Insight Editions · No. 281
The First 90 Days
Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter
Michael D. Watkins
Michael Watkins treats a leadership transition as the moment of greatest risk and opportunity, and gives a disciplined plan for learning, securing early wins and reaching the break-even point faster.
A study guide to The First 90 Days by Michael D. Watkins. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book on One Page
Michael Watkins argues that a leader's first three months in a new role largely decide success or failure, because impressions harden fast and early vicious or virtuous cycles compound. The goal of every transition is to reach the break-even point, where you have added as much value as you consumed, as fast as possible, by matching a disciplined 90-day plan to your specific situation. The book turns that goal into ten transition tasks, each with frameworks, question lists and a closing checklist.
- The problem. Transitions are frequent (13.5 in a typical career, one every 1.3 years) and costly: about a quarter of Fortune 500 managers move each year, each move touching a dozen colleagues, and CEOs guess a midlevel leader needs 6.2 months to break even. Failure comes from a bad fit between role and person, often through seven traps such as the action imperative, arriving with "the" answer and neglecting peers. A Transition Risk Index sizes the leap before you take it.
- Inner work first. Prepare yourself by making a mental break from the old job. A promotion changes breadth, delegation, influence, communication and presence; an outside move is an organ transplant that the body may reject unless you master four pillars (orientation, stakeholders, expectations, culture). Check your problem preferences for blind spots. Accelerate your learning as an investment: a learning agenda, the five questions for every report, and a written learning plan that covers culture and politics as well as the business.
- Diagnose before acting. STARS (start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, sustaining success) tells you what change to lead, what psychology to shift, and whether to act as a hero or a steward; most jobs are a portfolio of situations.
- Secure the base. Negotiate success with your boss through five conversations (situation, expectations, resources, style, personal development) and a written 90-day plan in three 30-day blocks. Secure early wins in waves: personal credibility first, then a few FOGLAMP-planned projects that also model new behavior; choose planned change or collective learning; avoid predictable surprises.
- Shape the organization. Achieve alignment of strategic direction (the four Cs, TOWS), structure, core processes and skill bases; build your team by assessing it on six criteria, evolving it, aligning it with push and pull tools and choosing the right decision process; create alliances by mapping influence networks and swaying persuadables with seven influence tactics.
- Sustain yourself and others. Manage yourself through 90-day strategies, personal disciplines and support systems, including the home front and an advice-and-counsel network. Finally, companies should accelerate everyone with ten design principles: a common core model, support delivered just in time, and links to recruiting and leadership development.
Chapter map
| Ch | Title | One-line payload |
|---|---|---|
| Pref | 10th Anniversary Preface | From niche topic to "onboarding bible"; accelerate all transitions, not just new hires |
| Intro | The First 90 Days | Reach break-even fast; seven traps, vicious vs virtuous cycles, ten tasks, transition risk index |
| 1 | Prepare Yourself | Let go of the old job; five promotion shifts, four onboarding pillars, seven self-preparation principles |
| 2 | Accelerate Your Learning | Learning as investment: agenda, best sources, five questions, structured learning plan |
| 3 | Match Strategy to Situation | STARS portfolio diagnosis; turnaround vs realignment; heroes vs stewards |
| 4 | Negotiate Success | Five conversations with the boss; written 90-day plan as a contract |
| 5 | Secure Early Wins | Change in waves; credibility then projects; FOGLAMP; plan or learn; predictable surprises |
| 6 | Achieve Alignment | Align direction, structure, processes, skills; four Cs, TOWS; change architecture to change culture |
| 7 | Build Your Team | Assess, evolve, align, lead; six criteria, six dispositions; choosing decision processes |
| 8 | Create Alliances | Map alliances and influence networks; persuadables; seven influence tactics |
| 9 | Manage Yourself | Four syndromes; stress curve; three pillars; disciplines; adviser network |
| 10 | Accelerate Everyone | Ten design principles for a companywide transition acceleration system |
Preface for the 10th Anniversary Edition
Watkins uses the anniversary preface to trace how a niche topic, leadership transitions, became a mainstream management discipline within a decade, and to list what changed in his own thinking. His standing conviction is that companies should accelerate every transition, internal promotions included, rather than treat onboarding of outside hires as the whole problem.
From risky topic to "onboarding bible"
When Michael Watkins began the book in 2001, almost nothing existed on getting up to speed in a new role. He was teaching negotiation and corporate diplomacy at Harvard Business School, and colleagues warned him that a further focus on transitions was a risky career move. He pressed on because the field was, in his view, virtually untilled both intellectually and practically.
- Prior work. He had already coauthored Right from the Start (1999) with Dan Ciampa, a modestly successful book on senior executive transitions.
- The test bed. From late 1999, Johnson & Johnson's corporate management development group hired him to build workshops and coaching for leaders in transition; the engagement became a long development partnership where his ideas were tried and refined.
- The distillation. The first edition condensed about two and a half years of work with hundreds of VPs and directors across all regions. It kept foundations from the earlier book (accelerated learning, early wins, alliances) but tested and rebuilt them into practical frameworks and tools usable at any level.
Watkins credits the mix of concepts, tools, cases and practical advice for the book's reception. Its success coincided with his exit from Harvard: rather than seek another academic post, he cofounded Genesis Advisers, a firm built to accelerate everyone taking a new role.
- November 2003: first edition published.
- Summer 2004: enters the BusinessWeek best-seller list and stays 15 months.
- Almost 800,000 English copies sold, 75,000 of them in 2011; a constant HBR Press best-seller for ten years.
- 27 translations; basis of Harvard Business Publishing's award-winning Leadership Transitions e-learning tool.
- 2006: The Economist calls it "the onboarding bible".
- 2009: named one of the 100 best business books of all time by Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten (800-CEO-READ).
Watkins admits the label "classic" carries a whiff of mustiness he dislikes, but reads the staying power as proof that each new generation of leaders must learn transitions afresh.
Why the field took off
He ties the book's rise to a wider corporate wave of interest in talent management, onboarding and CEO succession. As the war for talent intensified, firms saw the high costs of derailment, underperformance and poor retention of new hires. Learning and HR teams in thousands of companies adapted the tools independently of Genesis, and by the second edition the field had its own dedicated conferences.
Watkins thinks focusing only on onboarding is a mistake. Genesis's J&J work covered new hires and internal promotions from day one, because promotions, moves between units and international assignments carry comparable risks and deserve the same acceleration.
How the thinking evolved
The new edition folds in a decade of follow-on research and practice, plus eight years of building successive Genesis offerings: a new generation of Acceleration Coaching, a web-based workshop with virtual breakout groups, and a program moving physicians from clinical and research settings into commercial roles.
| Work | What it added |
|---|---|
| Shaping the Game (HBR Press, 2006) | Negotiation and influence tools applied to transitions |
| The First 90 Days in Government | Public-sector version, with retired Treasury official Peter Daly and Cate Reavis |
| "Pillars of Executive Onboarding" (Talent Management, Oct 2008) | Five focal points: business orientation, expectations, alignment, cultural adaptation, political connection |
| Your Next Move (HBR Press, 2009) | Organizational change challenge vs personal adaptive challenge; promotions, leading former peers, onboarding, international moves |
| "Picking the Right Transition Strategy" (HBR, Jan 2009) | Deeper STARS model: start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, sustaining success |
| "How Managers Become Leaders" (HBR, June 2012) | Seven seismic shifts from senior functional role to running a whole business |
Ideas others have borrowed
- STARS and transition traps, now common in consultants' toolkits.
- Early wins as the engine of early credibility.
- The "fuzzy front-end": the period between getting a job and formally stepping into it, developed jointly with Ciampa.
- Change vs adaptation: separating the organizational change challenge from the personal adaptive challenge when gauging a new leader's risk.
- Dan Ciampa. Coauthor of Right from the Start; with partner Shawna Slack, the biggest influence on the early ideas.
- Jeff Kehoe. HBR Press editor who directed and refined the work.
- Becky Atkeison (FedEx) and J&J leaders including Inaki Bastarrika and Ron Bossert: client sponsors who invested in the approach.
- Jerry Cogliano. Genesis COO who built the firm; Kerry Brunelle helped edit the manuscript.
The sales figures and accolades come from the author himself, writing a preface to promote a new edition; read them as self-reported marketing, not independent evidence that the methods work.
The First 90 Days
Watkins opens with a blunt premise: what you do in your first few months in a role largely decides whether you succeed or fail, because opinions of a new leader form fast and harden. Your goal in every transition is to reach the break-even point, where you have contributed as much value as you have consumed, as fast as possible. The rest of the book is a toolkit of ten transition tasks for getting there, and the introduction supplies the diagnosis: why transitions are dangerous, which traps catch leaders, and how to size your own risk.
Why transitions decide careers
Where a US president gets 100 days to prove himself, Watkins gives the new leader 90. A failed assignment can end a promising career, but outright failure is only the visible part of the problem: for every leader who derails, many more survive without reaching their potential, losing career opportunities and leaving their units weaker than they might have been. When leaders do derail, the trouble can almost always be traced to vicious cycles that began in the first months.
- Survey evidence. Of 1,300+ senior HR leaders surveyed, almost 90% agreed that transitions are the most challenging times in a leader's professional life, and nearly three-quarters agreed that early success or failure strongly predicts overall success in the job.
- The double edge. A transition is a chance to start afresh and make needed changes, but also a period of acute vulnerability: you lack working relationships and detailed knowledge of the role.
- Managing under a microscope. Everyone around you is trying to work out who you are and what you stand for, so opinions of your effectiveness form surprisingly fast and are very hard to change once formed.
- Momentum cuts both ways. Early credibility and wins tend to carry you through the rest of your tenure; an early hole means an uphill battle from then on.
A bad transition does not doom you, Watkins concedes, but it makes success a lot less likely.
Building your career transition competence
The single-employer career is fading, so the ability to move quickly and well into new roles has become a core career skill. Every successful career, in Watkins's formula, is a series of successful assignments, and each assignment is launched by a successful transition.
- 580 leaders surveyed jointly by Genesis Advisers, Harvard Business Review and IMD, averaging 18.2 years of professional experience.
- 4.1 promotions per leader.
- 3.5 moves to a new company.
- 2.2 geographic moves.
- 1.9 moves between business units in the same company.
- 1.8 moves between functions (for example sales to marketing).
- Total: 13.5 major transitions, or one every 1.3 years; some ran in parallel.
Hidden transitions
Not every transition comes with a new title. Hidden transitions are substantial changes in role and responsibility with no change of title, typically after rapid growth, restructuring or acquisitions. They are perilous because leaders often fail to notice them or give them the attention they need: the most dangerous transition can be the one you do not recognize is happening.
Other people's transitions
Even when you are not moving, others' moves land on you. About a quarter of managers in a typical Fortune 500 company change jobs each year, and each leader's transition materially affects the performance of roughly a dozen people (bosses, peers, reports, other stakeholders). Watkins suggests counting how many people near you are currently in their first 90 days; the number usually surprises.
The gap he sets out to fill: much has been written about leadership in general, but little about accelerating through transitions, so most leaders face these career crucibles with no preparation, reliable knowledge or tools.
Reaching the break-even point
New leaders begin as net consumers of value. As they learn and start to act, they create value, and from the break-even point onward they are (one hopes) net contributors.
- The benchmark. Asked to estimate how long a typical midlevel leader, promoted or hired from outside, needs to break even, 200+ CEOs and presidents averaged 6.2 months.
- Wide variation. Inherit a disaster (the classic burning platform) and you may add value from the day your appointment is announced; join a very successful organization from outside and it may take a year or more.
- The promise. The book offers a blueprint for compressing that time at any level; Watkins cites independent research showing reductions of up to 40% with rigorous use of its principles.
Avoiding transition traps
Most leaders learn transitions in the school of hard knocks, building personal approaches that work until, in a new setting, they suddenly do not, and the leader may not notice until too late. Watkins's remedy is a comprehensive framework that pools the experience of many leaders across many situations. The trap list comes from interviews with experienced leaders plus the Genesis/HBR/IMD survey.
- Sticking with what you know. You expect to succeed by doing what worked before, only more so, missing that the new role demands you stop some activities and embrace new competencies.
- Falling prey to the "action imperative." You feel you must act and try too hard, too early to stamp your mark; you are too busy to learn, decide badly and catalyze resistance.
- Setting unrealistic expectations. You fail to negotiate the mandate or set clear, achievable objectives, so you can perform well yet still miss what the boss and stakeholders expected.
- Attempting to do too much. You launch initiatives in every direction hoping some pay off; people get confused and no critical mass of resources gathers behind the key ones.
- Coming in with "the" answer. You arrive with your mind made up or jump to conclusions about "the" problems and solutions, alienating people who could have helped and wasting chances to build support for good solutions.
- Engaging in the wrong type of learning. You study the technical side and neglect the cultural and political dimensions, so you lack the insight, relationships and information conduits to see what is really happening.
- Neglecting horizontal relationships. You focus up to the boss and down to reports but not across to peers and other stakeholders, misjudging what success requires and missing early alliances.
Watkins asks readers to audit themselves: which traps have you fallen into before, which have you watched others fall into, and which threaten you in the new role.
Creating momentum
Each trap draws its victim into a vicious cycle. Learning the wrong things leads to bad early decisions, which damage credibility; people then trust your judgment less and share less, so learning gets harder still, and energy goes into compensating for early miscalculations while the spiral deepens.
Avoiding the downward loop is not enough; the aim is a virtuous cycle. Good initial decisions built on the right learning raise credibility, people trust your judgment, your learning speeds up, and you become able to make sound calls on tougher issues.
Leadership is ultimately about influence and leverage: you are one person and must mobilize the energy of many others. Done right, your vision, expertise and drive act as seed crystals around which momentum forms; done wrong, you get caught in negative feedback loops that may be impossible to escape.
The fundamental principles
Watkins's diagnosis of failure is interactional. The root cause always lies in a pernicious interaction between the role (its opportunities and pitfalls) and the individual (strengths and vulnerabilities).
- Not just the leader. Every failed leader he studied had significant past successes, so personal flaws alone do not explain derailment.
- Not just the situation. The situations facing derailed leaders were no tougher than those in which others succeeded brilliantly.
- The real cause. New leaders either misread the essential demands of the situation or lack the skill and flexibility to adapt to them.
- The remedy. Situations vary, but types of situation (start-ups, turnarounds and so on) share features and imperatives, and some principles (such as early wins) hold everywhere. Hence the governing rule: match your strategy to the situation.
The ten transition tasks
- Prepare yourself. Make a mental break from the old job and get ready to take charge; the biggest pitfall is assuming that what made you successful will keep doing so.
- Accelerate your learning. Climb the curve on markets, products, technologies, systems, structures, culture and politics; it feels like drinking from a fire hose, so decide systematically what to learn and how.
- Match strategy to situation. A start-up of a product, process, plant or business poses different challenges from a turnaround; clear diagnosis comes before the action plan.
- Secure early wins. In the first few weeks, find chances to build personal credibility; in the first 90 days, find ways to create value and improve results so you break even sooner.
- Negotiate success. No relationship matters more than the one with the boss: plan critical conversations on situation, expectations, working style, resources and personal development, and win agreement on a 90-day plan.
- Achieve alignment. The higher you go, the more you act as organizational architect: test the strategy, align structure to it, and build the processes and skills to deliver it.
- Build your team. Evaluate, align, mobilize and often restructure the inherited team; tough early personnel calls and putting the right people in the right roles are among the biggest success drivers.
- Create coalitions. Success depends on influencing people outside your line of control; identify whose support is essential, internal and external, and start lining them up at once.
- Keep your balance. Guard your equilibrium and judgment against isolation and lost perspective; the right advice-and-counsel network is indispensable.
- Accelerate everyone. Your transition puts reports, bosses and peers in transition too; speeding theirs helps your own performance, and systematic acceleration benefits the whole organization.
The introduction lists early wins before negotiating success, but the book's chapters run the other way (Chapter 4 Negotiate Success, Chapter 5 Secure Early Wins). Tasks 8 and 9 also become chapters titled Create Alliances and Manage Yourself. The content matches; only the sequence and labels drift.
The chapters that follow pair stories with guidelines and tools for each task, so the reader can diagnose the situation and assemble a tailored 90-day plan regardless of level or business situation.
Assessing transition risk
The first practical step is to diagnose which transitions you are going through, whether you are still interviewing or already in the role. Promotion and joining a new company are the most frequent shifts, but most moves stack several at once (a new company plus a new location; a promotion plus a first cross-functional role). Executive-program participants reported on average 2.2 major shifts in their latest move, and each added shift raises both the challenge and the risk of derailing.
The Transition Risk Assessment (Table I-1) makes this concrete: tick each shift that applies, rate how hard you find it from 1 (very easy) to 10 (very difficult), and sum the scores to get your Transition Risk Index. The index shows both the size of the overall challenge and which dimensions need most attention.
| Type of transition | Tick | Difficulty 1-10 |
|---|---|---|
| New industry or profession | ||
| Joining a new company | ||
| New unit or group, same company | ||
| Promoted to a higher level | ||
| Leading former peers (after promotion) | ||
| Moving to another function (e.g. sales to marketing) | ||
| First cross-functional leadership role | ||
| Moving geographically | ||
| Entering a new national or ethnic culture | ||
| Doing two jobs at once (finishing old, starting new) | ||
| Newly created role (not an existing one) | ||
| Organization already in major change | ||
| Transition Risk Index | Sum of scores |
The book says the index runs "up to 100", yet the table lists 12 shifts scored up to 10 each, so the true maximum is 120. The 6.2-month break-even figure is an average of CEO estimates, not a measurement, and the 40% reduction comes from research the book does not describe.
Mapping out your first 90 days
The transition begins the moment you learn you are being considered for the job; when it ends depends on the situation. Whatever the move, by roughly the three-month mark bosses, peers and reports expect you to be getting traction, so use 90 days as the planning horizon and accept that you operate in a compressed time frame.
- Use the lead time. Any gap between being considered and sitting in the chair is time to start educating yourself about the organization.
- Plan by milestones. Even a few hours of pre-entry planning pays off: decide what you want done by the end of day one, then week one, then the end of month one, month two and month three.
- Sketchy is fine. The plans will be rough, but the act of planning clears your head.
Hitting the ground running
Watkins pitches the book at every level, from first-time manager to CEO, on the grounds that the principles hold across levels: everyone must learn the organization fast, secure early wins and build coalitions. He asks for active reading, noting where each point applies and how it should be customized to your case. Each chapter closes with an acceleration checklist, usable both to prepare for interviews and to speed the transition once in the role, and a companion First 90 Days App (Apple and Android) adds day-by-day tips and tools.
- What will it take for you to reach break-even more quickly?
- Which traps might you hit, and how will you avoid them?
- What can you do to create virtuous cycles and build momentum?
- Which transition types are you experiencing, which are hardest, and why?
- What are the key elements and milestones of your 90-day plan?
Prepare Yourself
The commonest mistake of a new leader is believing you will succeed by doing what you did before, only more so. Preparing yourself means letting go of the old job and embracing the imperatives of the new one, before and as you step in, starting with a clear view of which kind of transition you are making. Doing what you know can look like it works for a while: being efficient feels like being effective until the walls come down.
The trap of the familiar
Julia Gould had spent eight years in marketing at a leading consumer electronics firm, earning early promotions and a high-potential, fast-track designation. She was made launch manager for one of the company's hottest products, coordinating a cross-functional team from marketing, sales, R&D and manufacturing to move it from R&D into production, ramp up fast and streamline market entry. Her marketing success rested on extraordinary attention to detail, a high need for control and a habit of making the calls. The team at first said nothing; then two key members challenged her knowledge and authority. Stung, she retreated into the marketing piece of the launch, micromanaged that group and alienated it too. Within six weeks she was back in marketing and someone else ran the team.
Watkins's reading: Julia never made the leap from strong functional performer to cross-functional project leader. Her strengths became liabilities in a role that required her to lead without direct authority or superior expertise, and doing what she knew made her feel in control while producing the opposite.
- The destructive logic. "They hired me for my skills, so they must want more of the same." Doing what you know (and avoiding what you do not) can appear to work for a while, so the leader lives in denial, mistaking efficiency for effectiveness until collapse.
- What preparation means. At the broadest level, letting go of the past and embracing the new situation's imperatives to get a running start. Promising managers often fail precisely because they skipped this change of perspective.
- Where to start. Identify the types of transition you face. The chapter takes the two most frequent: promotion and onboarding into a new company.
Getting promoted
A promotion rewards years of persuading influential people that you can work at the next level, but it also starts a new journey: working out what excellence looks like in the role, how to beat the expectations of those who promoted you, and how to position yourself for more. Every promotion carries the same five core challenges (the book's Figure 1-1 pairs each with a strategy).
Balance breadth and depth
Your horizon widens with each step, so you must build and hold a high-level perspective; Julia needed to look at the whole launch, not her function. The harder skill is judging when to keep the wide view and when to drill down. What used to be your 50,000-foot view may now be the view from 5,000 or even 500 feet.
Rethink what you delegate
Issues grow more complex and ambiguous at each level. The mechanics of good delegation stay constant: competent, trusted people; goals and metrics to track progress; higher goals translated into specific responsibilities for each report; reinforcement through process. What changes is the unit of delegation.
- 5 people: specific tasks, such as drafting marketing material or selling to one customer.
- 50 people: projects and processes.
- 500 people: responsibility for products or platforms.
- 5,000 people: reports may run entire businesses.
Influence differently
Conventional wisdom says it gets easier to get things done as you rise; Watkins says not necessarily. Paradoxically, positional authority often matters less after a promotion, and decisions become more political: less authority, more influence. He calls this neither good nor bad, simply inevitable, for two reasons.
- Ambiguity rises. Issues become complex enough that data and analysis alone rarely yield the "right" answer, so decisions are shaped by others' expert judgment, who trusts whom and networks of mutual support.
- Stronger players. Peers at higher levels are more capable and have bigger egos (they were promoted for the same drive you were), so the game gets more bruising and politically charged. Building and sustaining alliances becomes essential.
Communicate more formally
Moving up brings a broader view and more latitude, but puts you farther from the front line and more exposed to filtered information.
- Inbound channels. Keep direct, regular contact with select customers or groups of frontline employees, without undermining the chain of command.
- Outbound channels. Broadcast strategic intent and vision through town-hall-style meetings and electronic messages to the widest audience, instead of one-to-one or small-group sessions.
- Reports as carriers. Your direct reports should do more to spread the vision and critical information, which is a criterion when you evaluate the inherited team.
Exhibit the right presence
Citing Shakespeare ("all the world's a stage"), Watkins notes that promotion brings far more attention and scrutiny: you become the lead actor in a public play, with fewer private moments and constant pressure to show the right leadership presence. Settle early what a leader at your new level looks like and how he acts, what personal leadership brand you want, and how you will make it your own.
| Core promotion challenge | What changes | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Balance breadth and depth | Horizon widens; old high view is now low | Hold the wide view; choose deliberately when to drill down |
| Rethink delegation | Issues more complex and ambiguous | Delegate bigger units: tasks, then projects, products, businesses |
| Influence differently | Authority counts less; peers abler, egos bigger | Build alliances, trust and expert credibility |
| Communicate more formally | Farther from the front line; filtered information | Open direct channels in; broadcast intent out; use reports |
| Exhibit the right presence | More scrutiny, fewer private moments | Define what leadership looks like here and your personal brand |
Onboarding into a new company
Promoted leaders usually know the organization but must develop new behaviors and competencies. Outside hires face the reverse: they are often making lateral moves, hired to do what they did well elsewhere, and their trouble lies in adjusting to new political structures and cultures.
