'The First 90 Days', Michael Watkins

Rating: 7/10

Overall Thoughts

Leaders, regardless of their level, are most vulnerable in their first few months in a new position because they lack detailed knowledge of the challenges they will face and what it will take to succeed in meeting them.  They also have not yet developed a network of relationships to sustain them.

This book is suitable for individuals who are in their critical career transition periods.  I personally do not think that this book introduces groundbreaking new ideas, but it does lay out useful strategies and tactics for successful leadership.  'The First 90 Days' affords some clarity on how to secure early wins, align goals up and down the chain, anticipate surprises, build coalitions, stay balanced, and avoid vicious downward spirals.

Summary of 'The First 90 Days'

1. Promote Yourself

• Prepare yourself mentally to move into your new role by letting go of the past and embracing the imperatives of the new situation to give yourself a running start.  A related mistake is to believe that you will be successful in your new job by continuing to do what you did in your previous job, only more so.  
• Because you may not get a clean transition in terms of job responsibilities, it is essential to discipline yourself to make the transition mentally.  Do whatever it takes to get into the transition state of mind.  
• Your transition begins the moment you learn you are being considered for a new job.  It ends roughly 90 days after you begin the job.  Regardless of how much preparation time you get, start planning what you hope to accomplish by specific milestones.  
• Your weaknesses can make you vulnerable, but so can your strengths.  The qualities that have made you successful so far can prove to be weaknesses in your new role.  
• As you are progressively promoted, it becomes increasingly important to get good political counsel and personal advice.  Political counselors help you understand the politics of the organization, which is especially important when you plan to implement change.  Personal advisers help you keep perspective and equilibrium in times of stress.  
• Watch out for people who want to hold you back.  Be realistic about what you can accomplish.  There is always more that you could do, so keep in mind that time to learn and plan before you enter a new job is a very precious commodity.  
• Friends may not want their relationships with you to change.  But change they must, and the sooner you accept that (and help others to accept it too), the better.  Others in your organization will be looking for signs of favoritism and will judge you accordingly.  If you don't establish limits early, you will live to regret it.  Getting others to accept your promotion is an essential part of promoting yourself.  

2. Accelerate Your Learning

• It is essential to figure out what you need to know about your new organization and then to learn it as rapidly as you can.  Why?  Because efficient and effective learning reduces your window of vulnerability: You can identify potential problems that might erupt and take you off track.  It equips you to begin making good business decisions earlier.  
• Effective learning calls for figuring out what you need to learn so you can focus your efforts.  Devote some time to defining your learning agenda as early as possible, and return to it periodically to refine and supplement it.  
• Efficient learning means identifying the best available sources of insight and then figuring out how to extract maximum insight with the least possible outlay of your precious time.  
• Define your learning agenda, ideally before you even formally enter the organization.  A learning agenda crystallizes your learning priorities: What do you most need to learn?  Start by generating questions about the past, questions about the present, and questions about the future.  Why are things done the way they are?  Are the reasons why something was done still valid today?  Are conditions changing such that something different should be done in the future?  
• Identify the best sources of insight.  To make effective decisions, you also need "soft" information about the organization's strategy, technical capabilities, culture. and politics.  You need to listen to key people both inside and outside the organization.  
• Adopt structured learning methods.  When diagnosing a new organization, start by meeting with your direct reports one-to-one.  Ask them essentially the same five 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 exploit the potential of these opportunities?  (5) If you were me, what would you focus attention on?  By asking everyone the same set of questions, you can identify prevalent and divergent views, and thus avoid being swayed by the first or most forceful or articulate person you talk to.   How people answer can also tell you a lot about your new tea, and its politics: Who answers directly and who is evasive or prone to going on tangents?  Who takes responsibility and who points fingers?  Who has a broad view of the business and who seems stuck in a silo?  
• Create a learning plan.  Learning should be a primary focus of your plan for your first 30 days on the job.  
• Learn about culture.  Because cultural habits and norms operate powerfully to reinforce the status quo, it is vital to diagnose problems in the existing culture and to figure out how to begin to address them.  Do people seem most concerned with individual accomplishment and reward, or are they more focused on group accomplishment?  Does the group seem more casual, or more formal?  More aggressive and hard-driving, or more laid-back?  

3. Match Strategy to Situation

• The four types of business situations that new leaders must contend with are start-up, turn around, realignment, and sustaining success (STARS model).  
• Identify challenges and opportunities.  If you are succeeding the leader of a high-performing business, the challenge will be to take charge in your own way while preserving what is good about the organization.  If you are in a start-up situation, you will be responsible for creating the organization.  If you are in a  realignment situation, you will have to build awareness of the need for change.  Each situation also presents characteristic opportunities that you can leverage to build momentum.  
• Transform organizational psychology.  In start-ups, the prevailing mood is often of excited confusion, and your job is to channel that energy into productive directions, in part by deciding what not to do.  In turnarounds, you may be dealing with a group of people who are close to despair; it is your job to provide a light at the end of the tunnel.  In realignments, you will likely have to pierce through the veil of denial that is preventing people from confronting the need to reinvent the business.  In sustaining success situations, you have to "invent the challenge" by finding ways to keep people motivated, to combat complacency, and to find new direction for growth - both organizational and personal.  
• Focus your energy.  Clarity about the type of situation you are confronting helps you make three fundamental early choices: (1) How much emphasis will you place on learning as opposed to doing?  (2) How much emphasis will you place on offense as opposed to defense?  (3) What should you do to get some early wins?  

