Name: The First 90 Days
Rating: 3 (170 reviews)
Author: Michael D. Watkins

The First 90 Days summary

Michael D. Watkins

Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter

3 (170 ratings)

8 mins

What is The First 90 Days about?

The First 90 Days (2006) maps out the critical transition period for any business leader taking on a new role. It offers comprehensive and practical strategies for surviving – and thriving – past the first three months.

Table of Contents

What’s in it for me? Balance action with learning to achieve success.

Very few new leaders recognize just how important the first 90 days are in determining whether they sink, swim, or soar. It can be all too easy to focus on getting things done during the honeymoon phase, but an equal commitment to learning and observation can make all the difference in whether or not you’re embraced as a new leader – or frozen out.

Expanded and updated twice since it was first published in 2006, The First 90 Days has become foundational for leaders managing transitions; it helps them have a strong and effective start in any new role. Given that many leadership failures can be traced back to choices made during this early phase, it tackles the preparation, strategizing, team-building, alignment, and self-management required for a successful transition. This includes the sped-up learning process and intense self-assessment required for tackling a new role or building a new team.

In this very short Blink, we’ll zoom in on a particularly key insight, which might even seem counterintuitive at first. It is that balancing your desire for action with a commitment to learning and observation can actually help you thrive during, and long after, those crucial early days.

To find out why, let’s begin with a little story.

Accelerated learning is the first step to building your plan.

Allison had made a name for herself as the breakout star of the marketing team at a mid-sized B2B software company. Joining the organization right after graduate school, she’d quickly understood the customer base and their needs – and seemed to have a golden touch when it came to building teams.

She was thrilled, then, when she was hand-picked for a brand-new role as head of the launch team for a new software suite the company had been pouring years of R&D into. Given the timing of launch, the team would need to include a broad scope of members – from quality assurance and testers to market researchers and designers. Allison expected the team to come together seamlessly, just like in marketing. Everyone was used to a different management style, but she had time to work it out.

So imagine her shock when, after just a few short weeks, she was called in by a very angry upper manager about problems in the team. Sure, she’d been surprised when tech members had raised issues with her detailed timeline – claiming it failed to account for many stages of their quality assurance. Dismissing their concerns as overcautiousness, she noticed soon afterward that the new team had begun avoiding her in the hallways. Soon, the technical members were boycotting her meetings altogether, and taking their complaints to management.

What went wrong? Allison had always heard she had a golden touch with team-building – but those teams were closely aligned and shared similar working processes. In this new role, she’d relied on her team-building strengths. But she hadn’t educated herself on what leadership might require in a different context. She was so focused on being perceived as “getting the job done” that learning how this new mixed team might function fell to the wayside.

Shaken by this experience, she acted decisively. She set up one-on-one meetings with all of the team members to listen to their concerns. She convened small groups from their respective departments, and met with other stakeholders on her team. She learned that processes and procedures varied widely across the departments she was now working with – and that her assumption that all teams were essentially the same had almost cost her this new role.

Digging deeper, she learned that most early failures in a new role come down to failures in learning. Yet few leaders treat learning as a systematic part of taking on a new challenge. Even fewer leaders have a prioritized plan for learning when they step in.

This means that new leaders might be making changes without understanding how things came to work the way they currently do – without accounting for how the history of the organization has shaped the present. It can alienate and frustrate team members, who may feel dismissed or demoralized with the changes.

To get back on track, Allison realized, she needed to do some soul searching too.

For an effective plan, consider your strengths as well as your weaknesses.

What can we learn from Allison’s near disaster? First, leaders should plan for learning like they plan for other aspects of a transition. To adapt successfully, Allison needed to understand the culture in each department she would be working with – and how it manifested within the overall company culture. She’d been convinced that her way was “the right way.” Realizing this meant she needed to look at her leadership style more closely too.

After all, she’d been hand-picked for the new role because of her past success in managing teams – but she hadn’t taken the time to really reflect on her own leadership or compare it to the common leadership style at this new level in the company. She was a star in marketing because she was detail-oriented and had a strong need for process control. But these strengths didn’t help her with the technical members of the team, who were used to consensus-building in flattened hierarchies. Consensus-building wasn’t one of her strength areas – and it needed to be.