David Jones, an engineer, rose through R&D to become VP of new-product development in the electrical distribution division of a respected global manufacturer: deep leadership bench, command-and-control style but people spoke their minds, and a pioneer of TQM, lean manufacturing and six sigma. He joined Energix, a fast-growing wind energy company that had gone from 2 to 200 to 2,000 people, as head of R&D. During recruiting the CEO told him repeatedly that the firm, built on focus, teamwork and mutual trust, needed to become more disciplined and systematic to sustain its size. David found a company run by the seat of its pants: weak operational and financial processes, dozens of projects with vague specs and milestones, and the next-generation large turbine nearly a year late and far over budget. Meanwhile the senior management committee ran elliptical, consensus-driven meetings; pressing issues were not discussed openly, decisions seemed to happen in back channels, and pushing for commitments drew silence or lists of reasons why not. Two months in, impatient, he convened the heads of R&D, operations and finance and proposed teams to map and redesign processes, staffed with strong people from operations and finance plus external consultants. They listened, would not commit, and told him to take it to the full committee. Two then went to the CEO: one called him "a bull in a china shop", the other warned of upsetting delicate balances before the turbine launch, and both doubted that letting him run things was wise. His relationship with the CEO chilled noticeably.
Watkins's image: joining a company is an organ transplant, and you are the new organ. Adapt carelessly and the organizational immune system attacks and rejects you. David read the CEO's mandate as more latitude than he had, and moved on process before he had read the culture and politics.
Why outside hires struggle
Senior HR practitioners overwhelmingly rate coming in from outside as "much harder" than internal promotion, and blame outsiders' high failure rate on four barriers.
- Informal networks. Outsiders do not know the unofficial channels of information and communication.
- Culture. Not knowing the corporate culture, they find it harder to find their way.
- Credibility. Being unknown, they lack the standing of someone promoted from within.
- Insider tradition. A long habit of hiring from within makes some organizations reluctant to accept outsiders.
The four pillars of onboarding
To overcome the barriers, Watkins has outside hires work on four pillars, each with a checklist (Table 1-1).
Pillar 1: business orientation
The most straightforward pillar: the sooner you understand the business environment, the sooner you contribute. Learn the company as a whole, not only your piece, and go beyond financials, products and strategy: learn the brands and products you will support even outside sales and marketing, plus the operating model, planning and performance evaluation systems and talent management systems, which strongly shape how you can have impact.
- Public data early. Get financials, products, strategy and brand information as soon as possible.
- Wider sources. Find websites, analyst reports and similar material.
- Briefing book. If your level warrants it, ask the business to assemble one.
- Site tours. Where possible, tour key facilities before the formal start date.
Pillar 2: stakeholder connection
Build the right relationship wiring fast. New leaders, like David, naturally but dangerously invest in vertical ties (boss above, team below) and neglect lateral ties with peers and constituencies outside their unit. The rule: do not meet the neighbors for the first time in the middle of the night when your house is on fire.
- Boss introductions. Ask the boss to name and introduce the key people to connect with early.
- Pre-start meetings. Meet some stakeholders before the formal start if possible.
- Calendar control. Take charge of your calendar and book early meetings with key stakeholders.
- Lateral focus. Prioritize peers and others, not only boss and reports.
Pillar 3: expectations alignment
Check and recheck expectations after you join. Pre-hire understandings about mandate, support and resources may prove inaccurate, not through deception but because recruiting is like romance and employment is like marriage. New hires easily believe they have more latitude for change than they do, and acting on that triggers needless resistance or derailment. Also factor in the expectations of other constituencies (for example corporate finance if you sit in a business unit), especially if they influence how you are evaluated and rewarded.
- Planning systems. Understand and engage in business planning and performance management.
- Week-one talk. However sure you are, hold an expectations conversation with your boss in the first week.
- Working styles. Discuss working styles explicitly with bosses and direct reports as early as possible.
Pillar 4: cultural adaptation
The most daunting pillar; for David it meant moving from an authority-driven, process-focused culture to a consensus-oriented, relational one. Understand the overall culture and how it shows up in your unit (subcultures differ), approaching it as an anthropologist studying a newly discovered civilization.
- Ask while recruiting. Put questions about culture during the hiring process.
- Boss and HR. Schedule culture conversations with your new boss and HR and check back regularly.
- Interpreters. Find insiders who can act as culture interpreters.
- Day-30 check. After thirty days, run an informal 360-degree check-in with boss and peers on how your adaptation is going.
Reading a culture
Watkins defines culture as a set of consistent patterns of communicating, thinking and acting, grounded in shared assumptions and values, and layers it as a pyramid (Figure 1-2).
- Symbols and language (top). The layer most visible to outsiders: logos, dress, how office space is laid out and allocated, and a shared vocabulary of acronyms for units, products, processes and projects. Fitting in here is easy: learn to speak like the locals, and if people at your level do not wear plaid, neither should you, unless you mean to signal culture change.
- Norms (middle). Less visible accepted patterns: how people win support for initiatives, how they earn recognition, whether meetings are forums for discussion or rubber stamps. These surface only after time inside.
- Assumptions (base). Shared beliefs about how the world works that infuse every other layer. Example: how power is distributed; whether executives get decision rights from day one by position, whether authority grows with seniority, or whether the place runs on consensus, where persuasion is the key skill. Often invisible and slow to emerge.
- Influence. Is support for critical initiatives won through a patron on the senior team, or through affirmation from peers and reports that the idea is good?
- Meetings. Are they full of dialogue on hard issues, or forums for publicly ratifying agreements reached in private?
- Execution. To get things done, does deep process knowledge matter more, or knowing the right people?
- Conflict. Can people discuss hard issues without fear of retribution, or do they avoid conflict, or worse, push it down to lower levels where it does damage?
- Recognition. Does the firm promote stars who drive initiatives visibly and vocally, or team players who lead authoritatively but quietly and collaboratively?
- Ends versus means. Are there limits on how results are achieved, and is there a well-defined, well-communicated set of values reinforced by positive and negative incentives?
With a firmer grasp of the business, political networks, expectations and culture, you can strike the right balance between adapting to the organization and working to alter it. The same assessment method, suitably modified, applies to "inboarding" (moving between units of one company) and to international moves, since both bring new work cultures.
Principles for preparing yourself
With the transition type understood, Watkins sets out seven principles for getting ready to make the leap.
- Establish a clear breakpoint. Make the transition mentally even when the jobs overlap.
- Assess your vulnerabilities. Map your problem preferences and blind spots.
- Watch out for your strengths. Know which hammer you over-use.
- Relearn how to learn. Manage the fear of incompetence a steep curve revives.
- Rework your network. Shift from technical to political and personal advisers.
- Watch out for people who hold you back. Contain the old boss and former peers.
- Get some help. Use formal programs, HR, the boss and a cultural interpreter.
1. Establish a clear breakpoint
Moves usually happen in a blur: a couple of weeks' notice if you are lucky, more often days, with a scramble to finish the old job while grasping the new, and sometimes pressure to do both jobs until your old seat is filled. Since the handover will not be clean, discipline yourself to switch mentally.
- Pick a moment. Use a specific time, such as a weekend, to imagine yourself making the shift.
- Let go deliberately. Consciously release the old job and embrace the new; think hard about how the two differ and how you must think and act differently.
- Mark it. Celebrate the move, even informally, with family and friends.
- Consult. Touch base with informal advisers and ask for counsel. The bottom line: do whatever gets you into the transition state of mind.
2. Assess your vulnerabilities
You were chosen because people think you can succeed, but the Gould and Jones cases show the danger of relying on what worked before. One way to find weak points is to map your problem preferences: the problems you naturally gravitate to. Preferences steer you toward jobs where you do more of what you like, you get better at it, feel competent, and the cycle reinforces itself; like exercising only your right arm, the strong side grows and the weak side atrophies, leaving you exposed when the role demands ambidexterity.
The problem-preferences diagnostic
Score your intrinsic interest (not skill, not experience) in each cell from 1 (very little) to 10 (a great deal), rating each cell separately rather than comparatively, and complete the grid before reading on (Table 1-2). Then transfer the scores to Table 1-3 and sum the three columns and five rows.
| Function | Technical | Political | Cultural |
|---|---|---|---|
| Human resources | Design of appraisal and reward systems | Employee morale | Equity, fairness |
| Finance | Management of financial risk | Budgeting | Cost-consciousness |
| Marketing | Product positioning | Relationships with customers | Organizational customer focus |
| Operations | Product or service quality | Relationships with distributors and suppliers | Continuous improvement |
| R&D | Project management systems | Relations among R&D, marketing, operations | Cross-functional cooperation |
- Column totals. Show your preference for technical problems (strategies, markets, technologies, processes), political problems (power and politics) or cultural problems (values, norms, guiding assumptions). A noticeably low column is a potential blind spot; high technical with low political or cultural scores means a risk of overlooking the human side.
- Row totals. Show functional preferences; a low row means you prefer not to grapple with that function, again a potential blind spot.
- Questions to answer. Where do you most enjoy solving problems, where are you least eager, and what does that imply for vulnerabilities in the new role?
- Self-discipline. Deliberately spend time on critical activities you do not enjoy and that do not come naturally.
- Team building. Seek out people sharp in your weak areas to act as a backstop and to learn from.
- Advice and counsel. Use a network of advisers to push you beyond your comfort zone.
3. Watch out for your strengths
Strengths create vulnerability as surely as weaknesses. Watkins paraphrases Abraham Maslow: to a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The qualities that made you successful can become weaknesses in the new role, so be clear about what your hammer is. Julia's attention to detail, combined with a high need for control, turned into micromanagement in the areas she knew best and demoralized people who wanted to contribute without intrusive oversight.
4. Relearn how to learn
It may be years since you faced a steep curve; "suddenly I realized how much I didn't know" is a common lament. Whether you move from function to project leadership (Julia) or into a company with no network or cultural map (David), you must learn a lot, fast.
- The emotional undertow. Starting over can revive long-buried feelings of incompetence or vulnerability, especially after early setbacks or a first failure in years.
- The unconscious retreat. You drift toward areas where you feel competent and people who reinforce your self-worth.
- The vicious cycle. Fear of incompetence breeds denial and defensiveness. Bluntly, you either learn and adapt or become brittle and fail, dramatically like Julia or by death by a thousand cuts.
- The reassurance. Waking in a cold sweat is normal; most new leaders feel it, and embracing the need to learn overcomes it.
5. Rework your network
The advice you need changes as you rise, so restructure your advice-and-counsel network on purpose.
| Adviser type | Value | When it matters most |
|---|---|---|
| Technical advisers | Expertise in marketing, finance and the like to get work done | Early career |
| Political counselors | Read the organization's politics | Higher levels, above all before implementing change |
| Personal advisers | Keep perspective and equilibrium under stress | Higher levels and transitions |
Reworking the network is uncomfortable because current advisers may be close friends or familiar technical experts, but you must see where to build networks to cover blind spots and gaps in expertise or experience.
6. Watch out for people who want to hold you back
Some people, consciously or not, may not want you to advance.
- The old boss. As soon as the move date is known, negotiate what you will do to close things out: specific issues and projects, to what extent, and what will not be done. Take notes, circulate them so everyone shares one record, and hold the boss and yourself to it. Be realistic; there is always more to do, and pre-entry learning and planning time is precious.
- Former peers. Colleagues who now report to you may want the relationship unchanged, but it must change, and the sooner you and they accept that, the better; others will watch for favoritism.
- Disappointed rivals. Some former peers may be losing competitors and may try to undermine you. Expect early tests of authority and meet them firmly and fairly; fail to set limits early and you will regret it. If someone will never accept your new role, move them out of the organization as quickly as possible.
7. Get some help
Use what the organization offers, from high-potential development programs to formal onboarding (programs or coaching). Without formal support, still work with HR and your new boss on a 90-day transition plan.
- If promoted. Ask whether competency models describe the new role's requirements, but do not assume they tell the whole story.
- If hired from outside. Ask for help identifying and connecting with key stakeholders and finding a cultural interpreter, often a natural historian who can explain how the organization evolved.
Closing the loop
Some barriers to preparation lie inside you. Watkins asks you to name the personal vulnerabilities your problem preferences reveal and how you will compensate, then the external forces (such as commitments to the current boss) that could hold you back and how you will avoid them.
Preparation is a journey, not a destination: you must keep checking that you are tackling the real challenges of the job and not sliding back into habits that are both comfortable and dangerous. Watkins advises rereading the chapter periodically and asking whether you are doing all you can.
- If promoted, what does the move mean for breadth versus depth, delegation, influence, communication and presence?
- If joining a new firm, how will you handle orientation, stakeholders, expectations and culture, and what is the right balance between adapting and altering?
- What has made you successful so far? Can those strengths alone carry you, and which critical new skills do you need?
- Which critical parts of the job do you prefer to avoid, why, and how will you cover those blind spots?
- How will you make the mental leap, whose advice will you seek, and what other activities might help?
Accelerate Your Learning
The first transition task is to climb the learning curve fast, because effective learning closes your window of vulnerability, exposes problems before they erupt and lets you make good decisions sooner. Watkins treats learning as an investment process: spend scarce time and energy where they yield actionable insights, guided by an explicit learning agenda and learning plan. When a new leader derails, failure to learn effectively is almost always a factor.
Chris Hadley joined Dura Corporation, a medium-sized, world-class software services firm, straight from engineering school and rose fast in quality assurance, in a setting of state-of-the-art technology and motivated staff. When his boss left to become VP of operations at struggling developer Phoenix Systems, Chris followed as head of product quality and testing, a lateral move he took to lead a turnaround. Having visited beforehand, he knew the unit fell far short. Soon after arriving he declared its processes outdated and vowed to rebuild it "the Dura way"; operations consultants called the technology "antiquated" and the workforce "inadequate" and recommended reorganization plus heavy investment in technology and training. Chris shared the report with his reports and reorganized the testing teams Dura-style. One month later productivity plummeted, threatening a key product launch; urging people to "get the problems fixed, and fast" did nothing and morale slumped. After two months his boss said he had alienated just about everyone, asked whether he knew the unit had requested investment for years and what it had achieved with what it had, and told him to stop doing and start listening. Chris then held candid talks with managers, supervisors and worker groups, learned how creatively they had coped with underinvestment, heard what was failing in his structure, and at an all-hands meeting announced structural adjustments and a commitment to upgrade technology and training before any other change.
Watkins's verdict: like many new leaders, Chris failed to learn about the organization, made bad decisions and undercut his credibility. The task is to work out what you need to know and learn it as rapidly as possible; the faster you climb, the earlier you make sound business decisions and the sooner you can build your 90-day plan on solid foundations.
Overcoming learning roadblocks
Watkins identifies five obstacles that keep new leaders from learning well.
- Drinking from a fire hose. The torrent of information makes it hard to know where to focus and easy to miss important signals. Leaders also over-weight the technical side (products, customers, technologies, strategies) and shortchange culture and politics.
- No training, no plan. Surprisingly few managers have been trained to diagnose organizations systematically; those who have are almost always HR professionals or former management consultants. Fewer still plan to learn, meaning work out in advance the key questions and how best to answer them, and fewer still write an explicit learning plan.
- Ignoring history. Chris never asked the baseline question, "How did we get to this point?" Without it you may tear down structures or processes without knowing why they exist; history may show they must change, or that there is good reason to leave them alone.
- The action imperative. A near-compulsive need to act. Effective leaders balance doing (making things happen) with being (observing and reflecting), which is hard during a transition. The pressure to do comes mostly from inside the leader, from low confidence and a need to prove oneself; yet simply showing a genuine desire to learn raises credibility and influence.
- Coming in with "the" answer. Leaders raised where things were done "the right way" assume it transfers; it may fail miserably elsewhere and alienates people, as Chris found importing Dura's methods.
Being too busy or too anxious to learn starts a death spiral: poor early decisions undermine credibility, alienate potential supporters and make people less willing to share information, which breeds more bad decisions. Acting decisively at entry is sometimes right (Chapter 3 shows when), but it risks leaving you blind to the real problems.
Outside hires in particular must learn and adapt to the culture or suffer organ rejection syndrome, triggering the organization's immune system as a foreign body. Even in a turnaround, where you were brought in precisely to import new ways, you must learn the culture and politics to socialize and customize your approach.
Managing learning as an investment process
Treat your scarce time and energy as resources to be invested, and the return comes as actionable insights: knowledge that lets you make better decisions earlier and so reach personal break-even faster.
Three insights Chris missed would have changed his course:
- Systematic underinvestment. Phoenix's senior management had refused investment for years despite energetic lobbying by local managers.
- Remarkable results. Given its resources, the operation had achieved strong quality and productivity.
- Justified pride. Supervisors and workers were rightly proud of what they had done.
Maximizing the return requires learning that is both effective and efficient; Chris's was neither.
| Dimension | Meaning | How |
|---|---|---|
| Effective learning | Knowing what you need to learn, so effort is focused | Define a learning agenda early; revisit and refine it |
| Efficient learning | Getting maximum insight for least time | Pick the best sources; use structured methods |
Defining your learning agenda
Had Chris started over, Watkins would have him run a systematic learning process: a virtuous cycle of gathering, analyzing, hypothesizing and testing.
- What it is. The learning agenda crystallizes your priorities: a focused set of questions to guide inquiry, hypotheses to explore and test, or both. Draft it before formal entry if you can.
- How it evolves. Learning is iterative: the agenda starts mostly as questions, then you form hypotheses about what is going on and why, and the work shifts to fleshing out and testing them.
- How to seed it. Generate questions about the past, present and future: why are things done this way, are the original reasons (say, a competitive threat) still valid, and are conditions changing so something different is needed?
- Performance. How has the organization performed, and how do its people think it performed? How were goals set, and were they too timid or too ambitious? Were benchmarks internal or external? Which measures were used, and what behaviors did they encourage or discourage? What happened when goals were missed?
- Root causes. If performance was good, why? What were the relative contributions of strategy, structure, systems, talent, culture and politics? If poor, do the main issues lie in strategy, structure, technical capabilities, culture or politics?
- History of change. What change efforts have been tried, and what happened? Who has been instrumental in shaping the organization?
- Vision and strategy. What is the stated vision and strategy? Is the organization really pursuing it, and if not, why not; if so, will it get the organization where it needs to go?
- People. Who is capable and who is not? Who is trustworthy and who is not? Who has influence, and why?
- Processes. What are the key processes, and do they perform acceptably on quality, reliability and timeliness? If not, why not?
- Land mines. What lurking surprises could detonate and push you off track? What damaging cultural or political missteps must you avoid?
- Early wins. Where (people, relationships, processes or products) can you score early wins?
- Future challenges and opportunities. Where will the stiffest challenges come in the next year, and what can be done now? What are the most promising unexploited opportunities, and what would it take to realize them?
- Future barriers and resources. Are the most formidable barriers to change technical, cultural or political? Which islands of excellence or other strong resources can you leverage? What new capabilities must be developed or acquired?
- Future culture. Which elements should be preserved, and which must change?
Four domains of learning
Balance the agenda across four domains.
- Technical. Unfamiliar markets, technologies, processes and systems.
- Interpersonal. Getting to know your boss, peers and direct reports.
- Cultural. Norms, values and behavioral expectations, almost certainly different from your last organization, even when moving between units of one company.
- Political. Understanding the shadow organization: the informal processes and alliances that sit in the shadow of the formal structure and strongly shape how work gets done. It is both important and hard to see for newcomers, and its land mines can wreck your efforts to build a base of support.
Identifying the best sources of insight
Hard data (financial and operating reports, strategic and functional plans, employee surveys, press and industry reports) are necessary but not enough. Effective decisions also need soft information on strategy, capabilities, culture and politics, which you get only by talking to people with critical knowledge. Listening to sources inside and outside the organization, and at the top and the front line, lets you translate between external realities and internal perceptions.
| Source | Where | What it teaches |
|---|---|---|
| Customers | External | How external or internal customers see you; how best customers rate products and service; how you rank against competitors |
| Suppliers | External | You in your role as a customer; strengths and flaws in your quality and customer-satisfaction systems |
| Distributors | External | Logistics, customer service, competitors' practices and offerings; distributors' own capabilities |
| Outside analysts | External | Fairly objective view of your and rivals' strategy and capabilities; market demands; industry health |
| Frontline R&D and operations | Internal | Basic processes, links to external constituencies, how the rest of the firm helps or hinders the front line |
| Sales and procurement | Internal | With customer service and purchasing staff: current trends and imminent market changes |
| Staff (finance, legal, HR) | Internal | Specialized views of internal workings |
| Integrators | Internal | Project, plant and product managers: how functions mesh, the true political hierarchy, where conflicts lie |
| Natural historians | Internal | Old-timers who absorb history: company mythology and the roots of culture and politics |
Newcomers can start before arrival: beyond the recruiting process, mine online resources (background analysis, biographies of key people, the organization's own website) and, where possible, contact current or former employees for a read on history and culture.
Adopting structured learning methods
Most leaders simply dive in and start talking. That yields soft information but is inefficient: time-consuming, hard to weigh, skewed by the first or last few people you meet, and exposed to people who seek you out precisely to influence you.
Designing the conversations
- Group meeting first? A mistake: some people will not speak openly in a public forum.
- One-on-ones. Better, but you must meet people in some order, and later interviewees will quiz earlier ones about what you are after, narrowing the range of views and letting others interpret your messages in ways you did not intend.
- Use one script. Open with brief remarks about yourself and your approach, ask about the person (background, family, interests), then a standard set of business questions. Identical questions make answers comparable: line them up to see what is consistent and inconsistent, and who is more or less open.
- Take a horizontal slice. Interviewing your direct reports first is a horizontal slice: people at the same level across functions.
- What are the biggest challenges the organization faces now or will face soon?
- Why is it facing (or going to face) them?
- What are the most promising unexploited opportunities for growth?
- What would need to happen to exploit those opportunities?
- If you were me, what would you focus attention on?
With careful listening and follow-up, the five questions surface prevalent and divergent views, so you are not swayed by the first, most forceful or most articulate speaker. The manner of answering is data too: who answers directly and who is evasive or tangential; who takes responsibility and who points fingers; who sees the whole business and who is stuck in a silo.
- Close the loop with the group. Distil the one-on-ones into observations, questions and insights, then convene the reports, feed back your impressions and invite discussion. You learn substance and team dynamics, and show how quickly you have found the key issues.
- Stay flexible. An outside consultant or internal facilitator can run the diagnosis instead. Even modest structure (a script plus a sequence: individual meetings, analysis, group meeting) dramatically speeds insight.
- Tailor the questions. For salespeople, for example: what do customers get from competitors that they do not get from us?
GE developed a structured method for managers entering significant roles. Each is assigned a transition facilitator, who first explains the process to the leader, then meets the new direct reports and asks what they would like to know about the leader, and what they want the leader to know about them and about the business situation. The main findings go back to the leader without attribution, and the process ends with a facilitated meeting between leader and reports.