4. Secure Early Wins

• Avoid common traps: (1) failing to focus, (2) not taking the business situation into account, (3) not adjusting for the culture, (4) failing to get wins that matter to your boss, (5) letting your means undermine your ends.  
• Plan to make successive waves of change.  The goal of the first wave of change is to secure early wins: the new leader tailors each early initiatives to build personal credibility, establish key relationships, and identify and harvest low-hanging fruit - the highest potential opportunities for short term improvements in organization performance.  The second wave of change addresses more fundamental issues of strategy, structure, systems, and skills to reshape the organization.  
• Establish long term goals.  Plan your early wins so they help you build credibility in the short run and lay a foundation for your longer-term goals.  Your efforts to secure early wins should (1) be consistent with your A-item business priorities, and (2) introduce the new patterns of behavior you want to instill in the organization.  
• Focus on business priorities and behavioral changes.  Your longer term goals should consist of A-item business priorities and desired changes in the behavior of people in your organization.  A-item priorities constitute the destination you are striving to reach in terms of measurable business objectives.  
• Build personal credibility.  When you arrive, people will rapidly begin to assess you and your capabilities.  Your early actions, good and bad, will shape perceptions.  Once opinions about you has begun to harden, it is difficult to change.  In general, new leaders are perceived as more credible when they are: demanding but able to be satisfied, accessible but not too familiar, decisive but judicious, focused but flexible, active without casing commotion, willing to make tough calls but humane.  
• Secure tangible results.  Identify two or three key areas, at most, where you will seek to achieve rapid improvement.  If you take on too many initiatives, you risk losing focus.  But don't put all your eggs in one basket.  
• To translate your goals into specific initiatives to secure early wins, work through the following guidelines: (1) keep your long term goals in mind, (2) identify a few promising focal points, (3) concentrate on the most promising focal points, (4) launch pilot projects, (5) elevate change agents, (6) leverage the pilot projects to introduce new behaviors.  
• Avoid predictable surprises.  

5. Negotiate Success

• Proactively engage by negotiating with your boss to establish realistic expectations, reach consensus on the situation, and secure enough resources.  
• Focus on the fundamentals: (1) Don't trash the past; (2) Don't stay away from your boss; (3) Don't approach your boss only with problems; (4) Don't try to change the boss; (5) Take 100% responsibility for making the relationship work; (6) Clarify mutual expectations early and often; (7) Negotiate timelines for diagnosis and action planning; (8) Aim for early wins in areas important to the boss; (9) Pursue good marks from those whose opinions your boss respects.  
• Educate your boss.  Shape your boss's perception of what you can and should achieve.  You may find your boss's expectations unrealistic, or simply at odds with your own beliefs about what needs to be done.  If so, you will have to work hard to make your views converge.  
• Underpromise and overdeliver.  Whether you and your boss agree on expectations, try to bias yourself somewhat toward underpromising achievements and overdelivering results.  Be conservative in what you promise.  If you promise too much and fail to deliver, you risk undermining your credibility.  
• Clarify, clarify, clarify.  Even if you are sure you know that your boss expects, you should go back regularly to confirm and clarify.  Try asking the same questions in different ways to gain more insight.  Work at reading between the lines accurately and developing good hypotheses about what your boss is likely to want.  Try to put yourself in your boss's shoes and understand how you fit into the larger picture.  Don't let key issues remain ambiguous; ambiguity about goals and expectations is dangerous.  
• Diagnose your boss's style of communication.  How does your boss like 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?  Does your boss arrive at the office early and work late?  Does he or she expect others to do the same?  You may find it helpful to talk to other who have worked with your boss in the past.  Be careful not to be perceived as eliciting criticism of how the boss manages.  Listen to others' perspectives, but base your evolving strategy chiefly on your own experience.  

6. Achieve Alignment

• To equip your group to achieve its goals, 5 elements of organizational architecture all need to work together: (1) Strategy, (2) Structure, (3) Systems, (4) Skills, (5) Culture.  
• Your goal during your first 90 days should be to identify potential misalignments and then design a plan for correcting them.  
• Avoid: (1) Trying to restructure your way out of deeper problems; (2) Creating structures that are too complex; (3) Automating problem processes; (4) Making changes for change's sake; (5) Overestimating your group's capacity to absorb strategic shifts.  
• Getting started: (1) Start with strategy: take a hard look at how your unit is positioned with respect to the larger organization's goals and your A-item priorities; (2) Look at supporting structures, systems and skills; (3) Decide how and when you will introduce the new strategy; (4) Reshape structure, systems and skills simultaneously; (5) Close the loop: as you learn more about your group's structure, systems and skills, you will gain insight into the team's capabilities and its cultural capacity for change, which will in turn deepen your understanding of what changes in strategic positioning are possible over what time period.  
• Improve core processes.  Do not try to introduce radical changes in more than a couple of core processes at a time.  Your group will not be able to absorb so much change.  

