points-Early wins will give you credit
and additional freedoms.
• Launch pilot projects -Success with these early projects will energize your
staff and yield improvements.
• Elevate change agents -Identify high performers in your new team and
promote them.
• Leverage the pilot projects to introduce new behaviors

Plan-Then-Implement-Approach
Make sure you have the following prior to moving forward with a pilot project.

• Awareness - A critical mass of people are aware of the need for change.
• Diagnosis - You know what needs to be changed.
• Vision - You have a compelling visions and solid strategy.
• Plan- You have the expertise to build a detailed plan.
• Support - make sure you have a powerful coalition.

Keep in mind your overarching goal: creating a virtuous cycle that reinforces wanted
behavior and contributes to helping you achieve you’re A-item priorities. Remember
that you are aiming at modest early improvements so you can pursue more
fundamental changes.

Chapter Five- Negotiate Success

Focus on the Fundamentals

DON'TS!!!
• Don't trash the past - there is nothing to be gained and much to be lost by
criticizing the people who led the organization before you arrived.
Understand the past, but concentrate on your actions and decisions.
• Don’t stay away - If you have a boss that does not reach out to you, then
you MUST reach out to your boss. It may feel good to have a lot of rope, but
resist the urge to take it. Be sure your boss is aware of the issues you face
and that you are aware of the boss's expectations and whether and how they
are shifting.
• Don't surprise your boss - Most bosses consider it a far greater sin not to
report emerging problems early enough. Worst of all is for your boss to learn
about a problem from someone else.
• Don't approach your boss only with problems- You don't want to be
perceived as brining nothing but problems for your boss to solve. You need to
have a plan too.
• Don't run down your checklist-Discuss what you are trying to do, and how
your boss can help resolve an issue. Avoid a long laundry list of items you
are working on. There is very little value in doing that.
• Don't try to change your boss- Assume that you are not going to change
your boss, and adapt to his or her style and idiosyncrasies.

DO's!
• Take 100% responsibility for making the relationship with your boss
work.
• Clarify mutual expectations early and often-Begin managing
expectations right away! Check in regularly to make sure your boss'
expectations have not shifted.
• Negotiate timelines for diagnosis and action planning- Do not let
yourself get caught up in firefighting, or pressured to make calls before you
are ready.
• Aim for early wins in areas important to your boss- figure out what the
boss cares about most. What are his interest and goals, and how your actions
fit into that picture.
o Find three things that your boss sees as important and bring them up
in every conversation you have with him/her.
• Pursue good marks from those whose opinions your boss respects-
You need to curry favor with people your boss trusts.

Planning The Five Conversations With Your Boss

1. The situational Diagnosis Conversations - In this conversation you will

seek to understand how your new boss sees the business situation.
 2. The Expectations Conversation-Your agenda in this conversation will seek
to understand and negotiate expectations. Clarify and align your expectations
about the future. Identify short and medium term goals. If you don't manage
expectations, they will manage you!
a. Integrate your boss's goals with your own efforts to get early wins.
b. Identify the untouchables - find out what your boss loves, has worked
on or cares about.
c. Educate your boss on what you can and will be able to and should
achieve.
d. Under promise and over deliver
e. Clarify, clarify, clarify - Even If you are sure you know what your boss
expects, you should go back on a frequent basis to confirm and clarify.
f. Working at a distance - exert more discipline over communication,
scheduling calls and meetings.

3. The Style Conversation - This conversation is about how you and your boss
can best interact on an ongoing basis. Forms of communications? How often?
How do your styles differ?
a. Diagnose how your boss likes to communicate. How often? What kinds
of decisions does your boss want to be involved in, and when can you
make calls on your own.
b. Understand your boss's comfort level with decision making. Initially
expect to be confined to a small "box", but it will grow as your boss's
confidence grows.
c. Adapt to your bosses style. Ask how he/she would prefer you to
proceed.
d. Address the difficult issues head-on. Otherwise your boss will interpret
the style difference as disrespect or even incompetence.

4. The Resources Conversation- This conversation is essentially a negotiation

for critical resources. What is it that you need to be successful?
a. The first step is to understand the resource requirements to be
successful.
b. Put as much on the table as early as possible.

5. Personal Development Conversation- Discuss how your tenure in this role

will contribute to your personal development.
a. What skills do you need to do a better job?

The Golden Rule of Transitions

Helping your direct reports accelerate their transitions is about more then being a
good manager and contributing to others' development. The faster your direct
reports get up to speed, the better able they will be to help you reach your goals.