Frameworks such as SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) also structure diagnosis and double as tools for communicating with bosses, peers and reports to build a shared view of the situation. Effective leaders combine methods to suit their level and situation.
| Method (Table 2-1) | Uses | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Climate and satisfaction surveys | Culture and morale; many firms run them regularly and keep a database; if not, consider starting one | Managers at all levels, if data are available for your unit; value depends on granularity, instrument quality and rigorous analysis |
| Structured interviews with slices | Shared and divergent views of problems and opportunities: horizontal slice (same level, different departments) or vertical slice (down through levels); same questions for all | Leaders of groups from different functions; also lower levels when the unit has significant problems |
| Focus groups | Probe issues worrying key groups (e.g. frontline morale); watch how people interact and who shows leadership; discussion deepens insight | Managers of large groups doing similar work (sales or plant managers); senior leaders wanting quick reads |
| Analysis of critical past decisions | How decisions get made; where power lies | Higher-level managers |
| Process analysis | Cross-functional group maps and evaluates a key process | Managers of units with mixed functions |
| Plant and market tours | Informal contact with production staff and customers | Business-unit managers |
| Pilot projects | How the organization responds to change | Managers at all levels |
The book's Table 2-1 appears in the source only as an image showing its first three rows. The last four methods (past decisions, process analysis, tours, pilot projects) were reconstructed from knowledge of the printed book, in condensed form.
Creating a learning plan
The agenda defines what you want to learn; the learning plan defines how, turning goals into concrete actions (promising sources, systematic methods). It is a core part of the 90-day plan, and learning should dominate your first 30 days unless a disaster is in progress. Its heart is the cycle of collect, analyze and distill, hypothesize, test, deepening understanding with each pass. Chapter 3 revisits what to learn, and when, by type of situation.
- Before entry: basics. Find out what you can about strategy, structure, performance and people.
- Before entry: external assessments. Learn how knowledgeable, fairly unbiased outsiders view the organization; at lower levels, talk to the people who deal with your group as internal suppliers or customers.
- Before entry: outside observers. Ask former employees, recent retirees and business partners open-ended questions on history, politics and culture; talk to your predecessor if possible.
- Before entry: new boss. Talk to the person you will report to.
- Before entry: impressions. Write down first impressions and, in time, hypotheses.
- Before entry: questions. Compile an initial set of questions for structured inquiry after arrival.
- Soon after entry: data review. Study detailed operating plans, performance data and personnel data.
- Soon after entry: one-on-ones. Ask your reports the prepared questions; learn convergent and divergent views and the people themselves.
- Soon after entry: key interfaces. Hear how salespeople, purchasing agents and customer service see dealings with outside constituencies, and problems others miss.
- Soon after entry: top-down alignment test. Ask the top about vision and strategy, then see how far down those beliefs penetrate; it shows how well your predecessor drove strategy down.
- Soon after entry: bottom-up awareness test. Ask frontline people about challenges and opportunities and work upward; it shows how well the top checks the pulse.
- Soon after entry: update and report. Revise questions and hypotheses; meet your boss to discuss findings.
- Month one: team feedback. Gather the team, present preliminary findings, invite confirmation and challenge, and observe group dynamics.
- Month one: outside-in interfaces. Learn how suppliers, customers, distributors and others perceive your strengths and weaknesses.
- Month one: process maps. Convene the responsible groups to map and evaluate a couple of key processes for productivity, quality and reliability.
- Month one: integrators and historians. Learn how functional interfaces work and what problems integrators see; tap natural historians for history, culture and politics; both are potential allies and influencers.
- Month one: update and report. Revise hypotheses and meet your boss again.
Getting help
Responsibility for learning rests with you, but bosses, peers and even reports can make it far less painful, provided you explain what you are trying to do and how they can help. The precondition is willingness to ask, rather than feeling you must know everything and be in full control from the first day.
- Onboarding and inboarding. Support matters most when you join a new organization, whether from outside or by moving between units, which Watkins rates about 70% as difficult as an outside hire. Either way you face a different culture and lack your old political wiring.
- Ask for the system. A good onboarding system should help you read the culture and connect with stakeholders quickly; if there is none, ask for that help.
Priorities will shift as you dig deeper and begin dealing with your boss, early wins and coalitions, so Watkins advises returning to the learning agenda periodically and drafting new plans.
- How effective are you at learning new organizations? Do you fall into the action imperative or arrive with "the" answer, and how will you avoid it?
- What is your learning agenda: which questions will guide early inquiry, and what hypotheses have you formed and how will you test them?
- Given those questions, who will provide the most useful insights?
- Which structured methods will raise your return on time and energy?
- What support is available, and how will you best use it?
- From these answers, start drafting your learning plan.
Match Strategy to Situation
Before acting, every new leader must answer two questions: what kind of change am I being called on to lead, and what kind of change leader am I? Watkins's STARS model sorts business situations into five types (start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, sustaining success), each with predictable challenges, opportunities, moods and leadership demands. A playbook that wins a turnaround can wreck a realignment, so diagnose the situation before you choose the strategy.
Karl Lewin, a hard-driving, German-born executive at multinational consumer products firm Global Foods, had just turned around European manufacturing, broken by over-reliance on growth through acquisition and a narrow country-level focus. Within a year he centralized key manufacturing support functions, closed four of the least efficient plants and shifted much production to Eastern Europe; by 18 months efficiency had improved dramatically. The reward was a much bigger job: EVP of supply chain for core North American operations in New Jersey, combining manufacturing with strategic sourcing, outbound logistics and customer service. There was no crisis, which Karl saw as the essence of the problem. Benchmarks put manufacturing slightly below average on efficiency and in the bottom third on on-time delivery satisfaction: mediocre, not a turnaround. His own assessment found worse brewing underneath: a culture addicted to firefighting that prized reacting over preventing, decisions driven by gut feel with too little objective data, and widespread, unfounded optimism. He judged major failures only a matter of time.
Careful diagnosis of the situation clarifies the challenges, opportunities and resources available. The first question (what change am I leading) tells you how to match strategy to situation; the second (what kind of leader am I) tells you how to adjust your style.
Using the STARS model
STARS names five common situations: launching a venture (start-up), getting one back on track (turnaround), coping with rapid expansion (accelerated growth), reenergizing a once-leading business now facing serious problems (realignment), and inheriting a well-performing organization to take it to the next level (sustaining success). The end goal is always the same, a successful and growing business, but the route differs predictably (Table 3-1).
| Start-up | Turnaround | Accelerated growth | Realignment | Sustaining success | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Task | Assemble people, financing, technology to launch a business or initiative | Save a business widely seen as in serious trouble | Manage a rapidly expanding business | Reenergize a once-successful organization now facing problems | Preserve a successful organization's strength and take it to the next level |
| Challenges | Build strategy, structures, systems from scratch; recruit and weld a high-performing team; make do with limited resources | Reenergize demoralized staff and stakeholders; decide well under time pressure; go deep enough with painful cuts and personnel choices | Install structures and systems that permit scaling; integrate many new employees | Convince people change is necessary; carefully restructure the top team and refocus the organization | Live in the shadow of the former leader and the team they built; play good defense before launching too many initiatives; find how to reach the next level |
| Opportunities | Do things right from the start; people energized by possibility; no rigid preconceptions | Everyone sees the need for change; affected constituencies offer outside support; a little success goes a long way | Growth motivates people; they will stretch themselves and those who work for them | Significant pockets of strength; people want to keep seeing themselves as successful | A strong team may already exist; people motivated to continue success; a foundation such as a product pipeline may be in place |
The five situations in detail
- Start-up. You assemble the capabilities (people, funding, technology) for a new business, product, project or relationship, and can shape it from the outset by recruiting the team, defining the agenda and building the architecture. People are more excited and hopeful than in a failing unit but far less focused, because the vision, strategy, structures and systems that channel energy do not yet exist.
- Turnaround. A unit recognized to be in deep trouble: the classic burning platform. Most people accept that big change is needed, though they may be in disarray and disagree on what. It is ready-fire-aim: make tough calls on less than full knowledge and adjust. The leader must cut fast to a defensible core, then rebuild; success leaves a sustaining-success business, failure often means shutdown or divestiture.
- Accelerated growth. The organization has hit its stride and the hard work of scaling has begun: putting in structures, processes and systems for rapid expansion, and hiring and onboarding many people while keeping them inside the culture that made it successful. The risk is expanding too much, too fast.
- Realignment. Through complacency, eroding capabilities or external challenges, successful businesses drift toward trouble. The clouds are gathering but the storm has not broken, and many people do not see the clouds. The biggest challenge is creating urgency against denial; the good news is that there are usually islands of strength (products, customer relationships, processes, people). This was Karl's North America.
- Sustaining success. You must keep the business healthy and reach the next level, which emphatically does not mean resting on laurels. Understand deeply why the business succeeds and position it for inevitable challenges; often the key is continuously starting up, accelerating and realigning parts of the business.
Start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth. Resource-intensive construction: little existing infrastructure or capacity, so you largely start fresh (or, in growth, build on a strong base). Turnarounds in particular are ready-fire-aim.
Realignment, sustaining success. You inherit real strengths and serious constraints on what you can do. You usually have time before major calls, which you need, because you must learn culture and politics and build coalitions: ready-aim-fire.
Transforming organizational psychology
Success depends heavily on shifting the prevailing mood in predictable ways.
- Start-up: excited confusion. Channel the energy productively, partly by deciding what not to do.
- Turnaround: near despair. Provide a concrete plan and confidence that it will work.
- Accelerated growth: undisciplined momentum. Help people see the need for more discipline and work within defined processes and systems.
- Realignment: denial. Pierce the veil of denial that stops people confronting the need to reinvent the business.
- Sustaining success: complacency. Invent the challenge: keep people motivated, fight complacency, find new directions for organizational and personal growth.
You cannot decide where to take an organization without knowing where it has been and how it got here. In a realignment like Karl's, the leader must understand what made the organization successful and why it drifted, so Watkins tells you to put on your historian's hat.
STARS at every level
The model applies regardless of level. A new CEO of a company in start-up mode, a first-line supervisor of a new production line, a brand manager launching a product, an R&D team leader on a new development project and an IT manager implementing enterprise software are all in start-ups; the other four situations likewise arise at every level, in firms large and small.
Diagnosing your STARS portfolio
Pure cases are rare. At a high level the job may fit one category, but drill down and you are almost always managing a portfolio of products, projects, processes, plants or people in mixed states: an incrementally growing business with one group launching a new-technology product line, or a turnaround company that owns a couple of high-performing, state-of-the-art plants.
- List elements. For each STARS situation, list which elements of your responsibilities (projects, processes, products, even whole businesses) fall into it. Not every category needs an entry; everything may be in turnaround, or you may have two or three types.
- Allocate effort. Estimate the percentage of effort each category deserves in the next 90 days, totalling 100%.
- Check your bias. Ask which situation you most prefer; if it also got the highest priority, make sure preference is not driving priority.
- Use the output. Decide how you will manage each piece differently, and use the grid as a common language with boss, peers and reports about what you will do and why.
| STARS situation | Elements in this situation | % of effort, next 90 days |
|---|---|---|
| Start-up | ||
| Turnaround | ||
| Accelerated growth | ||
| Realignment | ||
| Sustaining success | ||
| Total | 100% |
Leading change: turnaround versus realignment
There is no one-size-fits-all way to lead change. STARS let Karl see the difference between Europe (an urgent need for rapid, radical surgery) and North America (problems mounting with no crisis to drive action). Radical surgery in North America would likely have provoked active and passive resistance, all the more because, as an outsider, he could easily be isolated and undercut. He chose a more measured approach, applying the book's levers (learning, priorities, strategic intent, team, early wins, alliances) differently.
- Focused learning. In Europe he assessed the technical dimensions (strategy, competitors, products, markets, technologies) like a consultant. In North America cultural and political learning mattered more, because internal social dynamics usually cause successful firms to drift, and getting people to acknowledge the need for change is a political more than technical task; for a newcomer, that understanding is a condition of success and even survival.
- Priorities. Europe's strategy and structure blocked its goals, so he closed plants, shifted production, cut the workforce dramatically and centralized functions to reduce fragmentation and cost. North America had no capacity or productivity problem and was already centralized; the real problems lay in systems, skills and culture, so that is where he focused.
- Leadership team. In Europe he cleaned house and recruited most senior talent from outside. North America's team was strong, so he made a few high-payoff changes: stronger technical leaders in a couple of central manufacturing roles to support the systems changes, and the exit of one influential manager who, despite Karl's efforts, never grasped the need for change and whose inaction threatened his leadership. The departure sent a strong message; filling roles by promotion from within rallied the organization and showed he valued its strengths, not only its weaknesses.
- Early wins. In Europe, closing ailing plants and shifting production moved people out of despair, refocused on core strengths and cut unnecessary projects. In North America the key win was raising awareness: revamped manufacturing and customer-service metrics that exposed critical weaknesses, external benchmarks and hard-nosed assessments by respected consultants as impartial outside voices, together piercing the unfounded optimism.
| Change task (Table 3-3) | What it means | Turnarounds | Realignments |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Organize to learn | What you most need to learn, from whom, how best | Technical learning (strategy, markets, technologies); prepare to act quickly | Cultural and political learning; prepare to act deliberately |
| 2. Define strategic intent | Communicate a compelling vision and a clear strategy to reach it | Prune noncore businesses | Hone and leverage existing capabilities; stimulate innovation |
| 3. Establish A-item priorities | A few essential goals pursued relentlessly; what must be done by end of year one | Faster, bolder moves; focus on strategy and structure | Slower, more deliberate moves; focus on systems, skills, culture |
| 4. Build the leadership team | Evaluate the inherited team; balance outside talent with internal high potentials | Clean house at the top; recruit external talent | A few important changes; promote high potentials from within |
| 5. Secure early wins | Plan how you "arrive"; build credibility and energize the ranks | Shift the mind-set from despair to hope | Shift the mind-set from denial to awareness |
| 6. Create supporting alliances | Learn how the organization really works and who has influence; build coalitions | Win support from bosses and stakeholders to invest resources | Build alliances sideways and down for better execution |
Managing yourself: heroes and stewards
The STARS state also dictates how you must manage yourself, starting with whether you are reflexively a hero or a steward.
Heroes (turnarounds). People hungry for hope, vision and direction line up behind the leader charging sword in hand and follow commands. The premium is on rapid diagnosis of markets, technologies, products and strategies, then aggressive cuts to a defensible core, acting fast on incomplete information. Karl in Europe took charge, set direction and made painful calls; with a bleak outlook, people complied with little resistance.
Stewards (realignments). Closer to servant leadership: diplomatic, less ego-driven, building consensus for change. Stewards use subtler influence, know the culture and politics deeply, decide more patiently and systematically what to keep and discard, and cultivate awareness through shared diagnosis, opinion leaders and benchmarking.
- Typical failures. Heroes stumble in realignments and sustaining success by moving too fast and needlessly causing resistance; stewards struggle in start-ups and turnarounds by moving too slowly, spending energy on consensus that is not needed and squandering time.
- Range is possible. Natural heroes can find their inner steward and vice versa; good leaders can succeed in all five situations, though no one is equally good at all of them.
- Three pillars of adaptation. Whether you can adjust depends on enhancing self-awareness, exercising personal discipline and building complementary teams.
Make a hardheaded assessment of which skills and inclinations will help in this situation and which will get you into trouble. Do not arrive ready for war if what you need is to build alliances.
Leadership as a team sport
Every organization needs both heroes and stewards, and the STARS portfolio sets the right mix on your team. Karl willed himself toward stewardship in North America, but knew he was a more natural hero, which had three implications.
- Add stewards. Stock the team with natural stewards for wise counsel (so he would not go off half-cocked) and to handle some of the outreach.
- Aim the hero. Find where heroic energy genuinely fits; every organization has parts in serious trouble. That is fine as long as he did not start fires just to fight them or jeopardize the larger realignment.
- Hire for STARS fit. Weigh STARS preferences and abilities when hiring, promoting and assigning people to key projects.
Rewarding success
STARS also bears on how you evaluate and reward people and on the culture you build. The Harvard Business Review Transition Survey asked which situation respondents found most challenging and which they would most prefer.
- Hardest: realignment 30.3%, sustaining success 22.6%, turnaround 21.9%, start-up 13.5%, accelerated growth 11.6%.
- Preferred: start-up 47.1% (by far), turnaround 16.7%, accelerated growth 16.1%, realignment 12.7%, sustaining success 7.4%.
- Action-oriented, authority-driven situations (start-up, turnaround, growth): 47.1% call them hardest, 79.9% prefer them.
- Learning, reflection and influence situations (realignment, sustaining success): 52.9% call them hardest, only 20.1% prefer them.
Why preferences invert
People are not drawn to the easy situations but to those that are (1) more fun and (2) more recognized.
- Visible wins. A successful start-up or turnaround is a visible, measurable individual accomplishment.
- Invisible wins. In a realignment, success means avoiding disaster, so nothing much happens: the dog that doesn't bark. It also requires building awareness patiently, often giving the group the credit.
- Thankless upkeep. Nobody calls the power company to thank it for keeping the lights on, but an outage brings immediate, loud complaint.
The reward paradox
If firms reward turnaround heroes lavishly while high potentials shun realignments, who prevents businesses from becoming turnarounds? Rewarding rescues (and not knowing how to reward realignments) may make crises more likely, since skilled managers can count on less accomplished people to wreck businesses so they can ride to the rescue.
- Easy to judge. Start-ups and turnarounds have measurable outcomes against a clear prior baseline.
- Hard to judge. A realignment may beat expectations yet still be poor, or show little because a crisis was averted. In sustaining success, success may be a small share loss under concerted competitive attack, or a few points of top-line growth in a mature business.
- "As compared to what?" The unknown is what would have happened under other actions or other leaders, so fair evaluation needs a deep understanding of the challenges and of the leader's actions.
The paired percentages rest on self-selected survey respondents, and the book's subtotal of 47.1% for "hardest" start-up/turnaround/growth is slightly off (the rows sum to 47.0%, and the two "hardest" subtotals then total 99.9%). The broader point about incentives favoring firefighters is argued, not measured.
Diagnosis of your STARS mix will deepen and shift as you learn, so Watkins advises revisiting it periodically and asking what must be done and who should do it.
- What STARS portfolio have you inherited: which parts are in start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment and sustaining success?
- What does it imply for your challenges and opportunities, and for how you accelerate your transition?
- What does it mean for your learning agenda: technical side only, or culture and politics too?
- What is the prevailing climate, which psychological shifts must you make, and how?
- How can you best lead change in the situations you face?
- Which strengths will be most valuable, and which could get you into trouble?
- What does it imply for the team you need to build?
Negotiate Success
No relationship matters more in a transition than the one with your new boss, who sets your benchmarks, interprets your actions to other key players and controls the resources you need, and so does more than anyone to decide how fast you break even. Watkins urges leaders to shape the game rather than just play it: negotiate realistic expectations, a shared diagnosis and sufficient resources instead of taking the situation as given. The vehicle is five planned conversations with the boss, culminating in a written 90-day plan that works as a contract.
Promoted to CIO of a key business unit at a midsized oil company, Michael Chen got calls from two colleagues telling him to update his résumé: his new boss, Vaughan Cates, would "eat you alive". Cates was a hard-driving unit head known for results and toughness; several people she had inherited had already left. Friends warned that Michael, a planner and team builder, would strike her as too slow for tough decisions. Forewarned, he asked for a 90-day frame, starting with 30 days to get on top of things, after which he would bring a detailed assessment and plan for the next 60 days, and he updated her regularly. Pressed after three weeks to decide a major systems purchase, he held to his schedule, then delivered a strong plan at day 30. A month later he reported early wins and asked for more head count for a key project; after withering questioning, which his business case survived, she agreed but set strict deadlines, and he soon hit several interim targets. Only then, with momentum, did he raise style: our styles differ, but judge me on results, not on how I get them. The relationship took nearly a year to become solid and productive.
What you need from a boss depends on level and situation
The level of the job shapes the relationship: the higher you rise, the more autonomy you get, especially if you and your boss sit in different locations. Light oversight is a blessing if you get what you need, and a curse if it gives you enough rope to hang yourself.
- Start-up. Resources, and perhaps protection from higher-level interference.
- Turnaround. Perhaps a push to cut back quickly to the defensible core.
- Accelerated growth. The right levels of investment.
- Realignment. Help making the case for change.
- Sustaining success. Help learning the business and avoiding early mistakes that threaten core assets.
- Start early. Relationship building begins while you are being considered, through interviews, selection and formal entry.
- Same boss, new role. Read the chapter even if your boss does not change: expectations shift and you may need more resources. Assuming you can work with a current boss the same way in a different role is a common error.
- Turn it around. The same ideas can speed your own new reports to break-even, in which you have a large stake.
Focusing on the fundamentals
Don't.
- Stay away. If the boss does not reach out or contact is uncomfortable, reach out yourself, or risk crippling communication gaps. Resist the lure of lots of rope; get on the calendar regularly so the boss knows your issues and you track shifting expectations.
- Surprise your boss. Bad news is unpleasant, but bosses see failure to report emerging problems early as a far greater sin; worst is hearing it from someone else. Give at least a heads-up as soon as you see a problem developing.
- Approach your boss only with problems. Bring a plan, not necessarily a full solution (crafting solutions can delay you into surprising the boss): how you will address it, even if only by gathering more information, your role and the help you need. Tell your own reports: "don't just bring me problems, bring me plans to begin addressing them".
- Run down your checklist. Bosses rarely want a recital of your activities; they want the most important things and how they can help. Go in with at most three items you must share or need action on.
- Expect your boss to change. Styles differ in communication, motivation and level of detail, but adapting is your responsibility.
Do.
- Clarify expectations early and often. Start during interviews; if the boss expects fast fixes and you see structural problems, get bad news out early and lower unrealistic hopes; check regularly for shifts, above all if you are an outsider without deep cultural and political knowledge.
- Take 100% responsibility for making the relationship work; if the boss meets you partway, it is a welcome surprise.
- Negotiate time lines for diagnosis and action planning; do not be dragged into firefighting or premature calls. Even a few weeks helps; the 90-day plan is the vehicle.
- Aim early wins at the boss's priorities. Learn what the boss cares about most and seek results there; track three things the boss cares about and discuss them every time you meet, so the boss owns your success.
- Pursue good marks from people the boss respects. The boss's view of you also comes from trusted others, often your new peers or reports. No need to curry favor; just stay alert to the multiple channels feeding the boss's opinion.
Planning for five conversations
The relationship is built through ongoing dialogue that starts before you accept the job. Watkins puts five specific conversations into the 90-day plan; they are intertwined threads, not separate meetings.
- Situational diagnosis. How does the boss see the STARS portfolio you inherited: which elements are start-up, turnaround, growth, realignment or sustaining success? How did the organization get here? Which soft and hard factors make it hard? Which internal resources can you draw on? Your view may differ, but you must grasp how the boss sees it.
- Expectations. What must you do in the short and medium term? What counts as success? Critically, how and when will performance be measured? You may need to reset unrealistic expectations; underpromise and overdeliver.
- Resources. In essence a negotiation for critical resources: what you need and what you need the boss to do. Not only money and people; in a realignment you may need help persuading the organization to confront change. Focus the boss on the costs and benefits of different resource levels.
- Style. How you will interact day to day: preferred forms of communication (face to face, voice, electronic) and for what; how often; which decisions need consultation and which you can make alone; how your styles differ and what that implies.
- Personal development. A few months in: where you are doing well, where you must improve or change, and which projects or special assignments you could take on without sacrificing focus.
Sequencing the dialogue
In practice the threads overlap and evolve: several in one meeting, or one worked out over many brief exchanges (Michael covered style and expectations in a single meeting and set a schedule for the rest). Still, the order has logic.
- First: situation, expectations and style.
- Then: resources, once you know more, revisiting the diagnosis and resetting expectations as needed.
- Last: personal development, once the relationship is reasonably established.
- Always: plan each conversation and signal clearly what you hope it will accomplish.
| Conversation (Table 4-1) | Guiding question | Current status | Next 30 days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Situation | How does your boss see your STARS portfolio? | ||
| Expectations | What are you expected to accomplish? | ||
| Resources | What resources do you have at your disposal? | ||
| Style | How can you best work together? | ||
| Personal development | What is going well, and what must you do differently? |
Use the grid to record where each conversation stands and your priorities for the next 30 days; while still interviewing, use it to capture what you have learned and pick focal points.
