The First 90 Days

Hi, and welcome to this EP M fast summary, where today we're looking at the book "The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels."

New leaders are very vulnerable in their first few months in a job. That's because they lack index knowledge of the issues they'll face, and they lack knowledge of what they need to do to make a success of their new role. Now, if a new leader doesn't create momentum in the first 90 days, then the rest of their time in that position is going to be a real uphill battle; it's going to be a real challenge. So this book aims to get you off to a good start by providing you with the tools you need to both understand your current position and to thrive in your new role.

Now, there's a lot of content covered in the book, and we're going to cover all the main topics today, including how to promote yourself, how to accelerate your learning, how to match strategy to situation, how to secure early wins, negotiate success, achieve alignment, build your team, create coalitions, and finally, how to keep your balance whilst all of this is going on and you're new to a brand new, challenging position.

Promoting yourself means mentally promoting yourself into your new role and very importantly, putting the past and your past role and responsibilities behind you. Now, the book highlights a very common mistake: to think that you will succeed in your new role by doing the things you did in your previous job. That just isn't the case. So the book gives three steps to promote yourself, and they are: number one, establish a clear breakpoint. So mentally picture yourself in the new role and think about what's different, and what you did, what you do differently, and how your behavior is different. And, I establish a clear timeline for when you're going to move into that new role and take on those new responsibilities, having already, you know, promoted yourself mentally. Step two: hit the ground running. This is the fact that your transition begins the moment you're given the new role, not when you actually turn up to do that new role. So, so use the time before you start to get yourself ready. You know, you could learn about the organization; you can learn about the department; you could learn about their products. There's lots you could learn about. And the third step is to assess your vulnerabilities. Now, these are probably the things that you don't enjoy doing. Now, maybe it's public speaking, or maybe it's team-building. You should think about what you can do to improve these areas.

Accelerate your learning. Now, in a new role, there can be so much information to absorb; it can be really difficult to know where to start. So the book provides two steps you should go through. So number one: define your learning agenda. So define what you most need to learn even before you enter the organization. And what this means is defining a focused set of questions you want answers to. So, for example, why are things done the way they are? And as part of this process, you want to learn about hard facts, so things like financial data, and also the softer facts, so company culture and more woolly issues. To collect this data, you're going to need to identify promising sources. And as you collect the data and you get lots of answers, you can begin to hypothesize about what is going on inside your unit or inside the organization and why it's going on. So now that you know what you want to learn and who to learn it from, it's time to create your learning plan. And basically, here you'll want to define a timeline for what you want to learn. So what do you want to learn before you start in this new role? What do you want to learn at the end of the first week? What do you want to learn at the end of the first month, etc., etc.

Matching strategy to situation. Now, in a new position, if you don't match your strategy to your situation, it can be a recipe for failure. There are four broad categories of situations that a new leader might find themselves in, and those are startup, turnaround, realignment, and sustaining success. So a startup is where you need to put together the capabilities to get, you know, a new business off the ground. Turnaround: it's where you take on a unit that's in trouble, and your job is to get it back on track. Realignment: for where you have to reinvent a unit to kind of revitalize and put new life into it. And sustaining success is where you need to take an already successful unit to the next level. So by clearly understanding the situation you're in, it's going to help you make three very early choices: so how much time will you place on learning as opposed to doing? Obviously, the more challenging the situation, the less time you have to learn, the more maybe early wins you have to try and go for. How much emphasis will you place on offense as opposed to defense? And, you know, what should you do to get some early wins? Which takes us nicely on to how to secure our early wins.

Now, in the first 90 days, a key goal is to secure personal credibility and to build momentum under your leadership. Now, early wins boost your credibility; they get people motivated, and they create value for the organization. But there are a few mistakes new leaders can make when trying to secure early wins, and these are: failing to focus, and basically that means, you know, you're trying to do too much; you're not focused; not taking the business situation into account. So this is about keeping in mind that a win will look very different from one business to another; not adjusting to corporate culture, which is similar, you know, don't bring your existing ideas of a win with you, but really understand what a win means to your new organization. The next point: failing to get real wins that matter to your boss, and focusing on the what and not the how. And this means that it's not simply about achieving the results; you have to think about how you achieve them as well. So maybe you achieve the results, but if you've alienated people in the process, then that's going to make it very hard to kind of sustain that success and keep building on those results.

Negotiating success. So this is about, you know, you need to take the time to negotiate with your boss so that you can ensure realistic expectations are set; you can ensure that you're both aligned and agreed around what the situation you're facing looks like, and that adequate resources are at your disposal so you can actually get things done. And here are some tips for how to go about negotiating success. So firstly, you know, take 100 percent responsibility for making the relationship work; clarify expectations with your boss fairly often. In this two-way, you should clarify what his or her expectations of you are, and also vice versa, you know, what your expectations of them are. You should negotiate time zones for diagnosis and action planning, and what that means is don't let yourself be sucked immediately into firefighting, but make time, you know, to understand the problem and then plan to solve the problem. You should aim for early wins in areas that are important to your boss; you know, that's going to reinforce the relationship between the two of you. And you should try and get good grades from those whose opinion your boss respects. And finally, a couple of things you shouldn't do: don't spring surprises on your boss, and don't come to your boss only with problems; you know, bring successes as well.

