Your First 90 Days
(Warning…this is a long blog. Several of my CEO clients have asked me to share this on my blog, so here goes…)
How you manage your first 90 days in the new job will make all the difference. It determines the culture and values that you instill on the organization and it determines how you will lead the organization to success and which priorities you will therefore establish.
While writing this for the new CEO, the tenets of the first 90 days apply to anyone taking on a new position managing people (after all, we are all CEOs of our organizational responsibilities).
Of course, depending on circumstances, fixating on 90 days is somewhat arbitrary. In general, I have found that taking longer than 90 days to “assess” begins a course of creating a defacto culture and priorities as opposed to deploying as you want to deploy… Taking less than 90 days, usually means we will in one way or another rush to judgment. During those 90 days, we will have crises to deal with; so when I talk about assessing and not deploying, I am talking about assessing and deploying strategic levers, large change elements. Of course the customers are buying, the employees are executing and fires are burning every day and need to be addressed.
Your first 90 days will not be about deploying ideas, actions, directives – they will be largely, almost exclusively about assessment – listening, observing, gathering facts, data and observations and starting to make conclusions.
Having said that, from day 1 you start to deploy immediately in one area. Your actions, words, how you engage with people from the first day on the job start to set the culture that you want to establish in the organization. Your non-negotiables as to your values, ethics, norms behaviors and style will be observed and registered by everyone – how you greet people, how you engage them when they talk to you, how you listen, how you respond, how you react, your accessibility; also how you communicate that the performance of the team is as critical as individual results (we all have two jobs – the job we are hired for and our job as a member of the team, governing the organization)– they all send the message as to your value system and how you want those respected in the organization that you lead.
The first 90 days are about assessment. In your first 90 days you will largely focus on the 80/20 rule to understand key drivers. Develop your 90 days plan around assessing key stakeholders and key levers of the organization.
You will need to start to understand the key stakeholders. These include:
• Your team - your direct reports
• The employees you are accountable for – your organization
• Your customers
• Your boss
• Your peers
• Strategic partners
• The Board of Directors
• Investors
You also need to get a quick assessment of the key levers that drive your organization. These include:
• Revenue and profit growth, sales performance, cost and productivity – what are the key levers? How are these valued and operationalized in the organization?
• Talent and non-performers
• Organizational priorities (are accountabilities clear, are priorities clear, are resources and talent mapped to priorities?)
• Areas of top performance (these are the engines you will want to continue to feed)- which products, countries, operations, facilities are creating profit and value?
• EBIT killers – which products, countries, operations, facilities are losing money?
• Strategic initiatives underway
• Customer Service – how do we organize around and measure customer satisfaction
• Customers – which customers are most valuable. Which are costing the organization. How do we face them?
Download from the Boss:
Listen, listen, listen!
There is a reason why your boss made an organizational change. Understand it. Understand your priorities, you accountabilities. Understand what defines success.
Develop a relationship. Executives aren’t hired for their experience and skills alone. Those are chips to get in the game. It is your leadership, your style, your ability to navigate and get things done – and it is understanding that you were hired for one thing! You were hired to deliver what your boss needs you to deliver. Understand the “WHAT” and use your 90 days to figure out the “HOW”.
Understand what is important to your boss. Understand their style, what makes them tick. Understand how your style and theirs will “click” to deliver a productive, efficient relationship based on trust and transparency.
And just like your team, you also have two jobs – the job you were hired to do, and the job as team member on your boss’s team. Make sure you apply similar energy and value to both jobs.
The Team:
Meeting with your team, getting to know them is one of the primary early objectives in your first 90 days. It’s the “first wave” – no making rash judgments on capability, but rather listening – getting updates on the priorities they are managing, their perspectives on their accountabilities and on the organization as a whole. Ask clarifying questions but spend 90% of the time listening. These first meetings are about you being brought up to speed and also starting to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your team on style, critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, taking accountability … do they tee up problems and not address solutions? How do they frame priorities? Do they speak in terms of “I” or their team?