Planning the situation conversation
The aim is a shared understanding of the situation, its challenges and opportunities: the foundation for everything else. If you and your boss define the situation differently, you will not get the support you need, so the first discussion should define it using STARS as a shared language (the same applies with your team).
Match your support to your situation
Once you agree on the situation, decide what role the boss should play and what support to request. In all five situations you need direction, support and space to do the job.
| Situation | Typical roles for your boss (Table 4-2) |
|---|---|
| Start-up | Help getting needed resources quickly; clear, measurable goals; guidance at strategic breakpoints; help staying focused |
| Turnaround | Start-up roles, plus support for tough personnel calls; support for changing or correcting the external image; help cutting deeply enough, fast enough |
| Accelerated growth | Start-up roles, plus support for investment to fuel growth at the right rate in the right ways; help making the case for new systems and structures |
| Realignment | Start-up roles, plus help making the case for change, especially if you come from outside |
| Sustaining success | Start-up roles, plus constant reality testing (is this really sustaining success, or a realignment?); support for good defense and avoiding damaging mistakes; help finding ways to take the business to a new level |
Planning the expectations conversation
The goal is to clarify and align expectations about the future: short- and medium-term goals, timing and, critically, how progress will be measured. What will count as success for the boss and for you? When does the boss expect results, measured how, over what time frame? If you succeed, what comes next? If you don't manage expectations, they will manage you.
- Match expectations to the situation. Align them with the shared assessment. In a turnaround both sides would expect decisive, quick action, such as cutting costs in nonessential areas or concentrating on the highest-margin products, and would measure success by overall financial performance.
- Aim for early wins the boss cares about. You need the boss's help, so help the boss succeed; attention to the boss's priorities creates ownership in your success. Best is to integrate the boss's goals with your own early-win plans; if impossible, pursue wins based solely on the boss's priorities.
- Identify the untouchables. Find any products, facilities or people the boss is proprietary about, before you press to close the product line the boss started or replace a loyal ally. Clues come from the boss's personal history, from others, and from facial expression, tone and body language; when unsure, float a trial balloon gently and watch the reaction.
- Educate your boss. Shape what the boss thinks you can and should achieve. If the boss blames the wrong part of a realigning business, for example, you must educate about the underlying problems to reset expectations, carefully, especially if the boss is invested in the old ways or partly responsible for the problems.
- Underpromise and overdeliver. Lean toward conservative promises, factoring in the organization's capacity for change. Delivering more delights the boss; promising too much means that even after accomplishing a great deal, you have failed in the boss's eyes.
- Clarify, clarify, clarify. Return regularly to confirm. Some bosses know what they want but express it poorly, and you do not want clarity only after heading down the wrong road. Ask the same question in different ways, read between the lines, form hypotheses about what the boss wants, understand how the boss's boss evaluates the boss, and see how you fit the larger picture. Never leave goals ambiguous: in a dispute over what was said, a tie goes to the boss.
Planning the resource conversation
This is an ongoing negotiation for critical resources, launched only once you agree on the STARS portfolio, goals and expectations. Needs vary by situation.
- Start-up. Adequate financial resources, technical support and people with the right expertise.
- Turnaround. Authority backed by political support for tough decisions, and scarce financial and human resources.
- Accelerated growth. Investment to support growth, plus support for installing needed systems and structures.
- Realignment. Consistent, public backing to make the organization confront change; ideally the boss stands shoulder to shoulder with you to pierce denial and complacency.
- Sustaining success. Financial and technical resources to sustain the core and exploit new opportunities, plus periodic pushes toward stretch goals that stop you drifting into complacency.
Making the ask
- Define needs. Decide which tangible and intangible resources you must have.
- Inventory what you have. For example experienced people or new products ready to launch.
- Identify gaps. List what you need help obtaining: what exactly do you need from the boss? The sooner you can say, the sooner you can ask.
- Ask once, fully. Put as much on the table as early as possible; going back for more too often destroys credibility. If you need more time to size requirements, take it, as Michael did by negotiating time itself as a resource.
- Use the menu approach. Lay out the costs and benefits of different commitment levels: 7% sales growth next year needs X dollars; 10% needs Y dollars.
Play the game. If you can work within accepted cultural and political norms, your requests will be expected and easier to win.
Change the game. In realignments and turnarounds you may need to change or abandon established ways. Requests are more sweeping and losing them more damaging, so negotiate harder: get clear in your own mind how situation, expectations and resources must line up, back it with hard data, explain why each resource is essential, stick to your guns, keep coming back, and enlist allies inside and outside. Better to push too hard than slowly bleed to death.
Negotiating principles
- Focus on underlying interests. Probe the agendas of the boss and anyone else whose resources you need: what is in it for them?
- Look for mutually beneficial exchanges. Seek resources that serve the boss's agenda and yours; help peers advance their agendas in return for help with yours.
- Link resources to results. Show the performance benefits of more resources, using the menu of what you can and cannot achieve now and what each increment would allow.
Planning the style conversation
Stylistic preferences shape how people learn, communicate, influence and decide. The style conversation works out how you and the boss can best work together over time, Michael's key challenge with Vaughan. The boss need not become a friend or mentor, but you must know what a productive working relationship takes.
Diagnose your boss's style
- Watch the channels. If you leave messages about an urgent problem, get no quick reply and are then reproached for no heads-up, that boss does not use that channel.
- Ask the basic questions. How and how often does the boss like to communicate? Which decisions does the boss want to be in on? Does the boss arrive early and work late, and expect others to?
- Map the differences. You may learn by talking to knowledgeable people while the boss relies on reading hard data, or the boss may micromanage while you prefer independence; anticipate the misunderstandings and how to avoid them.
- Consult past colleagues judiciously. Avoid seeming to solicit criticism of the boss; stick to safer topics such as communication preferences, and base your strategy chiefly on your own experience.
- Watch how the boss treats others. Is the boss consistent, and if not why? Are there favorites? Issues the boss is prone to micromanage? People the boss has come down hard on for unacceptable performance?
Scope out the dimensions of your box
The boss's comfort zone defines the decision-making box you operate in.
| Decision type | Example from the book |
|---|---|
| Decide yourself, then inform | Possibly key personnel decisions |
| Consult the boss before deciding | Actions touching broader policy (such as granting leave) or hot political issues |
| Boss decides | Whatever the boss reserves |
Expect a relatively small box at first, growing as the boss gains confidence in you; if it does not grow, or stays too small to be effective, raise it directly.
Adapt to your boss's style
Treat building the relationship as 100% your responsibility, which means adapting to the boss's style: if the boss hates voice messages, do not leave them; if the boss wants detail, overcommunicate. Never compromise superior business results, but smooth the day-to-day workings. Learn from others what worked, experiment judiciously, and when in doubt, ask the boss how to proceed.
Surface the difficult issues
Serious style differences left unspoken may be read as disrespect or even incompetence. Raise them before they become irritants and discuss how to accommodate both styles, though, like Michael, ideally after building some credibility.
- Frame around results. Early on, say you expect differences in approach but are committed to the agreed results; this prepares the boss, and you may need periodic reminders to judge results, not methods.
- Use a trusted intermediary. Someone the boss trusts can preview issues and solutions and may help you broach a hard topic non-threateningly.
- Pace it. Do not try to settle every style issue in one conversation; an early talk explicitly about style is a good start, then keep adapting as the relationship evolves.
Planning the personal development conversation
Once the relationship has matured (roughly the 90-day mark), open a candid discussion of how you are doing; it need not be a formal review. What are you doing well and what must you do differently? Which skills must you build, which leadership shortcomings must you address, and which projects or assignments (without sacrificing focus) would strengthen you?
- Career passages. This matters most at key passages. A first-time manager should get into the habit of asking for feedback on supervisory skills; seeking candid feedback, and acting on it, sends a powerful message.
- Every level. The same holds for a first-time manager of managers, functional leader, general manager or CEO: whenever success demands new skills and attitudes, be open to learning from those who went before.
- Soft skills. The higher you go, the more cultural and political diagnosis, negotiation, coalition building and conflict management matter. Training helps, but developmental assignments (project teams, new units, other functions, other locations) are indispensable.
Special cases
Working with multiple bosses
With more than one boss (direct or dotted-line), the principles hold but the emphasis shifts.
- Balance wins and losses. Carefully balance each boss's perceived wins and losses.
- Tilt to power, then rebalance. If one boss has much more power, lean toward that boss early, then redress the balance later as far as possible.
- Force convergence. If one-on-one work fails to produce agreement, bring the bosses to the table together to thrash it out, or you will be pulled to pieces.
- One grid per boss. Complete Table 4-1 for each boss, compare where views of situation, expectations and resources converge and diverge, and adapt to each style.
Working at a distance
Distance raises the risk of falling out of step without noticing.
- Communication discipline. The onus is on you to schedule calls and meetings that keep you aligned.
- Clear metrics. Establish comprehensive metrics so the boss sees what is happening and you can manage by exception.
- Meet in person early. Face-to-face contact builds confidence and trust (true for virtual teams too); fight for the resources and fly halfway around the world if needed.
- Find the windows. A distant boss is besieged by people physically present, so use times when the boss is less occupied, such as travel to or from the office.
Putting it together: negotiating your 90-day plan
Whatever the situation, create a 90-day plan and win the boss's buy-in, usually after a couple of weeks once you have the lay of the land.
- Written. Even if only bullet points, specifying priorities, goals and milestones.
- Shared. Seek the boss's buy-in; the plan is a "contract" on how you will spend your time, covering what you will and will not do.
- Structured. Divide the period into three 30-day blocks, each ending in a review meeting with the boss (with more frequent contact in between).
- Block one (days 1-30). Devote it to learning and building personal credibility; negotiate this learning period, as Michael did, and hold the boss to it. Build your learning agenda and plan, set weekly goals, and keep a discipline of weekly evaluation and planning. Outputs: a diagnosis of the situation, key priorities and a plan for the next 30 days, including where and how to seek early wins. The review focuses on the situation and expectations conversations: consensus on the situation, clarified expectations, buy-in to the next block.
- Block two (to day 60). The review assesses progress against the previous plan and sets goals for day 90. Depending on level and situation these might be identifying resources for major initiatives, fleshing out assessments of strategy and structure, and presenting early assessments of your team.
Planning the five conversations with your team
You are not only getting a new boss; you are becoming one. Ask how well you have helped subordinates through transitions before, and what you would do differently.
The golden rule of transitions: transition others as you would wish to be transitioned. Compare the guidance and support you want from a new boss with what you give new reports; if the two diverge sharply, you are part of the problem. The faster your reports get up to speed, the more they can help you reach your goals.
- Introduce the framework immediately. Explain the five conversations to your reports and schedule a first conversation with each on situation and expectations.
- Assign pre-work. For example, have them read the chapter on matching strategy to situation.
- Track it. Table 4-3 is a simple grid: team members down the side, the five conversations across. Mark where you stand with each report on each conversation and circle the priorities.
The chapter assumes a rational, reachable boss. "Take 100% responsibility" and "adapt to the boss's style" give little guidance when a boss is abusive, conflicted or about to leave, and the Chen case is a chosen success: the book offers no examples of the method failing.
- How well have you built relationships with new bosses before: what went well, and where must you improve?
- Plan the situation conversation: which issues, what to say up front, in what order?
- Plan the expectations conversation: how will you find out what the boss expects?
- Plan the style conversation: preferred mode, frequency, level of detail, which issues to consult on before deciding?
- Plan the resource conversation: what is absolutely needed, what fewer resources would force you to forgo, what more would deliver; build the business case.
- Plan the development conversation: strengths, areas to improve, assignments or projects that would build needed skills.
- How will you use the five conversations with your team, and where do you stand with each direct report?
Secure Early Wins
By the end of your first few months, your boss, peers and reports should sense that something new and good is happening. Early wins energize people, build personal credibility, create value sooner and pull the break-even point forward. Early wins must do double duty: build short-term momentum and lay the foundation for your longer-term goals, ideally while modeling the behavior you want the organization to adopt.
Elena Lee was promoted to head customer service at a leading retailer, with a mandate to lift slumping customer satisfaction and a personal aim to end the authoritarian culture of her predecessor. Having run the company's highest-performing call center, she believed more employee participation could transform results. Within a year her approach covered the whole organization: service had improved substantially and climate surveys showed striking gains in morale and employee satisfaction.
Her sequence of moves, which the rest of the chapter keeps returning to:
- Signal the vision. Through team calls and one-on-ones, she laid out quality goals and a more participative, problem-solving culture to her former peers, now her reports (call center heads worldwide). Reaction: very little.
- Install a rhythm. Weekly meetings with each center manager reviewed performance and improvement efforts. She declared that "the punishment culture is a thing of the past", expected managers to coach, and had serious disciplinary cases referred to her for review on an interim basis.
- Act on what she learned. Once she saw who was complying and who stayed punitive, she ran formal performance reviews and put the two worst offenders on improvement plans. One left almost at once and was replaced by a high-potential supervisor from her old center; the other eventually shaped up.
- Launch a project. Her best unit leader led a team of promising frontline managers to design new satisfaction metrics plus feedback and improvement processes, advised by a consultant on method, with regular reviews by Elena. She piloted the recommendations at once in the departed manager's unit, then rolled them out.
Watkins credits the early-wins idea to his earlier book with Dan Ciampa, Right from the Start (1999).
Making waves
The chapter's time logic comes from John Gabarro's study of executives taking charge (The Dynamics of Taking Charge, 1987), which found that new leaders change things in distinct waves rather than continuously.
- Focused learning comes first.
- An early wave of changes follows.
- The pace then slows: people consolidate, the leader learns more deeply, everyone catches their breath.
- Armed with better insight, the leader launches deeper waves of change.
- A last, gentler wave fine-tunes for maximum performance, after which most of these leaders are ready to move on.
The implication is to keep your ends in view. The transition lasts a few months, but you will usually hold the job for two to four years; early wins should advance those longer-term goals wherever possible.
Plan your waves
- Five phases per wave. Each wave runs through learning, designing the changes, building support, implementing, and observing results.
- Permission to pause. Thinking in waves frees you to invest time up front in learning and preparation, and afterward in consolidation before the next wave.
- Why not change constantly. With nonstop change you cannot tell what is working, and you are certain to burn out your people.
- Wave one. Aims at early wins: initiatives tailored to build personal credibility, establish key relationships, and harvest low-hanging fruit (the best short-term improvement opportunities). Done well, it builds momentum and deepens your own learning.
- Wave two. Tackles the fundamentals of strategy, structure, systems and skills to reshape the organization and deliver deeper performance gains. You will not reach the second wave unless you secure early wins in the first.
Starting with the goal
Eager new leaders gravitate to the easiest problems to fix fast, which is fine up to a point. The danger is the low-hanging fruit trap: pouring energy into early wins that contribute nothing to longer-term business objectives. Watkins likens it to launching a rocket with only a huge first stage: once the initial thrust fades, it falls back to earth. Sometimes you must skip the lowest fruit and reach higher in the tree.
So plan early wins that, as far as possible, meet two tests:
- Consistent with agreed goals: what your boss and key stakeholders expect you to achieve.
- A lever for new behavior: they help introduce the patterns of behavior those goals require.
Focus on business priorities
Agreed goals are the destination, stated as measurable business objectives: for example double-digit annual profit growth, a dramatic cut in defects and rework, or a key project finished by an agreed deadline. Elena's number one priority was a significant improvement in customer satisfaction. Define goals so you lead with a distinct end point in mind.
Identify and support behavioral changes
If goals are the destination, behavior is much of how you get there (or fail to), and hitting goals on time may mean changing dysfunctional patterns.
- Name the unwanted behaviors. Elena's were fear and disempowerment.
- Picture the target. Form a clear vision of how people should behave by the end of your tenure.
- Connect the two. Plan how your early-win actions will move behavior from one to the other.
Table 5-1 is a diagnostic aid for spotting the patterns that undermine high performance; summarize which ones you want to change.
| Lack of... | Symptoms (Table 5-1) |
|---|---|
| Focus | The group cannot define its priorities, or has too many; resources spread too thin, so crises and firefighting are frequent; people are rewarded for putting out fires, not for enduring fixes |
| Discipline | Wide variation in individual performance; employees do not grasp the costs of inconsistency; excuses are made for missed commitments |
| Innovation | Performance measured against internal benchmarks only; products and processes improve slowly and incrementally; people rewarded for stable performance, not for pushing the envelope |
| Teamwork | Team members compete and protect turf instead of pursuing collective goals; people are rewarded for building fiefdoms |
| Sense of urgency | Internal and external customers' needs ignored; complacency ("we're the best and always have been"; "responding fast won't make any difference") |
Adopting basic principles
Getting early wins matters, but so does getting them the right way, and above all avoiding early losses: once the tide runs against you, recovery is hard.
- Focus on a few promising opportunities. Overreach in a transition can be ruinous; you cannot deliver in more than a couple of areas. Treat it as risk management: enough focal points for a good shot at one significant success, not so many that effort diffuses.
- Get wins that matter to your boss. Wins must energize your reports, but the boss's view of your accomplishments is decisive. Even if you do not fully share the boss's priorities, make them central to your choice; solving the boss's problems builds credibility and secures access to resources.
- Get wins in the right ways. Results achieved in a way seen as manipulative, underhanded or counter-cultural set you up for trouble. Had Elena won through punishment, she would have undercut her real aim. A win that exemplifies the desired behavior is a double win.
- Take your STARS portfolio into account. What counts as a win varies sharply by situation: getting people simply talking about the organization's challenges is a big achievement in a realignment and a waste of time in a turnaround. Decide per part of the portfolio whether momentum comes from visible listening and learning or from rapid, decisive calls.
- Adjust for the culture. Some organizations want visible individual accomplishments; others see individual glory as grandstanding that damages teamwork. In team cultures, a win may be leading a team to a new product idea or being seen as a solid contributor to a broader initiative. Learn what counts as a win, especially when onboarding from outside.
Identifying your early wins
With goals and behavior objectives in hand, plan for two phases (timing depends on the situation):
- Phase one, roughly the first 30 days: build personal credibility.
- Phase two, beyond that: launch projects for early performance improvement.
Understand your reputation
People start assessing you immediately, partly on what they think they already know: people have talked to people who worked with you before. You arrive with a reputation, deserved or not, and confirmation bias (noticing what confirms a belief, screening out what does not) can turn it into reality. So work out what role people expect you to play and decide explicitly whether to reinforce or confound that expectation.
Elena faced a special case: people knew her, but in a more junior role, and would expect her to behave the same way. Her task was to change how she was perceived.
- Accept that relationships must change. Personal ties with former peers must become less personal; close friendships are rarely compatible with effective supervision.
- Focus early on rites of passage. The first days are about symbolism more than substance; for example, have your new boss introduce you to the team and pass the baton.
- Reenlist your (good) former peers. Every promotion leaves disappointed rivals, who go through stages of adjustment. Work out who can and cannot work for you.
- Establish your authority deftly. Walk the knife's edge between over- and underasserting. A consult-and-decide approach on critical issues works until former peers adjust to your making the calls, provided you never make uninformed decisions.
- Focus on what is good for the business. From the announcement on, some former peers will watch for favoritism or political agendas at their expense; the antidote is a relentless, principled focus on what is right for the business.
Build credibility
In the first weeks you cannot move performance measurably, but you can score small victories and signal change: in effect, early, early wins in credibility. People will judge your credibility by four questions:
- Insight and steadiness. Do you have what it takes to make tough decisions?
- Values. Do you hold values they relate to, admire and want to emulate?
- Energy. Do you have the right kind of energy?
- Standards. Do you demand high performance of yourself and others?
Opinions form on little data, form remarkably fast, and once they harden are hard to change. Building credibility is partly marketing yourself, like building brand equity: you want people to associate you with attractive capabilities, attitudes and values. There is no single formula, but credible new leaders strike six balances:
| Credible leaders are... | ...but also | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Demanding | Able to be satisfied | Secure realistic commitments, hold people to them, and know when to celebrate versus push; never satisfied saps motivation |
| Accessible | Not too familiar | Approachable in a way that preserves authority, not available indiscriminately |
| Decisive | Judicious | Show capacity to take charge with quick low-consequence decisions; defer big ones until you know enough |
| Focused | Flexible | Zero in on issues while consulting and inviting input; avoid the rigidity that alienates; let people reach results their own way |
| Active | Without causing commotion | Build momentum without overwhelming people; watch stress levels and pace yourself and others |
| Willing to make tough calls | Humane | Act at once if needed, including letting marginal performers go, in ways that keep dignity and look fair; people watch how as well as what |
Plan to engage
Your earliest actions weigh disproportionately, so plan how you will connect in the first few days.
- Audiences. Identify them: direct reports, other employees, key outside constituencies.
- Messages. Craft a few for each audience about who you are, the values and goals you stand for, your style and how you will conduct business. Not your plans: that is premature.
- Modes. How will you introduce yourself? First meetings with reports one-on-one or as a group? Informal get-to-know-you sessions or straight to business issues and assessment? Which wider channels (e-mail, video)? Early visits to other sites?
- Remove irritants. Quickly fix minor but persistent annoyances: start repairing strained external relationships, cut redundant meetings, shorten overlong ones, solve problems with physical work spaces.
- Learn visibly. A genuine commitment to understanding the organization builds credibility, immunizes you against looking as if you arrived with "the" answer, and signals respect for its unique history and dynamics. But be seen as a quick study, not a leader with, in a columnist's jibe at one president (George Will, 1994), "a learning curve as flat as Kansas", and know when to shift from learning to decision and action.
Write your own story
Early actions carry symbolism as much as substance, and they turn into stories that cast you as hero or villain. Small things decide it: whether you introduce yourself informally to the support staff or only to your boss, peers and reports can brand you accessible or remote. How you introduce yourself, treat support staff and handle small irritants all become kernels of stories that circulate widely.
- Teachable moments. Steer the mythology with actions that plainly show what you are about and model the behavior you want, as Elena's handling of recalcitrant supervisors did.
- They need not be dramatic. A teachable moment can be as simple (and as hard) as asking the penetrating question that crystallizes the group's understanding of a key problem.
Before any project delivers, you are already winning or losing through reputation, messages, irritants removed and the stories people tell. Treat the first 30 days as a campaign for personal credibility, because opinions harden fast and every later initiative draws on that capital.
Launch early-win projects
Credibility and key relationships yield immediate wins; soon you need quick, tangible performance gains in the business. The best candidates are problems you can fix fast and cheaply that produce visible operational and financial gains, such as bottlenecks that restrict productivity or incentive schemes that breed conflict and hurt performance.
- Three or four areas at most. More initiatives cost you focus.
- Build a portfolio. As in risk management, assemble promising early-win initiatives so that a big success in one balances disappointments in others, then pursue results relentlessly.
- Score each candidate. Use the early wins evaluation tool (Table 5-2): fill in one sheet per candidate focal point, circle the response that best describes its potential on each question, and total the scores as a rough indicator of potential.
- Prepare in your learning agenda. Make sure your learning plan explicitly covers how you will find promising improvement opportunities.
The questions of the early wins evaluation tool did not survive extraction (only its instructions did). Judging from the chapter, the scoring centers on impact on performance, speed with available resources, fit with agreed goals and the boss's priorities, and the chance to model new behaviors. Treat this as a reconstruction from context, not the printed wording.
Then turn goals into specific projects using five guidelines:
- Keep long-term goals in mind. Actions should serve the agreed business goals and the supporting behavior-change objectives.