Achieving alignment. The higher you climb within an organization, the more your role becomes that of an organizational architect. Now, to equip your group to achieve its goals, the five elements of organizational architecture all need to work together, and these are: strategy, so that's the approach your unit will use to achieve its goals; structure, how people are structured within the unit and how they communicate; systems, the processes used within the unit to add value; skills, obviously, are the skills and capabilities of your team; and culture are the values, the norms, and the assumptions that chase the behavior within your team and your unit. So how do you get started meshing this together? Well, you can think about aligning an organization being a bit like preparing for a long sailing trip. So first, you select your destination, so that's your mission and your goals, and then you select your route to get to that destination, which is your strategy. Then you figure out what boat you need, and that's the structure; how to ask for this, that's the systems you're going to use; and finally, the crew mix, that's the skills you need within the organization. And obviously, then throughout the journey, you know, you keep an eye out for weeks that are not on the chart, and you recalibrate based on what you see as you see it.

So how do you go about building your team? Well, poor team choices always come back to haunt you, but if you can create a high-performance team, you can expect huge leverage to create value. To do this, you're going to need to evaluate your current team; you're going to need to decide who's going to stay and who's going to go; and you're going to need to create a plan to find new people and to move existing people who are staying into the right roles. Now, there are a bunch of common mistakes people make when they're trying to build their team, including, you know, keeping the existing team too long. So, for a variety of reasons, this is a very common mistake to make, and you know, it can lead to a less than outstanding team; it can even lead to you shouldering more responsibility than you need to; not repairing that airplane. So basically, this means, you know, if you inherit a team, you will need to mold it in flight. If you don't mold it in flight, just like an airplane, you're not going to reach your destination; not working organizational alignment and team restructuring issues in parallel. That sounds complicated, but it just means you can't really build your team before you have clarity on strategy, structure, systems, and skills, or you'll end up with, you could end up with the wrong people in the wrong roles; not holding on to your best people. So that's about, you know, the uncertainty of uncertainty about who will be on the team can be to your best people leaving. Another mistake is to start team building before the core team is in place. It's very tempting to do because you want to get some real momentum, but it's often a mistake. And finally, two more: making implementation-dependent decisions too early. So you should really hold off making decisions until the core of your team is in place, otherwise it can be really difficult to get their buy-in because, you know, the decisions already be made, and they had no part in it, so it's hard to get their buy-in. And finally, you know, trying to do all this yourself is a mistake. Building a team is hard; there's different issues; there's HR issues, legal issues, so it's a really good idea to get some help; maybe you need a good HR person.

Now finally, you know, how do you evaluate your team? Well, you can evaluate them across these criteria: competence, judgment, energy, focus, relationships, and trust. And it's a good idea to kind of put this in a table and weight each one so you can evaluate everybody in the same way. So what are these criteria mean? Well, competence is, you know, really simple: does this person have the right competence to do the job effectively? Judgment: does this person exercise good judgment under pressure? Energy: does this person bring the right energy level to the job? Focus: you know, can this person stay focused, or are they going off in all kinds of directions? Relationships: is about are they easy to work with or difficult to work with? And trust is really simple: you know, will this person keep their word, and will they follow through with their commitments?

Create coalitions. Now, if your success depends on people you don't directly manage—maybe you work in a matrix organization—then you're going to have to create coalitions. And to do this, you need to learn how to influence people. Now, a common mistake new managers, new leaders make is to spend too much time influencing vertically, so influencing those below you or influencing up through your boss. You need to, you know, spread out through the horizontally as well. And to do this, you know, you need to identify who the key players you need to influence are, and maybe you need to get your boss to introduce you, and then you start to kind of work through who maybe are your potential supporters and who are your detractors. And of this group of people, which ones, you know, can you bring on side? And it's worth not trying to bring everyone on side at once; you know, it's worth remembering this coalition-building cycle. So, you know, gain a few allies, and that's going to help you recruit more allies, and that will increase your resource base, you know, which increases your likelihood of having success or the likelihood of your agenda's success, which in turn helps you to further get more allies, and the whole virtuous cycle continues.

That's a lot to take on board, so it's really important to keep your balance through the first 90 days while you're trying to do so much. And this section is all about regularly performing a self-assessment to ensure you're not falling into a personal trap at work, so including things like going off in all directions. It's not going to be possible to focus others if you can't focus yourself; undefended boundaries. Now, if you don't define your boundaries—what you are prepared to and are not prepared to do—then people are going to take whatever you have to give; brittleness. Now, this means don't overcommit to a course of action so that you can't change your mind if things start to go badly; isolation. To be effective, you have to be connected to people who can make action happen; bias judgment. So, for example, confirmation bias, whereby you focus only on factors that confirm your belief, or maybe work avoidance, and that's where you avoid taking the bull by the horns and making those difficult decisions, and in turn that makes, you know, tough problems tougher; and finally, going over the top, basically working too hard and being too stressed so you go beyond peak performance and you start to go downhill and move towards burnout. So those are the traps, but how do you avoid them? Well, you can adopt success strategies, and that's the bunch of strategies we've already discussed today; you can enforce personal disciplines, and that means things like, you know, devoting time weekly to planning, to a planning and evaluation cycle; try not to make spur-of-the-moment commitments that you might later regret; set aside time for actually doing hard work, as it's so easy to get distracted day to day with emails and people knocking on your door; it means things like if you find yourself getting too caught up in the emotional side of difficult decisions, take time out to look at the big picture; and finally, it means, you know, if you find yourself alienating people, even though you have really great ideas that you want to get implemented, then, you know, make some time and create a plan to how you're going to go about influencing people. And the final point is it's important to build your support systems, and this means, you know, stabilizing everything at home, because, you know, it's a fundamental rule of warfare, not to fight battles on too many fronts, and it also means, you know, thinking about how you're going to build your advice and counsel network.

In summary, this is an absolutely fantastic book to read for anyone about to step into a new leadership position. We rated it 10 out of 10 as being: it's a classic; it's a must-read book with lots of really great original ideas. And actually, it would also make a great book to read for anyone new to leadership who is preparing to step into their first leadership role or just looking to learn about leadership more generally.