I always began my 90 days with a full download by my CFO and Head of Human Resources. Consider them your “consiglieres”, providing insight into the people dynamics of the organization and into the numbers. And of course, these conversations give you early insight into their perspectives, style, awareness and business orientation .
From your Head of Human Resources:
Are there any liabilities or legal issues I should know of?
Are there any key open positions
Are any key people at risk of leaving?
Who do I need to put my arm around, pay attention to?
Perspectives on the team
Concerns that the team and the organization have (do we have employee survey and feedback data – what does it say, how do we use it and action it?)
Do we have a talent management process where we assess talent in the organization and map it to key positions/priorities, address succession planning?
How are key HR operational processes structured (Hiring/career development, payroll etc.)
Talent assessment of the HR organization – (both direct reports to the Head of HR as well as key HR people in the organization)
From your CFO:
• Where are the financial liabilities – where are we losing money? Where is risk? Cash flow and balance sheet priorities.
• CFO’s perspective on operations – profitability, sustainability, risks
• Audit open items – what are they, how serious are they, who owns addressing them (are they being addressed with adequate attention)
• How was the budget constructed (detailed walkthrough including customer); is there a business planning and budget process? How does it work? Is it an efficient process? Understand all the assumptions that are baked into the budget/plan. The “adage of ask why 5 times” really applies here. (for example, breaking down revenue growth – how many new customers, from where, profitability of customers, pipeline, customer retention. Breaking down cost – how wil we achieve that cost reduction, where will it come from, which countries, ehich expense categories, are there action plans defined to achieve) the key here is that you must feel comfortable (or uncomfortable) with the assumptions and what that means to achieve the plan
• Customer acquisition/revenue/margin/cost/productivity assumptions made, current performance against budget, opportunities, risks.
• Controls – are they in place from a company standpoint? Where in the organization are they not up to par?
• Talent assessment of the finance organization – (both direct reports to the CFO as well as key finance people in the organization)
After meeting with the head of HR and CFO, prioritize as best possible the meetings with the rest of your team; you will already have framed key levers and priorities as result of meetings with your boss, HR and CFO – I would prioritize meetings as follows:
Sales
Where are we making/not making our numbers, key customers, how do we pursue customers, how is our pipeline relative to plan, key customer issues priorities, sales performance and productivity, customer satisfaction…
Operations
Safety – what kind of safety culture do we have? Do we action it, measure it?
Quality – how do we value and operationalize Quality in our operations and products? How do we measure it?
Deep understanding of where we spend money – our cost. Where are there over-runs, where are be below budget, how are we on aggregate cost and variable cost?
Productivity – what focus (and how embedded in budget) does the company have on productivity?
Operational issues priorities/liabilities.
Key organizational P&Ls/Functions
Whether your organization is organized around P&Ls, products or functions, identify the 80/20 rule – most impactful to organization, biggest opportunity/liability. Sequence your 90 day assessment against this. Depending on the size and scope of your position, you likely will not be able to touch and assess everything and everyone, so you have to prioritize. (I was accountable for hundreds of countries, tens of thousands of employees – the math doesn’t work to see them all!) So prioritize. Do it tactfully, but do it.
The 91st day
Your assessment is never done (if only because you had to prioritize where you focus your first 90 days!). But the 90 days you gave yourselves to understand the “WHAT” are done. By now you have a clear understanding of the organizational, talent and business levers and priorities that are facing you and the team.
Your next 90 days are about implementing actions that you believe are critical to accelerating or changing the organization’s momentum as you see it. In my work with CEOs, I hear over and over again, the retrospective lament “I knew what I had to do, but I waited too long, delayed, for what I thought were good reasons…I should have acted faster.”