- Identify a few promising focal points. Focal points are areas or processes (Elena's customer service processes) where improvement can dramatically lift overall operational or financial performance. Concentrating on a few saves time and energy, and early success there buys freedom and space for wider change.
- Launch early-win projects. Manage initiatives as projects aimed at the chosen focal points, as Elena did with her customer-service team.
- Elevate change agents. Find people at all levels with the insight, drive and incentives to advance your agenda, and promote them or give them key projects (Elena's best unit leader).
- Use projects to introduce new behaviors. Projects should model how the unit should work in future; Elena's consultant taught the team the right methods so they learned how to do such work.
Complete one per early-win project; the name promises to help you cut through the haze.
- Focus. What is the project's focus: which goal or early win do you want?
- Oversight. How will you oversee it, and who else should share oversight to build buy-in for implementing results?
- Goals. What are the goals, the intermediate milestones and the time frames?
- Leadership. Who will lead it, and what training do they need to succeed?
- Abilities. What mix of skills and representation is needed: who joins for their skills, and who because they represent key constituencies?
- Means. What additional resources, such as facilitation, does the team need?
- Process. Should the team use particular change models or structured processes, and how will members become familiar with them?
Leading change
As you choose early wins, decide how you will make change happen. There is no one best way: methods that work in turnarounds, where urgency already exists, can fail miserably in realignments, where many people deny any need for change. Expect to lead change differently in different parts of your STARS portfolio.
Planning versus learning
Once the key problems are identified, choose between planned change and collective learning (a distinction Watkins credits to his colleague Amy Edmondson). Plan-then-implement works only when five supporting planks are all in place:
- Awareness. A critical mass of people sees the need for change.
- Diagnosis. You know what must change and why.
- Vision. You have a compelling vision and a solid strategy.
- Plan. You have the expertise to produce a detailed plan.
- Support. You have alliances powerful enough to carry implementation.
Planned change. Fits when all five planks hold, often in turnarounds: people accept there is a problem, the fixes are more technical than cultural or political, and people are hungry for a solution. Design the plan, then implement it.
Collective learning. Needed when any plank is missing. In a realignment in denial, a plan meets stony silence or active resistance. Instead of a frontal assault on defenses, wage something like guerrilla warfare: chip away at resistance and raise awareness by exposing key people to new customer-satisfaction and competitor data, benchmarking best-in-class organizations and analyzing how top competitors perform, and holding off-sites to envision new objectives or process improvements.
A missing plank calls for a specific learning response: build awareness, sharpen the diagnosis, create a vision and strategy, develop a cross-functional implementation plan, or build a coalition. The skill is to decide which parts of a change suit planning and which suit learning; Figure 5-2 walks through the test for any change you have in mind.
Get started on behavior change
The means matter as much as the ends. Early-win initiatives should set new standards of behavior, as Elena's carefully staffed and coached team and quick implementation did.
- Culture change is usually required, and hard. One person struggles to break habits; a mutually reinforcing group of people is harder still.
- Don't blow up the culture. People and organizations can absorb only so much change at once, and cultures have virtues as well as faults: they give predictability and are sources of pride. Declaring the old organization worthless removes a key source of stability during change and wastes a wellspring of energy.
- Build a bridge. Identify the good and bad elements; elevate and praise the good while changing the bad. The functional parts of the familiar culture carry people from past to future.
Match strategy to situation
Choose behavior-change techniques according to the group's structure, processes, skills and, above all, its situation.
| Situation | Pressures | Behavior-change techniques that fit |
|---|---|---|
| Turnaround | Time pressure; must quickly find and secure the defensible core | Bring in new people from outside; set up project teams on specific performance-improvement initiatives |
| Realignment | Hidden problems, people not yet convinced | Start less obviously: change performance measures and begin benchmarking, setting the stage to create a vision collectively |
Avoiding predictable surprises
All this can be wiped out by a ticking time bomb. If one explodes, you switch to continuous firefighting, and hopes of getting established and building momentum vanish. Some shocks truly come out of the blue; then you mount the best crisis response you can. Far more often new leaders are derailed by predictable surprises: situations where the information needed to see and defuse the bomb existed, but nobody acted (a concept from Watkins and Max Bazerman, Harvard Business Review, 2003). Two causes:
- Not looking in the right places. Everyone prefers certain problem types and avoids others they dislike or feel incompetent to handle. Discipline yourself to dig into uncomfortable areas or find trustworthy experts who will.
- Silos. Different parts of the organization hold different pieces of the puzzle and no one assembles them. Without processes to surface and integrate critical information, you invite being predictably surprised.
| Area to probe | Question | Examples from the book |
|---|---|---|
| External environment | Could trends in public opinion, government action or economic conditions trigger major problems? | A policy change that favors competitors or hits your prices or costs; a shift in public views of your product's health or safety; an economic crisis in a developing country |
| Customers, markets, competitors, strategy | Could competitive developments pose major challenges? | A study suggesting your product is inferior to a rival's; a new entrant with a lower-cost substitute; a price war |
| Internal capabilities | Could weaknesses in processes, skills or capabilities trigger a crisis? | Unexpected loss of key personnel; major quality problems at a key plant; a product recall |
| Organizational politics | Could you step on a political land mine unawares? | People who are untouchable without your knowing it; a key peer subtly undermining you |
The overarching goal is a virtuous cycle: early wins that reinforce the wanted behavior and advance the agreed goals. Aim for modest but significant early improvements that earn the right to pursue more fundamental change.
The waves model rests on Gabarro's 1987 in-depth field research on a small set of executive successions, a solid but dated and narrow base for a universal rhythm. The Elena case shows only success (and the punitive manager's quick exit is presented without his side). And the advice to put the boss's priorities first even when you disagree sits in tension with "get wins the right way": the chapter does not say what to do when the boss's preferred win requires the wrong behavior.
- Given your agreed business goals, what must you do during the transition to create momentum toward them?
- How must people behave differently to reach those goals? Describe as vividly as you can the behaviors to encourage and those to discourage.
- How will you connect with the organization: which key audiences, what messages for each, and which modes of engagement?
- What are the most promising focal points for early performance gains that also start behavior change?
- Which projects must you launch, and who will lead them?
- Which predictable surprises could take you off track?
Achieve Alignment
The higher you rise, the more your job becomes that of an organizational architect: designing and aligning strategic direction, structure, core processes and skill bases so that they reinforce each other. Charisma cannot rescue a misaligned unit; every day will feel like pushing a boulder uphill. In your first 90 days, aim for a solid diagnosis of misalignments and a start on the most pressing ones, so early wins point toward a deeper second wave of change.
Opening case: the problem was the structure
Hannah Jaffey, an HR consultant, was hired by a former client as corporate VP of human resources. Top executives were barely speaking; her brief was to help the CEO replace people and rebuild the team.
- Diagnosis. A year earlier the fast-growing firm had reorganized into product-line business units. Several units served overlapping customers, and structure plus incentives punished cooperation.
- Symptoms. Confused customers, fights over who owned key accounts, no capacity to sell integrated solutions, stalled top-line growth, and hard questions from the board and investors.
- Resistance. The CEO refused another reorganization: the design was sound, he said, and only the people were the problem.
- Persistence. Hannah agreed there were weak links but knew people issues could not be judged until the structure was right. She kept returning with an in-depth diagnosis, concrete cases where incentive misalignment stoked conflict, and examples of how other companies handled similar tensions.
- Outcome. The CEO moved to a hybrid structure: marketing and sales by customer segment, operations and R&D by product line, and a shared-services unit for finance, HR, IT and supply chain. A year later the company ran smoothly, customers were happier, robust growth had resumed, and it was obvious which executives had to go.
The case carries three lessons that run through the chapter. Structure and incentives shape behavior more than personalities do; you cannot fairly assess people inside a broken design; and a leader without formal authority over the architecture can still change it by building a patient, evidence-based case.
Why this matters even if you cannot redesign
- If you have the scope to change direction, structure, processes and skills, start analysing the architecture and alignment among the four elements at once. Expect to finish only a diagnosis and perhaps begin on the most urgent issue in the first few months, but use it to aim your early-win projects and lay the ground for a later, deeper wave.
- If you lack the authority (like Hannah), still assess how your piece fits the larger picture and decide whether you must convince your boss or peers that misalignment is the real obstacle to performance.
- Career payoff. Systems fluency builds credibility with senior people.
Avoiding common traps
Watkins calls simplistic fixes to complex organizational problems a form of malpractice. Five traps recur:
- Making changes for change's sake. New leaders feel self-imposed pressure to put their stamp on the organization and alter strategy or structure before they understand the business: ready, shoot, aim. The action imperative (Chapter 1's warning) again produces disaster.
- Not adjusting for the STARS situation. There is no one best way to lead change. Turnarounds call for rapid, often radical shifts; accelerated growth and realignment usually call for subtle, incremental moves. One-size-fits-all change is the error.
- Restructuring your way out of deeper problems. If the real issues are in processes, skill bases or culture, a reorganization is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Wait until you know whether structure is the root cause; otherwise you create new misalignments, must backtrack, disrupt the organization and damage your credibility.
- Creating structures that are too complex. A matrix may be right (as in Hannah's hybrid): done well it fosters shared accountability and productive creative tension. Done badly it diffuses decisions and adds sclerotic complexity. Aim for clear lines of accountability and the simplest structure that still meets core goals.
- Overestimating capacity to absorb change. Bold new directions are easy to draw and hard for people to live through, especially after a string of recent changes. Move fast in a turnaround; go incrementally in realignments and sustaining-success situations.
Designing organizational architecture
Learn to be the architect
Few leaders receive systematic training in organizational design, because early in their careers they control little of it. Junior staff complain about obvious misalignments and wonder why "those idiots" upstairs tolerate them; by midsenior level you are well on your way to becoming one of those idiots. Hence the advice to start learning how to assess and design organizations now.
The organization as an open system
Watkins asks you to see your unit (or the whole business, as in Figure 6-1) as an open system:
- "Open" means the organization both influences and is influenced by its surroundings: (1) the external environment of customers, distributors, suppliers, competitors, governments, NGOs, investors and media; (2) the internal environment of climate, morale and culture. Architectural choices must let the unit respond to and shape both.
- "System" means the architecture consists of distinct, interacting elements. You can work on one element (change strategy, alter structure, streamline a process, hire different skills), but never without thinking through the knock-on effects on the other three.
- Strategic direction. The organization's mission, vision and strategy.
- Structure. How people are grouped into units and how their work is coordinated, measured and incentivized.
- Core processes. The systems that add value by processing information and materials.
- Skill bases. The capabilities of key groups of people in the organization.
A good strategy is necessary but not sufficient: misalignment in any other element can make even the best strategy useless. Direction drives and is shaped by the other three, so changing direction usually forces changes in structure, processes and skills to restore a fully aligned architecture.
Diagnosing misalignments
The first-90-days goal is to identify likely misalignments and design a plan for correcting them. Watkins gives four illustrative pairings:
| Misaligned pair | Illustration | What breaks |
|---|---|---|
| Direction vs skills | R&D group told to generate and test more product ideas; staff lack the latest techniques for running faster experiments | Skills do not support the mission |
| Direction vs processes | Marketing group assigned a new customer segment has no way to compile and analyse data on those customers | Systems fail the direction |
| Structure vs processes | Product development organized by product line focuses expertise but has no efficient system for sharing best practice across teams | Whole group underperforms |
| Structure vs skills | Shift from functional to matrix structure to balance product and functional decisions; people used to authority now need influence and conflict-management skills | Structure demands skills people lack |
Getting started: the logic of alignment
Watkins's analogy is a long sailing trip: first confirm the destination (mission and goals) and route (strategy), then pick the boat (structure), outfit it (processes) and choose the crew mix (skill bases), while watching for reefs not on the charts. The point is that alignment has a logic: changing structure before settling direction causes trouble, and you cannot fully judge the crew until destination, route and boat are clear (though you can start).
- Begin with strategic direction. Check how the unit is positioned against the larger organization's goals and your agreed priorities; make sure mission, vision and strategy are well thought through and logically integrated.
- Look at supporting structure, processes and skills. Test whether they support the direction (existing, or the one you envision) and understand how they relate. Where one is ill suited, either adapt the direction or build or acquire the capability.
- Decide how and when to introduce new direction. With a clearer view of capabilities, chart the path: changes in positioning (markets, customers, suppliers) and in supporting capabilities, on a realistic time frame.
- Think through sequencing. In a turnaround, the strategy is typically inadequate: fix strategy first, then structure, then processes and skills. In a realignment, direction and structure are often fine and the trouble lies in processes and skill bases: start there.
- Close the loop. What you learn about structure, processes and skills reveals the team's capabilities and its cultural capacity for change, which in turn tells you what repositioning is possible over what period.
Defining strategic direction
What, why, how
To avoid sterile definitional debates, Watkins reduces the vocabulary to three questions:
- Mission is the what: what will be achieved.
- Vision is the why: why people should feel motivated to perform at a high level.
- Strategy is the how: how resources are allocated and decisions made to accomplish the mission.
The four Cs
Strategic direction must settle what the organization will do and, critically, what it will not do. Probe four areas:
- Customers. Which existing customers (external or internal) will we keep serving? What is our value proposition? Which markets will we exit, and which new ones will we enter, and when?
- Capital. Of the businesses we keep, which get investment and which do we draw cash from? How much extra capital will be needed, when, and from where?
- Capabilities. What are we good and bad at? Which existing capabilities (say, a strong new-product development group) can we leverage, which must we build up, and which must we create or acquire?
- Commitments. Which critical resource-commitment decisions must be made, and when? Which hard-to-reverse past commitments must we live with or try to unwind?
Watkins declines to teach strategy formulation itself; his focus is assessing the inherited direction on three tests: coherence, adequacy and implementation.
Test 1: coherence
The question is whether a clear logic links choices about customers, products, technologies, plans and resource commitments, and whether its authors thought through the ramifications and practicalities. Method:
- Gather the documents describing mission, vision and strategy.
- Disassemble them into markets, products, technologies, functional plans and goals.
- Test the threads between parts: does the market analysis connect to the objectives? Does the product development budget jibe with operations' capital plans? Are there plans to train salespeople for products in the pipeline?
A coherent direction makes such connections easy to spot; struggling to find them is itself the finding.
Test 2: adequacy
A strategy can be coherent and still too small. Will it carry the unit, and help the larger organization, through the next two to three years? Three approaches:
- Ask probing questions. Does your boss believe the direction gives enough return on the effort? Are resources being secured, developed and preserved? Are profit and other targets high enough? Is enough money earmarked for capital investment and research?
- Run TOWS rather than SWOT (see box).
- Probe the history of the strategy. Find out who drove it. A rushed process suggests unexamined ramifications; a drawn-out one suggests a lowest-common-denominator political compromise. Either kind of process error can undermine adequacy.
SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats), which Watkins credits to a team at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in the late 1960s, was meant to combine internal capabilities with external developments to set strategic priorities. Its name implies starting with strengths and weaknesses, and without an external anchor that becomes abstract navel-gazing: teams exhaust themselves and shortchange the environment. The fix is to reverse the order, hence TOWS: (1) people grounded in the business scan the environment for threats and opportunities; (2) ask which weaknesses expose you to specific threats and which strengths let you seize specific opportunities; (3) translate this into strategic priorities (blunt critical threats, pursue high-potential openings) that feed a fuller planning process.
The SRI origin story (usually tied to Albert Humphrey) is widely repeated but thinly documented; the strengths/weaknesses versus opportunities/threats logic also appears in the Harvard Business School business-policy teaching of the mid-1960s (Learned, Christensen, Andrews and Guth). And "TOWS" is not a new label: Heinz Weihrich published "The TOWS Matrix" in Long Range Planning in 1982, crossing threats and opportunities with weaknesses and strengths to generate strategies. Watkins's advice on the order of analysis is sound; treat the history as folklore and give Weihrich the credit for the name.
Test 3: implementation
Has the direction been pursued energetically, and if not, why not? Judge by what people do, not what they say; this separates failures of formulation from failures of implementation. Diagnostic questions:
- Pattern of decisions. Is the overall pattern of decisions consistent with the stated direction? Which goals does the organization actually seem to pursue?
- Metrics in use. Are the specified performance metrics used in day-to-day decisions?
- Teamwork. If the strategy needs cross-functional integration, are people actually working as teams across functions?
- Learning infrastructure. If it needs new employee skills, is a learning-and-development infrastructure in place?
The answers tell you whether to push for change in the direction itself or in its execution.
Modifying strategic direction
How far you can change a flawed inheritance depends on two factors: the STARS situation and your ability to persuade and build support.
- If the group is on the wrong path, raise questions that lead your boss and others to reexamine the direction themselves.
- If it is right but too timid (not fast or far enough), tweak early and plan bigger changes later: for example, raise revenue targets modestly or invest in a needed technology sooner than planned.
- Hold fundamental changes until you have learned more and built support among key constituencies.
Shaping your group's structure
Whether or not direction changes, assess whether structure supports it; if it does not, the organization's energy flows to the wrong places. One caution dominates: much of an organization's power is allocated through its structure, because it defines who may do what. Restructure only when the need is obvious (turnarounds, rapid growth). Early structural change is especially perilous in realignments, which lack a burning platform to carry it.
Structure is how the group organizes people and technology to support mission, vision and strategy. Its four elements and the questions to ask of each:
| Structural element | What it covers | Assessment questions |
|---|---|---|
| Units | How direct reports are grouped: by function, product or geography | Does the grouping help achieve the mission and implement strategy? Are the right people in the right places for core objectives? |
| Reporting relationships and integration mechanisms | Lines of reporting and accountability; how work across units is integrated | Do reporting lines align effort? Is it clear who is accountable for what? Is cross-unit work integrated effectively? |
| Decision rights and rules | Who may make which decisions; rules that tie decisions to strategy | Do decision rights produce the best strategic decisions? Right balance of centralization vs decentralization, standardization vs customization? |
| Performance measurement and incentive systems | Evaluation metrics and reward systems | Do we measure and reward what matters most strategically? Right balance of fixed vs performance-based pay, individual vs group incentives? |
Look at whether the four pieces are in harmony or out of tune before generating redesign ideas. In a start-up there is nothing to evaluate: decide instead how you want the pieces to work.
Grapple with the trade-offs
There is no perfect structure; each embodies trade-offs, and the task is the right balance for your situation. Four recurring problems:
- Silos of excellence. Grouping similar specialists builds deep wells of expertise but isolates and compartmentalizes them. Check who bridges the chasms between functions and whether integration mechanisms (cross-functional teams, group performance incentives) exist.
- Decision scope too narrow or too broad. Rule of thumb: decisions belong with those who have the most relevant knowledge, provided their incentives favor the organization. Centralization lets you decide quickly but forgoes better-informed people's judgment, produces ill-informed decisions and overloads the deciders. Broad scope without understanding of larger implications produces unwise calls.
- Incentives to do the wrong things. The best predictor of what people do is what they are incentivized to do. Leaders align individual decision makers' interests with the group's, which is why group incentives work in some settings. Problems arise when pay rewards neither individual nor collective effort, or when it rewards individuals at the group's expense, as when people serving the same customers have no reason to cooperate (exactly Hannah's problem).
- Compartmentalization or diffused accountability. Reporting lines let you observe and control work, clarify responsibility and encourage accountability. Hierarchy makes that easier but breeds compartments and poor information sharing; matrices broaden information flow but can diffuse accountability.
Aligning core processes
Core processes (often called "systems") turn information, materials and knowledge into value: commercially viable products or services, new knowledge or ideas, productive relationships, or whatever else the larger organization deems essential. As with structure, the test is whether they support mission, vision and strategy.
Make the right trade-offs
The kind and extent of process you need depends on your primary goal:
- Flawless execution. High quality, reliability and low cost require processes that specify both ends and means (methods, techniques, tools) in exquisite detail. Typical settings: manufacturing plants and service delivery organizations.
- Innovation. The same tight processes impede innovation. Here, define the ends, check progress rigorously at key milestones, and control the means far less.
Analyze processes: the credit card case
A credit card company listed its core processes in three groups (Table 6-1), then mapped and improved each one, built measurement schemes, changed reward systems to align behavior, and hunted bottlenecks. Where critical tasks were insufficiently under control it revamped procedures and added support tools. Result: a dramatic rise in both customer satisfaction and productivity.
| Category | Processes (Table 6-1) |
|---|---|
| Production / service delivery | Application processing, credit screening, credit card production, authorizations management, transaction processing, billing, payment processing |
| Support / service | Collections, customer inquiry, relationship management, information and technology management |
| Business | Quality management, financial management, human resource management |
Your unit may have as many processes. The first job is to identify them and rank them by strategic importance: if strategy puts customer satisfaction ahead of product development, make sure every process that delivers to customers supports that aim.
Align processes with structure
Watkins compares structure to anatomy (skeleton, muscle, skin: the structural foundation) and processes to physiology (circulation, respiration, digestion: the systems that let parts work together). Both must be sound and reinforce one another.
- Productivity. Does it efficiently turn knowledge, materials and labor into value?
- Timeliness. Does it deliver the value when needed?
- Reliability. Does it work dependably, or break down too often?
- Quality. Does it consistently meet required standards?
- When they mesh: a customer service organization structured by customer segment also shares information across teams and responds well to issues affecting all segments.
- When they clash: different teams competing for the same customers with different sales processes hamstring each other and subvert the strategy.
Improve core processes
- Draw a process (work-flow) map: a plain diagram of how tasks flow through the individuals and groups that handle them (Figure 6-2 shows order fulfillment).
- Have each stage's owners chart the flow from beginning to end, themselves.
- Hunt bottlenecks and problem interfaces between people handling adjacent tasks. Failures are commonplace at hand-offs, for example when customer relations passes a special-handling request to fulfillment.
- Find high-leverage improvements with the team, such as streamlining and automating work flows, and agree them with your boss.
Mapping is itself collective learning: the group sees who does what within and between units and how problems arise. Two cautions: manage your processes as a portfolio, a few at a time, and factor in the organization's capacity to absorb change.
Developing your group's skill bases
If direct reports lack the skills and knowledge to run core processes superbly, the whole architecture is compromised.
- Individual expertise. Gained through training, education and experience.
- Relational knowledge. Knowing how to work together to integrate individual knowledge toward specified goals.
- Embedded knowledge. The core technologies performance depends on, such as customer databases or R&D technologies.
- Metaknowledge. Knowing where to go for critical information, for example through research institutions and technology partners.
Identify gaps and resources
The aim is to find (1) critical gaps between needed and existing knowledge and (2) underutilized resources (partially exploited technologies, squandered expertise). Closing the first and using the second can yield significant gains in performance and productivity.
- Finding gaps. Revisit mission, strategy and core processes; envision the ideal mix of the four knowledge types; assess current skills, knowledge and technologies; sort gaps into quick repairs and slow builds.
- Finding hidden resources. Look for individuals or groups who perform well above average and ask what enables them: technologies, methods, materials, support from key people that could be exported to the rest of the unit. Look for promising product ideas left on the shelf for lack of interest or money, and production resources that could serve new customers.
Change architecture to change culture
Culture cannot be changed directly. It is shaped by the four architectural elements and by leadership behavior, so cultural change means changing the architecture and modelling the new behavior. The clearest lever is metrics: redefine how success is judged, then align objectives and incentives with the new measures.
- Interdependent work (a new-product development team): put more weight on group incentives.
- Independent, measurable work (a sales unit): put more weight on individual incentives.