7. Build Your Team

• Finding the right people is essential, but it is not enough.  Begin by assessing existing team members to decide who will stay and who will have to go.  Then devise a plan for getting new people and moving the people you retain into the right positions.  You still need to put in place goals, incentives, and performance measures that will propel your team in the desired directions.  You must establish new processes to promote teamwork.  
• Avoid: (1) Keeping the existing team too long: a good rule of thumb is that you should decide by the end of your first 90 days who will remain and who will go; (2) Not working organizational alignment and team restructuring issues in parallel; (3) Not holding onto the good people; (4) Undertaking team building before the core team is in place; (5) Making implementation-dependent decisions too early; (5) Trying to do it all yourself.  
• Assess your existing team.  During your first 30 to 60 days, you need to sort out what roles each individual plays, and how the group has worked in the past.  Consider these 6 criteria when evaluating people who report to you: (1) Competence, (2) Judgment, (3) Energy, (4) Focus, (5) Relationships, (6) Trust.  
• Assess your people.  The first test is whether any of them fail to meet your threshold requirements.  If so, begin planning to replace them.  Go on to the next step: evaluate their strengths and weaknesses.  One way to assess judgment is to work with a person for an extended time and observe whether he or she is able to (1) make sound predictions and (2) develop good strategies for avoiding problems.  
• Restructure your team.  Assign each team member to one of the following categories: (1) keep in place; (2) keep and develop; (3) move to another position; (4) observe for a while; (5) replace (low priority); (6) replace (high priority).  
• Consider alternative to outright termination.  Letting an employee go can be difficult and time-consuming.  You can work with HR to shift the person to a more suitable position.  
• Establish new team processes.  (1) Assess your team's existing processes; (2) Target processes for change; (3) Alter who participates; (4) Manage decision making.   
• You will know you have been successful in building your team when you reach the breakeven point - when the energy the team creates is greater than the energy you need to put into it.   

8. Create Coalitions

• One common mistake of new leaders is to devote too much of their transition time to the vertical dimension of influence - upward to bosses and downward to direct reports - and not enough to the horizontal dimension, namely, peers and external constituencies.  
• It is never a good idea to approach people for the first time when you need something from them.  Discipline yourself in building relationship capital with people you anticipate needing to work with later.  
• Identify the key players.  Try to identify the sources of power that give particular people influence in the organization.  If you can convince these vital individuals that your A-item priorities and other goals have merit, broader acceptance of your ideas is likely to follow.  
• Identify supporters, opponents, and convincibles.  Whatever supporters' reason for backing you, do not take their support for granted.  It is never enough merely to identify support; you have to solidify and nurture it.  When you meet resistance, try to grasp the reasons behind it before labeling people as implacable opponents.  When you have identified convincibles, look into what motivates them.  
• If you approach the right people first, you can set in motion a virtuous cycle.  Focus on approaching (1) people with whom you already have supportive relationships, (2) individuals whose interests are strongly compatible with yours, (3) people who have the critical resources you need to make your agenda succeed, and (4) people with important connections who can recruit more supporters.  
• To consolidate existing support, call on established social and political relationships and strengthen them through regular conversations.  Make sure you keep your allies up to date.  Pay attention to how they react to changing conditions.  You want to affirm the importance of existing relationships and leverage them into support for your new effort.  

9. Keep Your Balance

• If you fail to establish solid boundaries defining what you are willing and not willing to do, the people around you - bosses, peers, and direct reports - will take whatever you have to give.  The more you give, the less they will respect you and the more they will ask of you.  Eventually you will feel angry and resentful that you are being nibbled to death, but you will have no one to blame but yourself.  
• To be effective, you have to be connected to the people who make action happen and to the subterranean flow of information.  Isolation breeds uninformed decision making, which damages your credibility and further reinforces your isolation.  
• 1st pillar of self-efficacy: Adopt success strategies presented in the previous 8 chapters.  
• 2nd pillar of self-efficacy: Enforce personal disciplines.  Success or failure emerges from the accumulation of daily choices that propel you in productive directions or push you off a cliff.
• 3rd pillar of self-efficacy: Build your support systems.    

10. Expedite Everyone

• Begin by working locally; focus on the people who work for you, both new direct reports and people who have been around for a while.  Press them to create their own 90-day acceleration plan.  Help them identify and reach out to people whose support they are likely to need.  Press them on their A-item priorities and plans for securing early wins.  Once you get them up to speed, press them to use the transition acceleration framework with their own people.  
• If you are building a team, consider using the framework to accelerate the team-building process.  Push them to clarify the key challenges and opportunities.  Then move onto alignment issues - strategy, structure, systems, and skills.  Next, focus on how the team will define its A-item priorities and secure early wins.  Finally, explore the kinds of coalitions you and the team will have to marshal the support you need.