Don’t fall into that trap. Take decisive action that strengthens your team and team dynamics, that addresses EBIT killers and fuels the engines. You won’t regret it. Your first 90 days prepared you to make the best decision, in a timely manner and to set the course for how you want to lead the organization
How you manage your first 90 days in the new job will make all the difference. It determines the culture and values that you instill on the organization and it determines how you will lead the organization to success and which priorities you will therefore establish.
While writing this for the new CEO, the tenets of the first 90 days apply to anyone taking on a new position managing people (after all, we are all CEOs of our organizational responsibilities).
Of course, depending on circumstances, fixating on 90 days is somewhat arbitrary. In general, I have found that taking longer than 90 days to “assess” begins a course of creating a defacto culture and priorities as opposed to deploying as you want to deploy… Taking less than 90 days, usually means we will in one way or another rush to judgment. During those 90 days, we will have crises to deal with; so when I talk about assessing and not deploying, I am talking about assessing and deploying strategic levers, large change elements. Of course the customers are buying, the employees are executing and fires are burning every day and need to be addressed.
Your first 90 days will not be about deploying ideas, actions, directives – they will be largely, almost exclusively about assessment – listening, observing, gathering facts, data and observations and starting to make conclusions.
Having said that, from day 1 you start to deploy immediately in one area. Your actions, words, how you engage with people from the first day on the job start to set the culture that you want to establish in the organization. Your non-negotiables as to your values, ethics, norms behaviors and style will be observed and registered by everyone – how you greet people, how you engage them when they talk to you, how you listen, how you respond, how you react, your accessibility; also how you communicate that the performance of the team is as critical as individual results (we all have two jobs – the job we are hired for and our job as a member of the team, governing the organization)– they all send the message as to your value system and how you want those respected in the organization that you lead.
The first 90 days are about assessment. In your first 90 days you will largely focus on the 80/20 rule to understand key drivers. Develop your 90 days plan around assessing key stakeholders and key levers of the organization.
You will need to start to understand the key stakeholders. These include:
• Your team - your direct reports
• The employees you are accountable for – your organization
• Your customers
• Your boss
• Your peers
• Strategic partners
• The Board of Directors
• Investors
You also need to get a quick assessment of the key levers that drive your organization. These include:
• Revenue and profit growth, sales performance, cost and productivity – what are the key levers? How are these valued and operationalized in the organization?
• Talent and non-performers
• Organizational priorities (are accountabilities clear, are priorities clear, are resources and talent mapped to priorities?)
• Areas of top performance (these are the engines you will want to continue to feed)- which products, countries, operations, facilities are creating profit and value?
• EBIT killers – which products, countries, operations, facilities are losing money?
• Strategic initiatives underway
• Customer Service – how do we organize around and measure customer satisfaction
• Customers – which customers are most valuable. Which are costing the organization. How do we face them?
Download from the Boss:
Listen, listen, listen!
There is a reason why your boss made an organizational change. Understand it. Understand your priorities, you accountabilities. Understand what defines success.
Develop a relationship. Executives aren’t hired for their experience and skills alone. Those are chips to get in the game. It is your leadership, your style, your ability to navigate and get things done – and it is understanding that you were hired for one thing! You were hired to deliver what your boss needs you to deliver. Understand the “WHAT” and use your 90 days to figure out the “HOW”.
Understand what is important to your boss. Understand their style, what makes them tick. Understand how your style and theirs will “click” to deliver a productive, efficient relationship based on trust and transparency.
And just like your team, you also have two jobs – the job you were hired to do, and the job as team member on your boss’s team. Make sure you apply similar energy and value to both jobs.
The Team:
Meeting with your team, getting to know them is one of the primary early objectives in your first 90 days. It’s the “first wave” – no making rash judgments on capability, but rather listening – getting updates on the priorities they are managing, their perspectives on their accountabilities and on the organization as a whole. Ask clarifying questions but spend 90% of the time listening. These first meetings are about you being brought up to speed and also starting to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your team on style, critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, taking accountability … do they tee up problems and not address solutions? How do they frame priorities? Do they speak in terms of “I” or their team?