Getting aligned
Pull all these analyses into a single alignment plan. When you keep failing to get people to adopt better behavior, step back and ask whether misalignment, not the people, is the cause: the chapter's opening lesson restated as a rule.
- What misalignments do you see among direction, structure, processes and skills, and how will you dig deeper to confirm or refine them?
- What decisions on customers, capital, capabilities and commitments must you make, and how and when?
- What is your assessment of the direction's coherence and adequacy, and what are your thoughts on changing direction?
- What are the structure's strengths and weaknesses, and which structural changes are you considering?
- What are the core processes, how well do they perform, and what are your improvement priorities?
- What skill gaps and underutilized resources have you found, and what are your priorities for strengthening key skill bases?
Build Your Team
The most important decisions you make in your first 90 days will probably be about people. A high-performing team gives you enormous leverage in creating value; no leader achieves much alone, and bad early personnel choices will haunt you. Watkins's sequence has four parts: assess the team you inherited, evolve it without wrecking short-term performance, align it with push and pull tools, and lead it through new processes for meetings and decisions.
Opening case: two VPs, two plans, one exit
Liam Geffen took over a troubled business unit of a process automation company. The prior year's appraisals rated everyone either outstanding or marginal, nobody in between: a sign his predecessor had played favorites.
- Checking the evidence. Conversations and a review of operating results confirmed the skew. The VP of marketing was competent but no "minor god", and believed his own press; the VP of sales was solid but had been scapegoated for the predecessor's bad calls. Marketing and sales were at odds.
- Action. Liam met each VP separately, told them bluntly how he saw their ratings, and set each a detailed two-month plan. In parallel he and his HR VP quietly ran outside searches for both jobs, and he held skip-level meetings to gauge talent depth and spot internal candidates.
- Outcome. By the end of month three he had signaled to the marketing VP that he would not make it; the VP left and was replaced by one of his own direct reports. The sales head rose to the challenge. Liam now had strong people in both key seats.
The case previews the chapter's method: test inherited judgments against data, give people a clear chance with explicit plans and deadlines, and build backups in parallel so a decision does not leave a hole.
Avoiding common traps
Team-building mistakes delay the break-even point or cause outright derailment. Watkins lists eight:
- Criticizing the previous leadership. Nothing is gained by it. You need not condone poor past performance and may highlight problems, but concentrate on current behavior and results and the changes that improve them.
- Keeping the existing team too long. Outside a start-up you inherit a team and must mold it to your A-item priorities. Moving too fast happens, but keeping people too long is more common, from hubris ("they only lacked a leader like me") or from ducking tough calls. Strong performers, you included, then carry the load. Timing depends on STARS (shorter in a turnaround, longer in a realignment); where constraints block changes, get the most from people, for example by defining roles. Either way, set deadlines in your 90-day plan for reaching conclusions and acting, and stick to them.
- Not balancing stability and change. Rebuilding an inherited team is like repairing a leaky ship in mid-ocean: skip repairs and you never arrive; change too much and you sink. Make only truly high-priority changes early, and live with a B-player for a while if you can.
- Not aligning organization and team in parallel. A captain cannot choose crew without knowing destination, route and ship. Build the team in isolation from changes in direction, structure, processes and skills and you get the right people in the wrong jobs. Figure 7-1 runs organizational assessment and alignment in parallel with team assessment and personnel change.
- Not holding on to the good people. One manager's lesson: "When you shake the tree, good people can fall out, too." Uncertainty pushes top performers to look elsewhere. Within what you can say, signal that you recognize their capabilities; a little reassurance goes a long way.
- Team building before the core is in place. Explicit team-building strengthens bonds among people some of whom may be leaving. Hold group meetings, but keep them on the business until your team is largely set.
- Making implementation-dependent decisions too early. Where key initiatives need team buy-in, defer decisions until core members are in place. Some calls cannot wait, but committing newcomers to plans they had no part in defining is counterproductive; weigh speed against lost buy-in.
- Trying to do it all yourself. Restructuring carries emotional, legal and company-policy complications. Find advisers; the support of a good HR person is indispensable.
Assessing your team
Expect a mix of A-players (outstanding), B-players (average) and C-players (not up to the job), plus a group with its own dynamics and politics, perhaps including someone who wanted your job. Sort out who is who, what roles people played and how the group worked within the first 30 to 60 days, depending on your STARS mix.
Establish your evaluative criteria
Early impressions will form as you meet people and read results; do not suppress them, but step back and run a rigorous evaluation. Start by making your criteria conscious.
- Competence. The technical competence and experience to do the job effectively.
- Judgment. Good judgment, especially under pressure or when sacrifices for the greater good are required.
- Energy. The right kind of energy, or burned out and disengaged.
- Focus. Able to set priorities and stick to them, or prone to riding off in all directions.
- Relationships. Gets along with the team and supports collective decision making, or is difficult to work with.
- Trust. Can be relied on to keep their word and follow through on commitments.
Table 7-1 (a blank worksheet in the book) turns this into an exercise:
| Criterion | Your weight (total 100) | Threshold (*) |
|---|---|---|
| Competence | __ | |
| Judgment | __ | |
| Energy | __ | |
| Focus | __ | |
| Relationships | __ | |
| Trust | __ |
- Step 1. Divide 100 points across the six according to the weight you actually give each when judging direct reports.
- Step 2. Mark one with an asterisk as your threshold issue: if someone fails a basic threshold on it, nothing else matters.
- Step 3. Ask whether the result really reflects your values, and whether it reveals blind spots in how you judge people.
Check your assumptions
Your weights encode beliefs about what you can and cannot change in people. Scoring relationships low and judgment high suggests you think you can influence team relationships but not judgment. Many leaders make trust the threshold because it is essential and seems unchangeable. Those beliefs may be right; the point is to know you hold them.
Adjust the weights for four factors
- Functional expertise. Judging competence across marketing, finance, operations and R&D is hard, especially for first-time enterprise leaders. Insiders can ask respected people in each function who know the individuals. New enterprise leaders should build a template per function: function-specific KPIs, what they should and should not show, key questions, and warning signs, developed by talking to experienced enterprise leaders. (Watkins points to his HBR article "How Managers Become Leaders," June 2012.)
- Extent of teamwork. A VP of sales running scattered regional sales managers needs different criteria from a leader of a new-product development project. Where reports work independently, their ability to collaborate matters less, and a high-performing group rather than a true team may be fine.
- STARS mix. In sustaining success you may have time to develop one or two high-potential B-players you are confident can reach A level; in a turnaround you need A-level performance now. Judge people's STARS experience too: in a once-great business that slid and failed to realign, people who would be A-players in sustaining success or realignment may be the wrong leaders for a turnaround.
- Criticality of positions. It is about positions as well as players. List the positions of direct and indirect reports and rate each on a 1-10 criticality scale. Because change costs energy, a B-player in a non-critical role may be acceptable; in a critical role, not at all.
Assess your people
- First test. Does anyone fail your threshold? If so, start planning a replacement.
- Second test. Surviving the threshold does not make someone a keeper: weigh strengths and weaknesses using your weights, then decide who makes the grade.
Meet each person one-on-one as soon as possible. The format may be informal, formal or mixed, but your preparation and focus should be standardized:
- Prepare for each meeting. Review personnel history, performance data and appraisals; learn each person's technical or professional skills so you can judge how they function on the team.
- Create an interview template. Ask everyone the same questions and compare answers.
- Look for verbal and nonverbal clues. Word choice, body language and hot buttons.
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of our existing strategy?
- What are the biggest challenges and opportunities facing us in the short term? In the medium term?
- What resources could we leverage more effectively?
- How could we improve the way the team works together?
- If you were in my position, what would your priorities be?
What to watch for in and around the conversations:
- What is not said. Does the person volunteer information or must you extract it? Do they take responsibility for problems in their area, make excuses, or subtly point fingers?
- Consistency. Do facial expressions and body language match the words?
- Hot buttons. Topics that trigger strong emotion show what motivates someone and which changes would energize them.
- Relations with peers. Outside the meetings, are their relationships cordial and productive, tense and competitive, or judgmental and reserved?
Test their judgment
Assess judgment, not only competence or raw intelligence: some very bright people have lousy business judgment, and some of average competence have extraordinary judgment. Be clear what mix of knowledge and judgment each key role needs.
Judgment shows over time as the ability to (1) make sound predictions and (2) devise strategies that avoid problems. Both rest on mental models: ways of picking out the essential features and dynamics of an emerging situation and turning that insight into action. That is what expert judgment is. Since you lack time to wait for workplace predictions to resolve, use a domain with fast feedback:
The fast judgment test:
- Ask about a passion outside work (politics, cooking, baseball: the domain does not matter).
- Ask for a prediction: who will do better in the debate, what makes a perfect soufflé, which team wins tonight.
- Press them to commit. Unwillingness to go out on a limb is itself a warning sign.
- Probe the rationale. Does the reasoning make sense?
- Follow up if possible to see what happened.
The logic: someone who has built expertise in a private passion probably has done the same in a business field they care about. Whatever method you use, probe for the hallmarks of expertise rather than waiting for on-the-job results.
The soufflé-and-ballgame test is a heuristic with no evidence offered in the book, and it can favor confident talkers over careful thinkers or penalize people whose passions you do not share; use it as one input, never a verdict. Likewise the A/B/C-player labels (popularized by "topgrading" approaches of the 1990s and 2000s) invite fixed judgments about people; Watkins softens this with position criticality, the observe category and his insistence on fair treatment, which are the parts to keep.
Assess the team as a whole
- Study the data. Read team reports and meeting minutes, and any climate or morale surveys.
- Systematically compare answers to your common questions. Overly consistent answers may signal an agreed party line, or genuinely shared views: you must judge which. Little consistency suggests the team lacks coherence.
- Probe group dynamics. In early meetings watch for alliances, attitudes, leadership roles, who defers to whom on which topics, and eye-rolling or visible frustration when someone speaks: clues to coalitions and conflicts that test your early insights.
Evolving your team
Having weighed capability against functional expertise, teamwork needs, the STARS portfolio and position criticality, decide how to deal with each person. By roughly day 30 you should be able to place everyone provisionally:
- Keep in place. Performing well in the current job.
- Keep and develop. Needs development, and you have the time and energy to provide it.
- Move to another position. A strong performer in a role that does not use their skills or qualities.
- Replace (low priority). Should be replaced, but not urgently.
- Replace (high priority). Should be replaced as soon as possible.
- Observe for a while. Still a question mark; learn more first.
These need not be irreversible, but you should hold each with 90-plus percent confidence; anyone you are unsure of stays in observe, and you refine as you learn.
Consider alternatives
Before acting on high-priority replacements, pause. Termination is slow: even with documented poor performance it can take months or longer, and with no paper trail you must first build one. Legal protections, cultural norms and political alliances may make removal impossible even for a miserable performer, in which case you play the hand you were dealt.
Options short of firing:
- A clear message. A poor performer often leaves of their own accord once you signal your view.
- Shift the role. Move them to a team role that suits their skills: rarely permanent, but it keeps the organization running while you search.
- Move them out of the way. If someone cannot contribute or is disruptive or dispiriting, better they do nothing than destroy value: shrink their responsibilities, which also signals your judgment and may prompt a move.
- Move them elsewhere in the organization. Can benefit everyone if handled well, but only if you genuinely believe they will perform there: dumping a problem on a colleague damages your reputation.
Develop backups
To keep the team running while you build the long-term configuration, you may hold an underperformer in place during a search. As soon as you are reasonably sure someone will not make it, look discreetly for a successor: assess people on your team and elsewhere for potential to move up, use skip-level meetings and regular reporting sessions to read the talent pool, and ask HR to launch a search (exactly Liam's approach).
Treat people respectfully
Throughout, treat everyone with respect. Even when people agree someone must go, your reputation suffers if the process looks unfair. Show the care with which you are judging capability and job fit; direct reports form lasting impressions of you from how you handle this.
Aligning your team
The right people are necessary but not sufficient. Break large goals into components, assign responsibility for each with the team, and make each person accountable for their goals. A blend of push and pull tools (Figure 7-2) works best.
Push. Goals, performance measurement systems and incentives, which motivate through authority, loyalty, fear and expected reward. Suits methodical, risk-averse people. Turnarounds supply push naturally: the crisis itself teaches that something must be done.
Pull. A compelling vision that inspires through a positive, exciting image of the future. Suits high-energy go-getters. Lean on it in realignments, where urgency is hard to create: define what the organization could become.
Define goals and performance metrics
On the push side, clear, explicit metrics, consistently applied, are the best route to accountability; choose measures that show as clearly as possible whether a goal was met.
| Vague goal | Quantified version |
|---|---|
| "Improve sales" | Increase sales of product X by 15 to 30 percent over Q4 of this year |
| "Decrease product development time" | Cut development time on product line Y from twelve months to six within two years |
Align incentives
Two baseline choices: the mix of monetary and nonmonetary rewards, and whether to reward individual or collective performance. The second follows from whether you need true teamwork: if success depends on cooperation and integration of expertise, use group goals and incentives; if it hinges on independent individual achievement, a high-performing group with individual incentives suffices. Usually you reward both, weighted by the relative importance of independent vs interdependent work.
- Total reward = nonmonetary + monetary. The split depends on (1) the availability of nonmonetary rewards such as advancement and recognition and (2) how much people value them.
- Monetary = fixed + performance-based. The split depends on (1) how observable and measurable contributions are and (2) the time lag between performance and results. Lower observability and longer lags mean more fixed pay.
- Performance-based = individual + group. The split depends on interdependence. Superior results from the sum of independent efforts (a sales group) call for individual rewards; where cooperation and integration are critical (a new-product development team), weight group incentives, possibly at several levels: team, unit and company.
Incentive design is hard, but misalignment is dangerous: your reports must act as your agents. Never reward individual goals where teamwork is needed, or the reverse.
Articulate your vision
The vision is a key reason you and the team come to work at all. An inspiring one has three attributes:
- It taps sources of inspiration. It rests on intrinsic motivators such as teamwork and contribution to society. An orthopedic medical device company used "Restoring the joy of motion", backed by stories of injured athletes competing again and grandparents able to hold their grandchildren.
- It makes people part of "the story." It links people to a larger narrative that gives meaning, such as a quest to recapture past glories.
- It uses evocative language. It describes graphically what will be achieved and how achieving it will feel. Launching twelve rockets in ten years is a goal; President John F. Kennedy's man on the moon, returned safely by the decade's end, is a vision.
Use Table 7-2 to draft it, constantly asking why people should feel inspired to give extra effort for your goals.
Four principles for creating and communicating a shared vision:
- Use consultation to gain commitment. Be clear which elements are nonnegotiable; beyond them, let others shape the vision so they share ownership. Well-designed off-sites are a powerful vehicle (see the checklist).
- Develop stories and metaphors. A good parable crystallizes core lessons and models the behavior you want.
- Reinforce it. Persuasion research stresses repetition: a few core themes repeated until they sink in, and repeated beyond that to deepen commitment.
- Develop channels. You cannot reach everyone in person, so you must persuade from a distance through channels that carry the vision beyond the top team.
Above all, live the vision: one undercut by inconsistent behavior from you or your team is worse than no vision at all.
Six purposes (pick your reasons first):
- Diagnostic focus. A shared understanding of the business.
- Strategy focus. Define the vision and create a strategy.
- Team-process focus. Change how the team works together.
- Relationship focus. Build or alter relationships in the group.
- Planning focus. Develop a plan and commit to it.
- Conflict-resolution focus. Address conflicts and negotiate agreements.
Logistics: when and where; which issues, in what order; who facilitates. Lead and facilitate yourself only if you are skilled, respected and not enmeshed in a conflict; otherwise bring in a substantive expert or a process orchestrator.
Traps: do not attempt more than two purposes in a day or two; and do not jump to vision and strategy before laying the foundation of shared diagnosis and working relationships.
Leading your team
Teams differ sharply in how they run meetings, decide, resolve conflict and divide work. You will want changes, but do not plunge in: first learn how the team worked and how well, so you preserve what worked and change what did not.
Assess existing processes
Talk to team members, peers and your boss; read minutes and reports. Probe four areas:
- Participants' roles. Who had most influence on key issues? Was there a devil's advocate, an innovator, someone who avoided uncertainty? Whom did everyone listen to most? Who was the peacemaker, the rabble-rouser?
- Team meetings. How often, with whom, and who set the agendas?
- Decision making. Who made which decisions, who was consulted, and who was told afterward?
- Leadership style. How did your predecessor prefer to learn, communicate, motivate and decide? How does that compare with your style, and how will you handle the impact of marked differences?
Target processes for change
Spell out changes in specific terms: how often the team meets, who attends which meetings, and how agendas are set and circulated. Clear processes help the team coalesce and win early group victories.
Alter the participants. Core-meeting membership is a common dysfunction and a chance to signal change:
- Too inclusive (too many people discussing and deciding): shrink the core group and streamline, signalling you value efficiency and focus.
- Too exclusive (people with relevant views and information systematically left out): broaden participation judiciously, signalling you will not play favorites.
Lead decision making
Few leaders lead team decisions well. Most stick with one approach, from comfort and a belief that consistency avoids confusion; Watkins cites research that this is wrongheaded. Different decisions need different processes, plus a framework for explaining why.
| Mode | How it works | Main risk |
|---|---|---|
| Unilateral | Leader decides alone or with a few personal advisers | Misses critical information; lukewarm support in implementation |
| Consult-and-decide | Leader gathers information and advice (individually, as a group or both) but makes the final call: harnesses the group for analysis, not closure | People not bought in; time spent selling the decision later |
| Build consensus | Leader seeks both analysis and buy-in; aims for sufficient consensus: a critical mass thinks it right and the rest can live with and support it | Slower; divisive issues can stall |
| Unanimous consent | Everyone must agree | Decision diffusion: endless debate or a lowest-common-denominator compromise; threats and opportunities unaddressed |
Choosing consult-and-decide because you are short of time is emphatically wrong. You reach a decision faster but not necessarily the outcome: you may spend the saved time selling the call or pressuring reluctant implementers. Leaders with the action imperative are most at risk.
- Highly divisive decisions that create winners and losers: use consult-and-decide and take the heat. Consensus will fail and make everyone angry; decisions that allocate losses or pain belong to the leader.
- Energetic implementation needed from people whose performance you cannot observe and control: build consensus; consult-and-decide may be quicker to a decision but not to the result.
- Inexperienced team: rely more on consult-and-decide until you have measured and developed them; trying consensus risks frustration and imposing a decision anyway, which undercuts teamwork.
- Authority to establish (for example, supervising former peers): make key early calls with consult-and-decide, then relax toward consensus once people see you can make tough calls steadily.
- STARS. Start-ups and turnarounds pose mainly technical problems (markets, products, technologies) and people often crave "strong" leadership: consult-and-decide works. Realignments and sustaining success involve strong, intact teams and cultural and political issues: build consensus.
Three further disciplines:
- Preferences are not destiny. Consult-and-decide people should experiment with sufficient consensus where it fits; consensus people should feel free to decide when appropriate.
- Run a fair process. Explain which process and why. People often support decisions they dislike if (1) their views and interests were heard and taken seriously and (2) they received a plausible rationale. Never stage a charade of consensus for a decision already made: it fools no one, breeds cynicism and undercuts implementation; simply consult and decide.
- Switch modes as you learn. Start with consensus but reserve the right to decide if the process turns divisive; or start with consult-and-decide and move to consensus if energetic implementation proves critical and agreement is possible.
Adjust for virtual teams
Cohesion is harder to build and sustain remotely, and evaluation is harder without early face-to-face contact. Five additions to the usual principles:
- Bring the team together early if at all possible. Technology is improving, but for true teamwork nothing replaces meeting to build shared knowledge, relationships, alignment and mutual commitment.
- Set clear communication norms. Which channels and how to use them; explicit responsiveness agreements (urgent messages answered within a set time); virtual-meeting etiquette (interrupt less, make points more efficiently).
- Define team support roles. Virtual teams need more discipline in capturing information and following up; assign roles such as note-taker and agenda-creator, perhaps rotating.
- Create a rhythm. Co-located teams get routines for free (arriving together, coffee talk); teams across time zones need imposed structure: fixed meeting times and set agendas.
- Celebrate success. Remote members, especially a few among a mostly co-located group, easily feel disconnected; recognition is essential.
Jump-starting the team
Assess, evolve, align and lead well, and the payoff is focus and energy behind goals and early wins. The signal of success is the team's break-even point: when the energy the team generates exceeds the energy you must put in. That takes time: you must charge the battery before you can start the engine.
- What are your criteria for assessing team members, and how do functions, required teamwork, the STARS portfolio and position criticality change their weights?
- How will you go about assessing your team?
- What personnel changes do you need? Which are urgent and which can wait? How will you create backups and options?
- How will you make high-priority changes, preserve the dignity of those affected, and where will you find help with the restructuring?
- How will you align the team: what mix of push (goals, incentives) and pull (shared vision)?
- How should the new team operate: what roles should people play, should the core team shrink or expand, and how will you manage decision making?
Create Alliances
Success in a new role depends on people over whom you have no authority, and you may arrive with little relationship capital. Start early: build "relationship bank accounts" with people you will need later, and notice when a role demands persuasion and alliance building rather than command. Map whose support you need, how influence really flows, and who will back, block or can be swayed, then build a winning alliance with deliberate influence tactics.
Opening case: a good business case stuck in quicksand
Alexia Belenko, a sales and marketing professional, rose through country management at MedDev, a global medical devices company, to managing director (country manager) in her native Russia. To broaden her, leaders made her regional VP of marketing for EMEA, responsible for marketing strategy across the region's country operations.
- Two bosses. Solid line to Marjorie Aaron, SVP of corporate marketing at US headquarters; dotted line to her former boss Harald Jaeger, international VP for EMEA operations, to whom all the region's MDs reported.
- Diagnosis. After one-on-ones with EMEA MDs and Harald, and a trip to the US to see Marjorie and some of her reports, she concluded the big problem and opportunity was the tension between centralized and decentralized marketing decisions for new-product launches.
- Proposal. A business case for more standardization of overall brand identity and positioning and more MD flexibility on adjustments to advertising and promotion plans.
- Response. Marjorie and Harald saw merit but would not commit; both told her to brief the stakeholders: corporate marketing in the US and the EMEA country managers.
- Quicksand. Six weeks of confounding meetings later: a session with corporate marketing including David Wallace (head of global branding, reporting to Marjorie), then a presentation to 30-plus people in the US, nearly all suggesting more central control. A conference call with the MDs went no better: they welcomed flexibility but closed ranks at any limit on autonomy. Respected MD Rolf Eiklid doubted the trade was worth it and that corporate would honor it: flexibility had been promised before and never materialized.
- Four months in, Alexia was frustrated by headquarters maneuvering and doubting her patience and finesse for the politics of a regional role.
Watkins's diagnosis of her error has two parts. She was used to positional authority and a team reporting to her, and did not see early enough that she now had to influence through persuasion and alliance building. And even leaders with real authority should build support for early-win objectives: work out whom to influence, who will support or resist, and how to win swing voters, as an integral part of the 90-day plan.
Defining your influence objectives
Start with why you need others' support. For each early win, ask which ones depend on people over whom you have no or insufficient authority, then work out whose support is essential and how to get it. Consider an alliance-building plan for each early-win project.
What Alexia was really trying to do
- The goal. A "grand bargain" between her new and old bosses and their organizations on how important marketing decisions get made in EMEA.
- The status quo. A long-standing compromise: an uneasy but more or less stable equilibrium. On its face any change was win-lose: corporate wanted centralization and standardization, the MDs local customization.
- The implication. Any agreement would be a package of trades both sides could support, built on supportive alliances inside each side.
- Critical mass, not unanimity. Some people had too much invested in the status quo, so the aim should have been a critical mass of support in both corporate and the region.
Had she framed it that way, she would have spent less effort on rational problem-solving alone and more on how her agenda fit the politics on both sides of the Atlantic; she would not have assumed the strength of her case would carry the day or felt she had to win every stakeholder. Mapping influence would also have exposed potential blockers and what it would take to get them to yes.
Alexia's analysis was sound; her mistake was treating approval as a matter of logic rather than coalition. Where change redistributes power, you need a mapped, sequenced alliance, and a deal that a critical mass on each side can accept.
Understanding the terrain of influence
Identify the key players
Next, name the key decision makers, what you need each to do, and when (Table 8-1, a blank worksheet in the book), for each early-win initiative.
| Influential player | What you need them to do | By when |
|---|---|---|
| e.g. Marjorie Aaron | Approve the new EMEA decision rules | Before launch planning |
| e.g. Harald Jaeger | Approve and commit the MDs | Same time |
| ... | ... | ... |
Winning and blocking alliances
- Winning alliance. The set of people who collectively have the power to support your agenda. For Alexia: Marjorie (corporate) plus Harald (EMEA).
- Blocking alliance. Those who collectively can say no. Ask who might band together, why, and how they would impede you; knowing where opposition will come from lets you neutralize it.
Map influence networks
Senior decision makers rely heavily on trusted advisers, so map who influences whom on your issues. Formal authority is only one source of power; people defer to others' opinions on important matters. Marjorie might defer to David on how local customization affects brand identity; Harald might defer to Rolf, who commands his peers' respect and represents them.
These networks are channels of communication and persuasion running parallel to the formal structure, a shadow organization that sometimes supports and sometimes subverts it. Alexia needed maps for both corporate marketing and her old EMEA colleagues.
Ways to accelerate the mapping:
- Contact points. Start where your unit touches others: customers and suppliers, internal and external, are natural focal points for alliances.
- Your boss's list. Ask for the key people outside your group you should know, and meet them early. In the spirit of the golden rule of transitions, give your own new reports a priority relationship list and help them make contact.
- Observation. Watch who defers to whom on which topics, whom people go to for advice, who shares what information, and where eyes track when an issue is raised.
- Expertise. Deep knowledge others depend on.
- Control of information. Deciding what others know, and when.
- Connections to others. A position in the network that links people.
- Access to resources. Budgets, rewards and other things people want.
- Personal loyalty. People who will follow someone because of who they are.
As patterns clarify, two features matter most:
- Opinion leaders. People with disproportionate influence from informal authority, expertise or force of personality. Convince them and broader acceptance tends to follow.
- Power coalitions. Groups that explicitly or implicitly cooperate over the long term to pursue goals or protect privileges. Linking your agenda to theirs builds support, provided you do not water down your aims or get caught in political machinations that undercut you.
Draw an influence diagram
Summarize the map in a diagram (Figure 8-1). In Alexia's case:
- Centre. Marjorie and Harald, the winning alliance: both had to agree to the package.
- Corporate side. Marjorie strongly influenced by David (VP global branding) and Tim Marshall (VP in corporate strategy).
- EMEA side. Harald influenced by the collective view of his country managers, and especially by Rolf, the longtime Nordic MD, who also sways the other MDs.
- Alexia herself. Significant influence on Harald, some on Marjorie. Heavier arrows mean stronger influence.
Supporters, opponents and persuadables
Supporters
Where to look:
- Shared vision. People who want the same future, or who pushed similar changes before.
- Quiet reformers. People already working for change on a small scale, like a plant engineer who found a way to cut waste sharply.
- Newcomers. People not yet acculturated to how the company works.
Then solidify and nurture support rather than taking it for granted: preach to the converted, and ask supporters to act as force multipliers, influencing others with the best arguments you can give them. Look also for alliances of convenience: people you disagree with on much, but who align on this issue; educate and enlist them.
Opponents
True adversaries will oppose you whatever you do. Some simply believe your assessment is wrong; others resist for reasons that can be addressed.
- Comfort with the status quo. Change could undermine their position or alter established relationships.
- Fear of looking incompetent. They worry they will struggle to adapt and perform badly afterward.
- Threats to core values. They see you promoting a culture that spurns traditional value or rewards inappropriate behavior.
- Threats to their power. For example, shifting decision rights to frontline managers strips them of authority.
- Negative consequences for allies. Your agenda would hurt people they care about or feel responsible for.
- Probe before labeling. Ask why people resist before calling them implacably opposed; motives suggest counters (fear of incompetence, for instance, yields to help building new skills).
- Symbolic wins. "The enemy converted to ally" is a story that resonates; so is redemption, helping a marginalized or "ineffective" person prove themselves.
- Friends who disagree. A special class: good relationships, but not aligned on this agenda. Preserve the relationship by explaining what and why, joint problem-solving, and compensating their losses with help on other issues or a favor returned later.
Persuadables
People indifferent, undecided or uncommitted who could be won. Find out which kind:
| Type | What is going on | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Indifferent | Your agenda does not touch them much | Trade: your support for theirs |
| Undecided | Lack information or conviction | Find out why; educate and persuade |
| Political operators | Waiting to see which way the wind blows | Show momentum so they climb on the bandwagon |
Code the influence map by stance (the book uses dark = opposed, light grey = supportive, mid grey = undecided; green-yellow-red works too). At MedDev: Tim supportive, David undecided, Rolf somewhat opposed. Again, a deal needed a critical mass on both sides.
Understanding the swing figures
With players, alliances and stances mapped, focus on the swing individuals you must move: for Alexia, David and Rolf. Analyze three things for each (Table 8-2, a blank worksheet in the book).
1. Intrinsic motivators
People are driven by needs for recognition, control, power, affiliation (relationships with colleagues) and personal growth, in very different weightings. Work out what makes each swing figure tick: where possible ask questions and listen actively, especially to learn what opponents like Rolf object to and why. Identify losses they are trying to avoid and a valuable trade that might compensate.
2. Situational pressures
- Driving forces push people toward the yes you want; restraining forces are situational reasons to say no.
- Social psychology shows we overestimate personality and underestimate situation when explaining behavior (the fundamental attribution error). Rolf may be intrinsically inflexible and protective of status, or responding to his business goals and incentives and his peers' opinions, or both.
- So map the forces acting on each person, then strengthen drivers and remove restraints.
3. Perceived alternatives
- What options do they think they have? The key test: does an opponent believe resistance, overt or covert, can preserve the status quo? If so, convince them the status quo is no longer viable. Once change looks inevitable, the game shifts from opposition to a contest over what kind of change happens. (Could Alexia have convinced the decision makers that the current situation was unacceptable?)
- Insecure agreements. People may doubt that promised concessions will materialize and prefer fighting for the status quo, which is exactly what Rolf voiced. Raise confidence, for example by phasing in changes, each step linked to successful implementation of the previous one.
| Swing figure | Intrinsic motivators | Driving forces | Restraining forces | Perceived alternatives |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| e.g. Rolf Eiklid | Status among peers? Control? | Growth goals, peer pressure for flexibility | Distrust of corporate promises, loss of autonomy | Believes resistance can keep status quo |
Crafting influence strategies
Watkins names seven classic techniques; the art lies in combining them for each person.
Consultation
Good consultation is active listening: pose questions, let people voice real concerns, then summarize and feed back what you heard. It signals respect and promotes acceptance of difficult decisions. Its persuasive power is vastly underrated, because the questions you ask and how you summarize shape perceptions and so frame the choice.
Framing
Craft arguments person by person: right tone, resonant with each player's motivations and pressures, and above all shaping how they see their alternatives. If Alexia cannot build and communicate a compelling case, nothing else will matter. With Rolf she should have asked what would move him to neutral or supportive: specific concerns to address, a set of trades attractive if implementation were guaranteed, and help with other agendas he cares about.
- Logos: data and reasoned arguments. Which data or analysis will they find persuasive? What logic appeals to them? Are they falling prey to biases, and how could you demonstrate it?
- Ethos: principles, policies and other "rules". Which principles (such as fairness) or policies should they be convinced apply here? If you ask them to act against a principle, can you help them justify an exception?
- Pathos: emotions and meaning. Which emotional triggers (loyalty, contribution to the common good) can you appeal to? Can you help them find meaning in supporting or opposing a cause? If they are overheated, can you help them step back and regain perspective?
Two craft rules for framing:
- Repeat a few core themes. People learn by repetition; success is when they echo your themes without realizing it. But like a song played too often, identical wording breeds backlash because it reveals the persuasion: repeat and elaborate without sounding like a parrot.
- Inoculate. Present and decisively refute weak versions of counterarguments you expect, which immunizes audiences against stronger versions later.
Choice-shaping
Shape how people perceive their options so that saying no is hard:
- Narrow or broad. A request that might set an undesirable precedent is best framed as a circumscribed one-off; other choices sit better inside a higher-level set of issues.
- Broaden win-lose choices. Adding issues or options enables mutually beneficial trades that enlarge the pie.
- Neutralize toxic issues. Set them aside explicitly for later, or make up-front commitments that allay anxieties.
Social influence
Others' opinions and social rules change how attractive an initiative looks: knowing a highly respected person already supports it shifts everyone else. Get opinion leaders to commit and mobilize their networks. Research suggests people prefer to:
- Stay consistent with strongly held values and beliefs, usually shared with reference groups; acting against them causes psychological dissonance.
- Stay consistent with prior commitments and decisions, since reneging draws social sanctions and signals unreliability; they avoid reversing themselves or setting constraining precedents.
- Repay obligations. Reciprocity is a strong norm; appeals invoking past favors work.
- Preserve their reputations. Choices that protect or enhance reputation are favored.
So avoid asking people to act against their values or prior commitments, lose status, risk reputation or draw the disapproval of respected others. If someone has a competing prior commitment, help them escape it gracefully.
Incrementalism
People will move step by step where they would refuse a single leap, because each step sets a new psychological reference point. Alexia could have begun with meetings merely to explore the centralization-versus-flexibility problem, then analysed each issue, then, after working through all major concerns, discussed principles of a good solution.
- Shared diagnosis is a form of incrementalism: having helped diagnose the problem, people find it hard to deny the need for tough decisions. Then move to options, then to evaluation criteria; by the end people accept outcomes they would have rejected at the outset.
- Decisions are like rivers: big choices draw on tributary processes that define the problem, generate alternatives and set criteria. By the time those are fixed, the choice may be a foregone conclusion, so shape the process before momentum builds the wrong way.
Sequencing
Be strategic about the order in which you approach people. Win the right person first and a virtuous cycle starts: each respected ally makes the next easier, your resource base grows, success looks likelier, and recruitment gets easier still. Alexia should have seen Tim Marshall first, solidified his support and armed him to persuade Marjorie.
- One-on-one meetings are for learning the lay of the land: hearing positions, shaping views with new information, negotiating side deals.
- Group meetings are for the end game: in serious negotiations people often make final concessions and commitments only face to face with the others.
Action-forcing events
When success needs coordinated action by many people, one person's delay cascades, giving everyone else an excuse. So eliminate inaction as an option with events that induce commitments or action: meetings, review sessions, teleconferences and deadlines. Regular progress reviews and tough questioning of those who miss agreed goals raise the psychological pressure to follow through.
Figure 8-1 shades David as opposed while the text calls him undecided; read the text as authoritative. Watkins never tells us how Alexia's story ended, so the case illustrates errors rather than proving the method works. His social-influence list closely tracks Robert Cialdini's principles (consistency, reciprocity, social proof) and the attribution point is classic social psychology (Lee Ross, 1977); both are well supported, but they work best as understanding, and used crudely (inoculation, staged deadlines, exploiting obligations) they can read as manipulation and burn the trust the chapter's own "relationship bank account" depends on.
Putting it all together
Alliance building runs in sequence: decide whose support you need, map influence, identify support and opposition, isolate the swing figures, understand their motivations, situational pressures and perceived alternatives, then craft influence strategies to assemble the winning alliance.
- What critical alliances, inside the organization and outside, do you need to advance your agenda?
- What agendas are other key players pursuing, and where might they align or conflict with yours?
- Where can you build long-term, broad-based alliances, and where can shorter-term agreements serve specific objectives?
- How does influence work here: who defers to whom on key issues?
- Who is likely to support you, who to oppose you, and who is persuadable?
- What are the swing figures' motivations, situational pressures and perceptions of their choices?
- What should your influence strategy be: how will you frame arguments, and could incrementalism, sequencing and action-forcing events help?
Manage Yourself
A transition is a balancing act under maximum uncertainty: you don't know what you don't know, you have no support network yet, and if you relocated, you and your family are in transition too, while everyone expects you to acclimate fast and start changing things. Self-management rests on three pillars: applying the 90-day strategies, enforcing personal disciplines, and building support systems at work and at home.
Opening case: losing on the home front
After six strong years in the New York office of a large media company, Stephen Erikson was promoted to a senior role in its Canadian unit. He expected an easy move: Canadians and Americans seemed alike, and Toronto was safe, with good restaurants and culture.
- The plan. He moved at once into a short-term downtown apartment. His wife Irene, a freelance interior designer, listed their co-op and prepared Katherine (12) and Elizabeth (9) for a mid-school-year move; waiting four months to the year's end had seemed too long apart.
- Work friction. Getting anything done felt like wading through molasses. A blunt lifelong New Yorker, he found colleagues irritatingly polite, unwilling to argue hard issues, and he lacked the go-to people he had relied on.
- Family friction. At week four Irene came to look at houses, schools and design work. She found no school she liked (the girls were at a top-tier private school and resented moving), so they agreed to leave the children in New York until year's end.
- Spiral. Stephen commuted; Irene became a working single parent and her heart left the move. Weekends were tense; he returned on Mondays tired and unfocused, which worsened his traction at work and raised his stress further.
- Outcome. He forced the issue, finding a school and housing through company contacts, and pressing Irene to sell. It triggered the worst fight of their marriage. With the relationship at risk, he told the firm he must return to New York or quit.
The case shows how work and family stress compound each other. Watkins's opening questions: are you focusing on the right things in the right way, keeping your energy and perspective, and getting the support you and your family need? His answer to all three: don't go it alone.
Taking stock
Begin by checking how you feel about the transition right now.
How do you feel so far? Rate yourself high to low on each, and for any low score ask why, and what you can do about it:
- Excited?
- Confident?
- In control of your success?
What has bothered you so far? For each, ask why:
- With whom have you failed to connect?
- Which meeting has been the most troubling?
- Of all you have seen or heard, what has disturbed you most?
What has gone well or poorly?
- Which interactions would you handle differently, and which exceeded expectations? Why?
- Which decisions turned out particularly well, and which not so well? Why?
- Which missed opportunities do you regret most, and was a better result blocked mainly by you or by something beyond your control?
Then focus on your biggest difficulties and be honest: are they situational, or do they lie within you? Even skilled people tend to blame the situation rather than their own actions, which makes them less proactive than they could be.
The normal dip
Some trouble is just the emotional roller coaster of any new role: initial enthusiasm fades as reality sets in. It is common to hit a valley three to six months in, and you will almost certainly come out the other side, provided you keep applying your 90-day plan.
Four syndromes that transitions amplify
The deeper risk is that transitions amplify your weaknesses. Check yourself against four dysfunctions, and ask people who know you well (if it is safe) for honest feedback.
| Syndrome | What happens | The vicious cycle |
|---|---|---|
| Undefended boundaries | You set no clear limits on what you will and will not do, so bosses, peers and reports take whatever you give | The more you give, the less they respect you and the more they ask; you end up resentful, nibbled to death, with only yourself to blame |
| Brittleness | Uncertainty feeds rigidity and defensiveness, especially in leaders with a high need for control | A premature call becomes overcommitment to a failing course: the longer you wait, the harder to admit error and the worse the consequences; insisting your way is the only way disempowers people with equally valid ideas |
| Isolation | You lose touch with the people who make action happen and the subterranean flow of information, by leaning on a few people or official data, or by deterring bad news (people fear your reaction or think you are captured by competing interests) | Isolation breeds uninformed decisions, which hurt credibility and deepen isolation |
| Work avoidance | Facing tough early calls (direction on incomplete information, personnel moves that affect lives), you bury yourself in other work or tell yourself the time is not ripe | Leadership thinkers' term for dodging the bull's horns: tough problems grow tougher |
Each syndrome is a feedback loop that tightens under transition stress. Naming which one you are prone to, and putting a routine against it, is the practical core of the chapter.
Stress and performance
All four syndromes push stress toward dangerous levels, but not all stress is bad. Watkins invokes the Yerkes-Dodson curve (Figure 9-1): you need some stress, self-generated or imposed (positive incentives, consequences of inaction), to be productive. With none, little happens: you stay in bed munching chocolates.
- Rising side. As pressure builds, performance improves at first.
- The peak. At a point that varies by person, more demands (too many balls, too heavy an emotional load) begin to undermine performance.
- Falling side. Lower performance creates more stress, a vicious cycle as you go over the top of your curve.
- Outcome. Burnout is rare; much more common is chronic underperformance: you work harder and achieve less, as Stephen did.
Watkins calls the stress-performance link well documented, but the Yerkes-Dodson "law" comes from a 1908 experiment on mice learning to discriminate under electric shocks; the neat inverted-U for human work stress is a popular extrapolation with mixed empirical support. Treat it as a useful metaphor, not a measured curve. The family advice also assumes a household able to choose when and whether to relocate, which many leaders cannot.
The three pillars of self-management
To counter these weaknesses you need deliberate self-management, a personal practice resting on three pillars:
Pillar 1: adopt 90-day strategies
The previous eight chapters form a template for how to prepare, learn, set priorities, plan and direct action to build momentum. Seeing them work, and banking early successes, makes you more confident and energized. As the transition proceeds, check your challenges against Table 9-1 and return to the relevant chapter.
| Core challenge | Diagnostic question (Table 9-1) |
|---|---|
| Prepare yourself | Are you adopting the right mind-set for the new job and letting go of the past? |
| Accelerate your learning | Are you working out what to learn, from whom, and how to speed up the process? |
| Match strategy to situation | Are you diagnosing the type of transition and what it implies you should and should not do? |
| Negotiate success | Are you building the relationship with your boss, managing expectations and marshaling resources? |
| Secure early wins | Are you focusing on priorities that advance long-term goals and build short-term momentum? |
| Achieve alignment | Are you finding and fixing misalignments of strategy, structure, systems and skills? |
| Build your team | Are you assessing, restructuring and aligning the team? |
| Create alliances | Are you building internal and external support so you are not pushing rocks uphill? |
Pillar 2: develop personal disciplines
Knowing what to do is not doing it. Success or failure emerges from the accumulation of daily choices that carry you forward or push you off a cliff. Personal disciplines are regular routines enforced ruthlessly on yourself. Which ones you need depends on your strengths and weaknesses: use your own insight, but also ask trusted people who know you (360-degree feedback helps), especially about your weak spots.
- Plan to plan. Run a daily and weekly plan-work-evaluate cycle: spend ten minutes at day's end checking goals met and planning tomorrow, and repeat at week's end. Even when behind, you stay more in control.
- Focus on the important. The urgent crowds out the important: calls, meetings and e-mail swallow the medium and long term. Set aside a fixed time daily, even half an hour, with the door closed, phone off and e-mail ignored.
- Judiciously defer commitment. Never say yes on the spot: "Sounds interesting; let me think about it and get back to you." If pressed, say that if an answer is needed now it is no, but you will consider it if they can wait. Begin with no: yes later is easy, while yes then reversal damages your reputation. Beware requests far ahead, when your diary looks deceptively open.
- Go to the balcony. When caught in emotional escalation, step back, view the situation from fifty thousand feet, then make productive interventions. The practice is long praised by leadership and negotiation authorities; hard when stakes are high, but learnable with practice.
- Check in with yourself. Practise structured reflection on your reactions: a few notes, impressions and questions each evening, or a weekly review. Pick what suits you, do it regularly, and turn insights into action.
- Recognize when to quit. Transitions are marathons, not sprints. If you go over the top of your stress curve more than occasionally, learn to spot diminishing returns and take whatever break refreshes you, even when one more hour seems decisive: the short-term gain can carry a steep long-term cost.
Pillar 3: build your support systems
Three components: assert control locally, stabilize the home front, and build an advice-and-counsel network.
Assert control locally
It is hard to focus without basic infrastructure. Even amid bigger worries, set up your office, develop routines and clarify expectations with your assistant quickly; if needed, assemble temporary resources until permanent systems work.
Stabilize the home front
A basic rule of warfare is not to fight on too many fronts. You cannot create value at work while destroying value at home: Stephen's fundamental mistake.
- Why it matters. If you relocate, your family is in transition too: a spouse may be changing jobs, children leaving friends and schools. Family life is disrupted just when you most need stability; your stress amplifies theirs and theirs adds to your emotional load, delaying your break-even point.
- First step. Acknowledge that your family may be unhappy, even resentful. Disruption is unavoidable, but talking it through and working through the sense of loss together helps.
- Analyze the family's support system. Moving severs ties with doctors, lawyers, dentists, babysitters, tutors and coaches. Inventory them, set priorities and find replacements quickly.
- Get your spouse back on track. A spouse who quits to search after the move can grow unhappy if the search drags. Negotiate job-search support with your company up front (or soon after moving), and don't let your spouse defer starting.
- Time the move carefully. Moving children mid-school-year is much harder. Consider waiting until year's end; the price is separation and commuting, so give the solo parent extra support: single parenting is hard work.
- Preserve the familiar. Restore family rituals quickly and keep them going; help from favorite relatives such as grandparents makes a difference.
- Invest in cultural familiarization. For an international move, get professional cross-cultural advice: language and cultural barriers make isolation a far greater risk for the family.
- Tap the relocation service early. Corporate services usually cover only finding a home, moving belongings and locating schools, but that help matters.
There is no avoiding pain when a family moves, but much can be done to minimize it and speed everyone's transition. (Stephen's family broke at least three of these guidelines: a rushed mid-year plan, schools not secured, and no extra help for the solo parent.)
Build your advice-and-counsel network
No leader can do it all. A network of trusted advisers inside and outside the organization guards against isolation and loss of perspective. Cultivate three types: technical advisers (analysis of technologies, markets and strategy), cultural interpreters (norms, mental models, the organization's language) and political counselors (a sounding board for implementing your agenda, testing it with what-if questions).
Insiders versus outsiders:
- Insiders know the organization, its culture and politics. Seek well-connected people you can trust to tell you what is really going on: a priceless resource.
- But insiders cannot give dispassionate or disinterested views, so add outside advisers who listen and question well, understand how organizations work, and have your best interests at heart.
Audit the network (Table 9-3). List each adviser by domain (technical, cultural, political) and as insider or outsider, then ask whether it fits the new role. Do not assume past helpers will still help: the problems differ, and as you rise the need for political counsel increases dramatically. Think ahead too: networks take time, so start on the one your next job will need.
| Adviser (Table 9-3 worksheet) | Technical | Cultural | Political | Insider / outsider |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Name 1 | ||||
| Name 2 |
- Right mix of roles: technical advisers, cultural interpreters and political counselors.
- Right mix of insiders and outsiders: honest feedback from inside, dispassionate perspective from outside.
- External supporters loyal to you, not to your new organization or unit: typically long-standing colleagues and friends.
- Trustworthy internal advisers whose personal agendas don't conflict with yours and who give straight, accurate advice.
- Representatives of key constituencies who explain their perspectives, so you are never limited to one or two points of view.