I always began my 90 days with a full download by my CFO and Head of Human Resources. Consider them your “consiglieres”, providing insight into the people dynamics of the organization and into the numbers. And of course, these conversations give you early insight into their perspectives, style, awareness and business orientation .
From your Head of Human Resources:
Are there any liabilities or legal issues I should know of?
Are there any key open positions
Are any key people at risk of leaving?
Who do I need to put my arm around, pay attention to?
Perspectives on the team
Concerns that the team and the organization have (do we have employee survey and feedback data – what does it say, how do we use it and action it?)
Do we have a talent management process where we assess talent in the organization and map it to key positions/priorities, address succession planning?
How are key HR operational processes structured (Hiring/career development, payroll etc.)
Talent assessment of the HR organization – (both direct reports to the Head of HR as well as key HR people in the organization)
From your CFO:
• Where are the financial liabilities – where are we losing money? Where is risk? Cash flow and balance sheet priorities.
• CFO’s perspective on operations – profitability, sustainability, risks
• Audit open items – what are they, how serious are they, who owns addressing them (are they being addressed with adequate attention)
• How was the budget constructed (detailed walkthrough including customer); is there a business planning and budget process? How does it work? Is it an efficient process? Understand all the assumptions that are baked into the budget/plan. The “adage of ask why 5 times” really applies here. (for example, breaking down revenue growth – how many new customers, from where, profitability of customers, pipeline, customer retention. Breaking down cost – how wil we achieve that cost reduction, where will it come from, which countries, ehich expense categories, are there action plans defined to achieve) the key here is that you must feel comfortable (or uncomfortable) with the assumptions and what that means to achieve the plan
• Customer acquisition/revenue/margin/cost/productivity assumptions made, current performance against budget, opportunities, risks.
• Controls – are they in place from a company standpoint? Where in the organization are they not up to par?
• Talent assessment of the finance organization – (both direct reports to the CFO as well as key finance people in the organization)
After meeting with the head of HR and CFO, prioritize as best possible the meetings with the rest of your team; you will already have framed key levers and priorities as result of meetings with your boss, HR and CFO – I would prioritize meetings as follows:
Sales
Where are we making/not making our numbers, key customers, how do we pursue customers, how is our pipeline relative to plan, key customer issues priorities, sales performance and productivity, customer satisfaction…
Operations
Safety – what kind of safety culture do we have? Do we action it, measure it?
Quality – how do we value and operationalize Quality in our operations and products? How do we measure it?
Deep understanding of where we spend money – our cost. Where are there over-runs, where are be below budget, how are we on aggregate cost and variable cost?
Productivity – what focus (and how embedded in budget) does the company have on productivity?
Operational issues priorities/liabilities.
Key organizational P&Ls/Functions
Whether your organization is organized around P&Ls, products or functions, identify the 80/20 rule – most impactful to organization, biggest opportunity/liability. Sequence your 90 day assessment against this. Depending on the size and scope of your position, you likely will not be able to touch and assess everything and everyone, so you have to prioritize. (I was accountable for hundreds of countries, tens of thousands of employees – the math doesn’t work to see them all!) So prioritize. Do it tactfully, but do it.
The 91st day
Your assessment is never done (if only because you had to prioritize where you focus your first 90 days!). But the 90 days you gave yourselves to understand the “WHAT” are done. By now you have a clear understanding of the organizational, talent and business levers and priorities that are facing you and the team.
Your next 90 days are about implementing actions that you believe are critical to accelerating or changing the organization’s momentum as you see it. In my work with CEOs, I hear over and over again, the retrospective lament “I knew what I had to do, but I waited too long, delayed, for what I thought were good reasons…I should have acted faster.”
Don’t fall into that trap. Take decisive action that strengthens your team and team dynamics, that addresses EBIT killers and fuels the engines. You won’t regret it. Your first 90 days prepared you to make the best decision, in a timely manner and to set the course for how you want to lead the organization
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