Staying on track
Self-management is a daily fight. Success or failure flows from small choices that create momentum for the organization and for you, or start vicious cycles. Your day-to-day actions in the transition set the pattern for what follows: for the organization, your personal efficacy and your well-being.
- What are your greatest vulnerabilities in the new role, and how will you compensate?
- Which personal disciplines must you develop or strengthen, how, and what will success look like?
- What can you do to gain more control over your local environment?
- How can you ease your family's transition, which support relationships must you build, and which come first?
- What are your priorities for the advice-and-counsel network: how much on the internal versus external side, and in which domain (technical, cultural, political or personal) do you most need support?
Accelerate Everyone
The last chapter turns from the individual leader to the company. Every failed or slow transition, from outright derailment to quiet underperformance, costs the organization too, so firms should run transition acceleration as a critical business process with a shared framework, tools and systems. A companywide acceleration system serves three purposes at once: it reduces enterprise risk, lifts performance across thousands of overlapping transitions, and speeds up organizational change.
Why companies have a stake
The book began as a guide for individuals: diagnose the situation, define the core challenges, plan for momentum. Watkins reports that hundreds of thousands of leaders have used it and that "independent research" shows it cuts time to break-even by as much as 40 percent. His case for a company-level transition acceleration system rests on three arguments.
1. Risk management
A single senior failure, whether a new hire or an internal promotion, can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct costs, before lost opportunities or business damage. The same study of Genesis Advisers (Watkins's firm) programs and coaching produced an assessed 1,400 percent ROI on conservative salary assumptions, and interviewees described the stakes:
- Growth halved in one region under a struggling new leader: about $7-8 million after tax.
- Initiatives dropped, results missed, a launch delayed: with product development problems, up to $100 million.
- Lost high potentials: a scarce resource "washed out", a cost beyond direct dollars.
Companies manage other risks of this size systematically; executive transition risk deserves the same rigor, so acceleration belongs in enterprise risk management.
2. Performance improvement
- Volume. About a quarter of leaders in typical Fortune 500 firms change jobs each year (the introduction's figure).
- Executives move more. In one study 35 percent of the top three tiers changed roles in a year: 22 percent internally, 13 percent hired from outside.
- Spillover. Each transition materially affects about a dozen people around the leader: peers, reports and bosses.
Accelerating all of these by even 10 percent (never mind 40) improves company results directly and makes the business more nimble and responsive: a potential competitive advantage and a mark of a high-performance organization.
3. Change implementation
Restructurings, rapid growth and acquisition integration each send a ripple of individual transitions through the organization.
- Phase one, the "hard side". Getting the right structure and systems in place and staffing key positions.
- Phase two. Meeting targets such as acquisition synergies requires driving strategic direction down the organization, clarifying roles, responsibilities and decision rights, and accelerating relationship building.
Watkins's firm applies the 90-day framework to phase two in "Rapid Rewire" implementations: team acceleration starting with the top team and cascading down, every team using the same methodology, language and tools to build 90-day plans, relationships and teamwork. It can separate hitting targets from failing miserably, because, as many firms learn painfully, the soft side of change is the hard side.
The 40 percent and 1,400 percent ROI figures are labelled "independent research", but the endnotes show two studies run by clients of Watkins's own firm, both on subjective self-estimates. The 2006 study (a Fortune 100 health-care company, 125 participants) found self-reported performance gains of 38 percent (programs) and 40 percent (coached executives), so its 40 percent measures performance, not break-even time. The only break-even measure, a 2008 study at a Fortune 500 financial services firm (50 participants), found an average reduction of 1.2 months and roughly 300 percent ROI. Treat them as promising testimonials, not controlled evidence; the chapter also doubles as an outline of what Genesis Advisers sells.
The conclusion: whether the goal is risk, performance or change, companies should manage leadership-transition acceleration like any critical business process, internally and externally, individually and organizationally. Watkins then gives ten design principles.
1. Identify the critical transitions
Many companies cannot say how many people are being hired, promoted, moved between units or shifted laterally, or when. Without frequency and timing data you cannot weigh the costs and benefits of support at each level or allocate resources efficiently.
- Rule of thumb. Where movement among frontline leaders is high (over 30 percent, say in a fast-growing business), they should attend a transition workshop (in person or virtual) within their first 60 days, on top of immediate launch resources when they start. Workshops work best with 15 to 20 participants.
- Know the mix. Track the balance of onboarding, inboarding (moves between units), promotions and lateral moves, since support should be tailored to each.
- Find the critical ones. A small, fast-growing pharmaceutical company that has just won approval for a new drug and is racing a competitor must onboard its new sales force quickly and help the sales organization gel; that is where effort goes first.
The Transition Heat Map (Figure 10-1) summarizes priorities: list units, groups or projects down the side, note each one's major change events, then rate the intensity of four transition types (onboarding, promotion, geographic moves, lateral moves). The book's example grid did not survive extraction; an illustrative version:
| Unit (illustrative) | Major change event | Onboarding | Promotion | Geographic | Lateral |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New-drug sales force | Product launch | High | Medium | Low | Low |
| European operations | Plant consolidation | Low | Medium | High | Medium |
| Corporate finance | ERP rollout | Medium | Low | Low | High |
2. Identify set-up-to-fail dynamics
The book's earlier chapters address traps leaders fall into (staying in the comfort zone, doing too much too fast). But organizations also make systematic mistakes when placing leaders, documented by respondents to the HBR/IMD study (Watkins credits the idea to Jean-François Manzoni and Jean-Louis Barsoux, The Set-Up-to-Fail Syndrome, 2007). Table 10-1 lists them:
All transitions:
- Unclear expectations and mandates. Too little or conflicting information about what success requires.
- STARS ignored in hiring and promotion. For example, putting a turnaround specialist into a sustaining-success or realignment job.
- Leaps too big. Roles with very high transition risk: leaders take on too much and fail.
- A Darwinian culture. Little support, because the culture misguidedly prizes sink or swim as development.
Promotions:
- Promoted for current performance, without assessing ability at the higher level.
- Training too late or never, so leaders lose the chance to build credibility early.
- Doing old and new jobs at once because of poor succession planning.
Onboarding (and moves between units):
- Cultural fit ignored in recruiting; people hired for capabilities alone.
- No support for cultural adaptation, so newcomers make avoidable early mistakes.
- No help identifying and connecting with key stakeholders, so the right links come too late.
An acceleration system is pointless if the company keeps setting people up to fail, so the effort may require culture change. Two matched remedies: oversized leaps call for systematic transition risk assessment (from the introduction); unclear expectations call for disciplined use of the five conversations (Chapter 4).
3. Diagnose existing transition support
Most firms have a patchwork quilt: one unit promotes junior leaders well, another runs good executive onboarding, a third handles international moves. Because a companywide system on a common core framework is so valuable, this mosaic usually needs substantial change or replacement. Assess what exists and where no support exists:
- Frameworks and tools. Which approaches have been used, why, and how close are they to best practice?
- Delivery modes. Coaching, virtual workshops, self-guided materials at each level of the leadership pipeline, with their costs and benefits.
- Coherence. Does support for onboarding, promotion, lateral and international moves hang together on a common core model?
- Stakeholders. Which bosses, peers, direct reports, HR generalists and learning-and-development staff do or could help?
- HR information systems. Do websites and data support transitions directly and show where and when they occur, so help can arrive just in time?
4. Adopt a common core model
Given how often people change jobs and how many others each move affects, everyone (bosses, reports, peers) should use the same model. A unified framework, language and toolkit is probably the single most important step in building the system. With it, every leader in transition could discuss with colleagues:
- Their STARS portfolio: the mix of start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment and sustaining success, with its challenges and opportunities.
- Their learning: technical, cultural and political, and the main elements of their learning plan.
- The five conversations: progress on situation, expectations, style, resources and personal development with the boss and reports. (The chapter lists the fifth as "progress"; Chapter 4 calls it personal development.)
- Early wins: agreed priorities and plans.
- Alliances they need to build.
A common model makes these discussions far more efficient, and more importantly makes conversations happen that otherwise would not. People become more forthcoming, share confidences, and grow tolerant of others' transition struggles: the organization moves beyond sink or swim.
5. Deliver support just in time
Transitions move through predictable stages, so needs shift predictably:
- Digestible blocks. Once in role, leaders are immersed in events and have very little time to learn, reflect and plan. Support not delivered just in time goes unused.
- Use pre-entry time. The transition starts at recruiting or selection, not on day one: a priceless period for learning and planning. Provide key documents and tools for planning early diagnosis and help leaders connect with key stakeholders early. For executives, transition coaches can run a pre-entry diagnosis, including stakeholder interviews, and distill it into an actionable assessment for early discussions.
6. Use structured processes
The paradox of transition acceleration: leaders are too busy to learn and plan the transition, and urgent demands crowd out the important work. So support should not be a free-flowing, leader-paced process. Build in action-forcing events:
- Preset coaching meetings at each stage, or scheduled cohort events that take leaders out of the fray to reflect and create or refine their 90-day plans.
- A launch meeting. After pre-entry diagnosis and leader self-assessment, coach and client are ready for a highly productive launch meeting to jump-start the process.
- Early, focused coach connection. A coach who has done intensive pre-entry diagnosis holds a precious resource, knowledge of the situation; offering it early cements the coach-client relationship.
7. Match support to transition type
The 90-day toolkit fits every transition, but the weight of activities (for instance, how much to invest in learning the culture) varies, so build targeted supplements for the most important types. Two deserve extra resources:
- Promotion. As Chapter 1 explained, new levels demand different competencies, roles, behaviors and ways of engaging reports. Provide resources that show what success looks like at the new level, support self-assessment and produce a personal development plan.
- Onboarding (and moves between units with distinct subcultures). The challenges are aligning expectations, adapting to the culture and building the right relationships. Accessible resources on how things get done and help identifying and connecting with key stakeholders reduce derailment and speed time to high performance.
8. Match support to leader level
The ideal. If cost were no object, every transitioning leader would get a transition coach who would diagnose the situation independently and brief them before entry, help them self-assess and spot transition risk factors, support diagnostic planning and goal setting, assist with team assessment and alignment, gather feedback on progress, and be available to talk through issues.
The economics. Executives have high impact, so coaching often pays for them; it rarely pays at lower levels. The solution has three parts:
- Identify alternative delivery modes: coaching, cohort sessions, virtual workshops, self-guided materials.
- Assess their relative costs and benefits.
- Match mode and extent to levels of the leadership pipeline to maximize return on investment.
Transition coaching. A time-bound role as trusted adviser through entry. Requires business acumen and thorough knowledge of the organization, its culture and its political system.
Developmental coaching. Focuses on longer-term personal growth. Hence the danger when new hires bring their own coach, who may lack transition experience and any grasp of the culture and politics the leader is entering.
9. Clarify roles and align incentives
Transition support is a team sport: bosses, peers, direct reports, HR generalists, coaches and mentors can all affect success. Even when one person holds primary responsibility (usually a coach or HR generalist), think through what others could contribute and how to encourage them.
- Bosses have an obvious stake in fast ramp-up but face other demands: give them guidelines and tools to support new reports efficiently and with focus.
- HR generalists can be invaluable in helping onboarding leaders understand the new culture.
- Both must know what to do and have incentives to do it.
10. Integrate with other talent management systems
Link recruiting and onboarding
The best onboarding cannot compensate for the sins of poor recruiting: hire people unlikely to fit the culture and little can reduce derailment risk. Yet many firms still keep the two apart, reporting through different parts of the organization with divergent goals, measures and incentives.
- One umbrella. Put recruiting and onboarding under the same organizational roof and align their goals and incentives.
- Set transition risk tolerance for each search (Figure 10-2). Firms often practise "best athlete" recruiting: hiring for capabilities, ignoring fit. Bringing in someone from a very different culture is fine if the capability-versus-fit trade-off is deliberate and transition risk is explicitly evaluated. That needs a clear view of the culture and why people struggle to assimilate, refined by feedback from onboarding successes and failures.
- Pass the data forward. Psychometric instruments give coaches and facilitators insight into a hire's style and likely adaptation struggles; interviewers should be asked explicitly to build a transition risk profile.
Link leadership development and acceleration
Development prepares talent for the next level; acceleration helps them make the leap. Two links:
- Teach the core model early. Include the acceleration framework in development programs, so leaders adopt a transition state of mind and have a foundation to build on when the demanding move comes.
- Use STARS to plan careers. Chart high potentials through positions that build capability across all business situations, and expose gaps, such as a leader who has mostly run turnarounds.
The development grid (Table 10-3)
Rows are functions (marketing, sales, finance, human resources, operations, R&D, information management, other); columns are the five STARS situations. Method:
- Plot every position you have held: a circled number for each management job in sequence (job 1 in marketing during a turnaround; job 2 in sales in a start-up unit).
- Add projects and task forces as a number in a triangle (a 2△ in operations for a task force run alongside job 2).
- Connect the dots to see your trajectory.
- Read the blanks. Empty rows or columns show limits to your readiness and possible blind spots.
| Example | Start-up | Turnaround | Accelerated growth | Realignment | Sustaining success |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing | ① first job | ||||
| Sales | ② second job | ④ | |||
| Operations | 2△ task force | ③ | |||
| Finance |
In this illustrative history the finance row and sustaining-success column are blank: the leader has never protected a strong franchise or held a financial role.
Putting it all together
Best-in-class acceleration systems rest on a core framework and toolkit, deliver support just in time, are partly customized by transition type, are deployed cost-effectively across levels, align and incentivize stakeholders, and link to recruiting and leadership development. Given how many transitions occur and how much each matters, the costs and benefits of such a system deserve serious evaluation.
- What are the most important transitions in your organization, and how often do they occur?
- Can the organization identify where and when transitions are occurring?
- Is there a common core transition framework, language and toolkit?
- Do leaders have support when they need it and throughout their transitions? What would give onboarding and promotion focused resources?
- Are the systems for recruiting and accelerating transitions linked appropriately?
- Should transition acceleration be part of the curriculum for high-potential leaders?
- How could the 90-day framework accelerate organizational change, such as restructuring or post-acquisition integration?
Master Takeaways
Watkins's method reduces to a sequence: prepare and learn, diagnose the situation, agree the plan with your boss, win early, then reshape architecture, team and alliances while guarding your own judgment. Transitions fail when the leader's playbook does not fit the situation, so diagnosis comes before action every time.
- Race to break-even. Every new leader starts as a net consumer of value; the whole job of a transition is to become a net contributor as fast as possible.
- Diagnose before you prescribe. Use STARS to name the situation; a turnaround playbook applied to a realignment provokes resistance and destroys credibility.
- Let go of the old job. The commonest failure is doing what made you successful before, only harder; strengths become liabilities in a new role.
- Own the boss relationship. Hold five conversations (situation, expectations, resources, style, development) and lock agreements into a written 90-day plan.
- Win early, the right way. Early wins should serve long-term goals and model the new behaviors you want, not just pick low-hanging fruit.
- Make people calls early. Assess the team against explicit criteria and act within set deadlines; keeping weak players too long is more common than moving too fast.
- Failure is a fit problem. Derailed leaders had strong records and faced no harder situations; they misread the role's demands or lacked the flexibility to adapt.
- Size the leap first. Score each shift in the Transition Risk Index before accepting a role; several big shifts at once multiply the danger.
- Onboarding is an organ transplant. Outsiders face rejection unless they master business orientation, stakeholder connection, expectations alignment and cultural adaptation.
- Know your problem preferences. The parts of the job you enjoy draw your time; the ones you avoid become blind spots that need discipline, advisers or team members.
- Learning is an investment. Write a learning agenda of questions and hypotheses, and spend time where it yields actionable insight, including culture and politics.
- Use the five questions. Ask every direct report the same five questions, ending with "If you were me, what would you focus on?", to get comparable answers.
- Beware the action imperative. Compulsive doing, often rooted in insecurity, leaves you too busy to learn and starts a vicious cycle.
- Most jobs are portfolios. Map products, projects and units onto STARS; each part needs its own mix of construction work, cutting and preservation.
- Heroes and stewards. Turnarounds reward bold, decisive heroes; realignments and sustaining success need patient stewards who build support. Know which you are and borrow the other.
- Manage expectations or they manage you. Underpromise and overdeliver, find the untouchables, and when goals are ambiguous, a tie goes to the boss.
- Ask for resources once, fully. Put needs on the table early, with a menu linking resource levels to results; repeated requests erode credibility.
- The 90-day plan is a contract. Write it, share it, and review it at 30, 60 and 90 days; it records what you will and will not do.
- Change comes in waves. Early wins, then consolidation and learning, then deeper change in strategy, structure, systems and skills; nonstop change burns people out.
- Credibility forms on little data. People judge your insight, values, energy and standards fast; be demanding but satisfiable, decisive but judicious, tough but humane.
- Plan or learn. Impose a plan only when awareness, diagnosis, vision, plan and support all exist; otherwise run collective learning to build them.
- Avoid predictable surprises. Scan the environment, markets, internal capabilities and politics for crises that the available information already foretold.
- Fix architecture before people. Misaligned strategy, structure, processes and skills make good people fail; culture changes only through architecture and leadership behavior.
- Do TOWS, not SWOT. Start with external threats and opportunities, then test them against strengths and weaknesses.
- Evolve the team without wrecking it. Give each person one of six dispositions (keep, develop, move, replace soon or later, observe) but preserve short-term performance and develop backups first.
- Match decision process to decision. Consult-and-decide for divisive calls, inexperienced teams or establishing authority; build consensus when energetic implementation matters.
- Build alliances deliberately. Map winning and blocking alliances and influence networks; win a critical mass, not unanimity.
- Sequence and shape the process. Approach the right allies first and shape problem definition early; by the time options are framed, the choice is often made.
- Protect your judgment. Enforce disciplines (plan to plan, defer commitment, go to the balcony) and build a network of technical, cultural and political advisers.
- Stabilize the home front. You cannot create value at work while destroying it at home; time family moves carefully.
- Transition others as you would be transitioned. Use the five conversations with your own reports, and push your company to accelerate everyone.
- Make acceleration a business process. A common core model, just-in-time and structured support, and links to recruiting and development turn thousands of transitions into an advantage.
Frameworks & mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Break-even point | New leaders consume value before contributing; shrink that time | Setting goals for any new role |
| Seven transition traps | Old habits, action imperative, unrealistic expectations, too much, "the" answer, wrong learning, no peers | Self-checking in the first weeks |
| Transition Risk Index | Rate up to 12 concurrent shifts 1-10 and sum | Sizing the leap before accepting a job |
| Five promotion shifts | Breadth vs depth, delegation, influence, communication, presence | Moving up a level |
| Four onboarding pillars | Orientation, stakeholders, expectations, culture | Joining a new company or unit |
| Problem-preferences diagnostic | Rank functional problems by enjoyment to find blind spots | Planning where to get help |
| Learning agenda and plan | Questions, then hypotheses; collect, analyze, hypothesize, test | Days 1-30 |
| Five questions | Challenges, causes, opportunities, how to exploit them, "if you were me" | First meetings with reports |
| STARS | Start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, sustaining success | Diagnosing what change to lead |
| Heroes vs stewards | Bold rescue vs patient building and preservation | Matching your style to the situation |
| Five conversations | Situation, expectations, resources, style, development | Building the boss and report relationships |
| 90-day plan | Three 30-day blocks, each ending in a boss review | Structuring the transition |
| Waves of change | Learn, early wave, consolidate, deeper wave, fine-tune | Pacing change over 2-4 years |
| FOGLAMP | Focus, oversight, goals, leadership, abilities, means, process | Running early-win projects |
| Planned change vs collective learning | Plan only if awareness, diagnosis, vision, plan, support exist | Choosing how to lead a change |
| Predictable surprises | Probe environment, markets, capabilities, politics | Defusing time bombs early |
| Organizational architecture | Direction, structure, processes, skill bases must fit | Diagnosing why good people struggle |
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Four Cs and TOWS | Customers, capital, capabilities, commitments; threats and opportunities first | Testing and setting strategy |
| Six evaluative criteria | Competence, judgment, energy, focus, relationships, trust | Assessing inherited reports |
| Push and pull tools | Goals, metrics, incentives vs a compelling vision of the future | Aligning the team |
| Decision spectrum | Unilateral, consult-and-decide, build consensus, unanimity | Choosing how to decide |
| Influence map and tactics | Alliances, networks, persuadables; consultation, framing, choice-shaping, social influence, incrementalism, sequencing, action-forcing events | Building support without authority |
| Three pillars of self-management | 90-day strategies, personal disciplines, support systems | Managing stress and judgment |
| Ten acceleration design principles | Critical transitions to talent-system links | Building a companywide system |
| Development grid | Functions vs STARS situations, plotted per job | Planning a leader's career experience |
Who's who
| Name | Role | Why they matter |
|---|---|---|
| Julia Gould | Fast-track marketer made launch manager | Never let go of her functional expertise (Ch 1) |
| David Jones | R&D executive who joined Energix | Rejected "organ transplant" in a new culture (Ch 1) |
| Chris Hadley | Quality head who moved to Phoenix Systems | Learned to stop doing and start listening (Ch 2) |
| Karl Lewin | Global Foods manufacturing turnaround leader | Had to switch from surgeon to steward in a realignment (Ch 3) |
| Michael Chen and Vaughan Cates | New CIO and his tough boss | Negotiated time, resources, then style (Ch 4) |
| Elena Lee | Head of customer service at a retailer | Early wins that ended a punishment culture (Ch 5) |
| Hannah Jaffey | Corporate VP of HR | Found the problem was structure, not people (Ch 6) |
| Liam Geffen | Head of a troubled automation unit | Reassessed a team skewed by favoritism (Ch 7) |
| Alexia Belenko | MedDev regional marketing VP for EMEA | Good business case stalled without alliances (Ch 8) |
| Stephen Erikson | Media executive moved to Toronto | Lost balance when the home front failed (Ch 9) |
| Dan Ciampa, John Gabarro, Amy Edmondson, Max Bazerman | Coauthor and cited scholars | Sources of early wins, waves, plan-vs-learn and predictable surprises |
Watkins writes as a consultant-practitioner, and the book's evidence is thin where its claims are boldest. The 40% faster break-even and 1,400% ROI come from two client studies of his own firm, Genesis Advisers, using participants' self-estimates (the only break-even measure found a 1.2-month gain); the 6.2-month figure is an average of CEO guesses. Cases are composites chosen to illustrate success, with no failures of the method. The advice assumes a rational boss, a corporate hierarchy and room to relocate a family, and it predates remote-first work, though short virtual-team and distant-boss sections help. Some internal slips (a risk index said to max at 100 that reaches 120, survey subtotals that do not add) and lost tables in this edition's extraction are flagged in the chapters. The frameworks remain useful, but treat them as structured judgment, not science.
Connect it
- Enterprise architecture. Watkins's four-element architecture (direction, structure, processes, skills) maps neatly onto business, organization, process and capability views; his rule that structure changes before process or skill fixes often fail is a useful sequencing check for target-state roadmaps.
- Banking transformations. Many bank units are realignments in denial (profitable but slipping); his advice to use benchmarking, new metrics and steward-style leadership rather than turnaround heroics fits regulated, consensus-heavy cultures.
- AI programs. New AI leaders often fall into the action imperative and "the" answer traps; the learning agenda, STARS portfolio (most AI efforts are start-ups inside sustaining-success businesses), FOGLAMP-style pilots and alliance mapping apply directly to winning sponsors outside one's authority.
- Post-merger integration. Chapter 10's point that every restructuring triggers a cascade of individual transitions argues for running 90-day plans team by team after the "hard side" decisions are made.
About this book
The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter by Michael D. Watkins, 2003; updated and expanded 2013. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions