The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins

Date finished 28 Sep 2020

Essential reading if you’re about to start a new job in a leadership role; whether you’ve been promoted or joined a new company. The book is well structured and provides clear strategies for approaching the new challenge and setting yourself up for success. Every time I change roles, I re-read this book.

My notes

This book is packed with useful information. I really recommend buying a copy.

• The root causes of transition failure lie in a pernicious interaction between the situation, with its opportunities and pitfalls, and the individual, with his or her strengths and vulnerabilities.
• There are systematic methods that leaders can employ to both lessen the likelihood of failure and reach the breakeven point faster.
• The goal is to build momentum by creating virtuous cycles that build credibility and by avoiding getting caught in vicious cycles that damage credibility.

1. Promote yourself

• Don’t assume what has made you successful at this point will continue to do so.

2. Accelerate your learning

• Climb the learning curve as fast as possible. Markets, products, technologies, systems, structures, culture and politics.
• “Getting acquainted with a new organisation can feel like drinking from a fire hose”
• Be systematic and focussed about deciding what you need to learn and how you will learn it efficiently.
• Planning to learn means figuring out in advance what the important questions are an how you can best answer them.
  • Baseline question: how did we get to this point?
  • Start by generating questions about the past, questions about the present and questions about the future.
• An actionable insight is knowledge that enables you to make better decisions earlier and so helps you reach the break even point in personal value sooner.
  • Extract actionable insights from the mass of information available to you.
• Efficient - identify the best sources of insight and figure out how to extract maximum insight with the least possible outlay of time.
• Create a virtuous cycle of information gathering, analysing, hypothesising and testing.

• What do you most need to learn?

• Questions about the past
  • Performance - How has this organisation performed in the past? How do people in the organisation think it has performed? - How were goals set? Were they insufficiently or overly ambitious? - Were internal or external benchmarks used? - What measures were employed? What behaviours did they encourage or discourage? - What happened if goals were not met?
  • Root causes - If performance has been good, why has this been the case? - What have been the relative contributions of the organisation’s strategy, its structure, its technical capabilities, its culture and its politics? - If performance has been poor, why has this been the case? Do the primary issues reside in the organisation’s strategy? Its structure? Its technical capabilities? Its culture? Its politics?
  • History of change - What efforts have been made to change the org? - Who has been instrumental in shaping it?
• About the present
  • Vision and strategy - What is the stated vision and strategy of the org? - Is it really pursuing that strategy? If no, why not? If so, is the strategy going to take the org where it needs to go?
  • People - Who is capable and who isn’t? - Who can be trusted and who can’t? - Who has influence and why?
  • Processes - What are the key processes in the org? - Are they performing acceptably in terms of quality, reliability and timeliness? If not, why not?
  • Land mines - What lurking surprises could detonate and push you off track? - What potentially damaging cultural or political missteps must you avoid making?
  • Early wins - In what areas (people, relationships, processes, or products) can you achieve some early wins?
• Questions about the future
  • Challenges and opportunities - In what areas is the business most likely to face stiff challenges in the coming year? What can be done now to prepare for them? - What are the most promising unexploited opportunities? What would need to happen to realise their potential?
  • Barriers and resources - What are the most formidable barriers to making needed changes? Technical? Cultural? Political? - Are there islands of excellence or other high quality resources that you can leverage? - What new capabilities need to be developed or acquired?
  • Culture - Which elements of the culture should be preserved? - Which need to change?
• Sources of information:
  • Customers
  • Distributors
  • Suppliers
  • Outside analysts
  • Frontline R&D and Operations
  • Sales and Purchasing
  • Staff
  • Integrators
  • Natural historians
• Pick up ‘Soft information’ by talking to people.
• Ask direct reports the same 5 questions
  • What are the biggest challenges the org is facing or will face in the future?
  • Why is the org facing or going to face these challenges?
  • What are the most promising unexploited opportunities for growth?
  • What would need to happen for the org to exploit the potential of these opportunities?
  • If you were me, what would you focus attention on?
• How people answer can tell you a lot about your new team and its politics.
  • Who answers directly? Who is evasive and prone to going on tangents? Who takes responsibility and who points fingers? Who has a broad view of the business and who seems stuck in a silo.
• Creating a learning plan
  • p50-52 provides a learning plan template. The above is what you want to learn, this is how you will learn it.
• Learning about culture
  • Symbols are signs that distinguish one culture from another. Including logos or styles of dress.
  • Norms are shared social rules that guide behaviour. What get encouraged or rewarded? What elicits scorn or dispproval.
  • Assumptions are often unarticulated beliefs that underpin social systems. What truths does everyone take for granted?
  • There are organisational, professional and geographic culture perspectives that often intersect.

3. Match strategy to situation

• Diagnosis before developing an action plan.
• Identify which transition type your situation is:
  • Start up
  • Turnaround
  • Realignment
  • Sustaining success
• What you do depends on this.
• When clear on the situation you’ll face 3 fundamental early choices.
  • How much emphasis will you place on learning as opposed to doing?
    • Realignment and sustaining success - more learning. Startup or turnaround - more doing.
  • How much emphasis will you place of offence as opposed to defence?
    • Realignment or startup are offence. Sustaining or turnaround are defence.
  • What should you do to get some early wins?

4. Secure early wins

• These build credibility and create momentum. They create virtuous cycles. Leverage the energy you’re putting in to create a sense that good things are happening.
• In the first few weeks identify opportunities to build credibility. In the first 90 days you need to identify ways to create value, improve business results and get to the breakeven point more rapidly.
• Common traps:
  • Failing to focus
  • Not taking the business situation into account
  • Not adjusting for the culture
  • Failing to get wins that matter to your boss
  • Letting your means undermine your ends
    • eg. being seen as manipulative or underhanded
• Each wave of change consists of:
  • Learning
  • Designing the changes
  • Building support
  • Implimenting the changes
  • Observing results
• The point is to define your goals so you can lead with a distinct endpoint in mind.
  • A-item priorities - should follow naturally from core problems.
  • Behaviour changes. Lack of:
    • Focus
    • Discipline
    • Innovation
    • Teamwork
    • Sense of urgency
  • At this stage your objective is to build personal credibility.
    • Craft a few messages tailored to your key audiences
      • Focus on who you are, the values and goals you represent, your style and how you plan to conduct business.
    • Remove minor but persistent irritants:
      • Redundant meetings
      • Shorten excessively long ones
      • Improve physical space problems

5. Negotiate success

• Figure out how to build a productive relationship with your new boss and manage their expectations.
  • Carefully plan critical conversations about:
    • Situation
    • Expectation
    • Style
    • Resources
    • Personal development
    • Developing and gaining consensus on your 90 day plan
  • Fundamentals on building a productive relationship:
    • Don’t trash the past
    • Don’t stay away
    • Don’t surprise your boss
    • Don’t approach your boss only with problems
    • Don’t run down your checklist
    • Don’t try to change the boss
    • Do take 100 percent responsibility for making the relationship work
    • Do clarify mutual expectations early and often
    • Do negotiate timelines for diagnosis and action planning
    • Do aim for early wins in areas important to the boss
    • Do pursue good marks from those whose opinions your boss respects
  • Plan for 5 conversations:
    • Situational diagnosis conversations - you seek to understand how your new boss understands the situation
    • The expectations conversation
    • The style conversations
    • The resources conversation
    • The personal development conversation
  • Identify untouchables.
  • Educate your boss - get realistic expectations.
  • Underpromise and overdeliver.
  • Plan the conversations (p.120).

6. Achieve alignment

• Org architect: figure out if the orgs strategy is sound, bring its structure into alignment with its strategy and develop the systems and skill bases necessary to realise strategic intent.
• 5 areas of org architecture need to work together:
  • Strategy
  • Structure
  • Systems
  • Skills
  • Culture
  • Identify misalignments
• Common traps:
  • Trying to restructure your way out of deeper problems
  • Creating structures that are too complex
  • Automating problem processes
  • Making changes for change’s sake
  • Overestimating your group’s capacity to absorb strategic shifts
• Getting started:
  • Start with strategy
  • Look at supporting structure, systems and skills.
  • Decide how and when you will introduce the new strategy
  • Reshape structure, systems and skills simultaneously
  • Close the loop
• Crafting strategy:
  • Customers
  • Capital
  • Capabilities
  • Commitments
• Shape your groups structure:
  • Units
  • Decision rights
  • Performance management and rewards systems
  • Reporting relationships and information sharing mechanisms
• Initiating cultural change:
  • Change performance measures and incentives
  • Set up pilot projects
  • Bring in new people
  • Promote collective learning
  • Engage in collective visioning

7. Build your team

• Select the right people for the right positions - critical for success.
• Avoid common traps:
  • Keeping the existing team too long
    • Rule of thumb: by the end of your first 90 days decide who shall remain and go. But end of 6 months should have been communicated to key stakeholders.
  • Not repairing the airplane - ie doing nothing
  • Not working organisational alignment and team restructuring issues in parallel
  • Not holding onto the good people
  • Undertaking team building before the core team is in place:
    • Tempting to launch team-building activities such as joint problem solving, brainstorming and visioning right away…but poses a danger, strengthens the bond of the group.
    • Making implementation dependent decisions too early
    • Trying to do it all yourself - get support from a good HR person
• Assessing your existing team:
  • Competence
  • Judgement
  • Energy
  • Focus
  • Relationships
  • Trust
• Assign each team member the following categories:
  • Keep in place
  • Keep and develop
  • Move to another position
  • Observe for a while
  • Replace (low priority)
  • Replace (high priority)

• Your direct reports will form lasting impressions of you based on how you manage this part of your job.

• Aligning goals, incentives and measures:
  • Push tools:
    • Incentives
    • Reporting system
    • Planning processes
    • Procedures
    • Mission statement
  • Pull tools:
    • Shared vision
    • Teamwork
• Decision making:
  • Unilateral (most leader control)
  • Consult-and-decide
  • Build consensus
  • Unanimous (least leader control)
  • To avoid confusion, consider explaining to direct reports what you’re using and why. Strive to run a fair process. Even if they don’t agree, they’ll support if they feel 1) that their views have been heard and taken seriously and 2) that you have given a plausible rationale for why you made the call you did
  • Charade consensus building for a decision already made doesn’t fool anyone

8. Create coalitions

• Identify whose support is essential for your success, and figure out how to line them up on your side.
• A common mistake is for leaders to focus too much on the vertical dimension of influence (bosses and DRs) and not enough on the horizontal dimension - peers and external constituencies.
• Discipline yourself to invest in building relationship capital with people you anticipate needing to work with later.
• Identify key players. Consider creating priority relationship lists for direct reports.
• Notice to whom people go for advice and insight.
• Sources of power:
  • Expertise
  • Access to information
  • Status
  • Control of resources, such as budgets and rewards
  • Personal loyalty - You’ll notice power coalitions. - Draw an influence map - p.190 - Appeal to core values - loyalty, commitment and contribution, individual worth and dignity, integrity.

9. Keep your balance

• The right advice and council network is indispensable.
• Watch out for:
  • Riding off in all directions
  • Undefended boundaries
  • Brittleness
  • Isolation
  • Biased judgement
  • Work avoidance. Need to take the bull by the horns
  • Going over the top
• The 3 pillars of self-efficacy:
  • Adopting success strategies
  • Enforcing personal disciplines:
    • Plan to plan
    • Judiciously defer commitment
    • Set aside time for hard work
    • Go to the balcony - look from a high level
    • Focus on process
    • Check in with yourself
  • Guidelines for self reflection p.215 - questions to ask yourself.

10. Expedite everyone

• Develop high quality leaders
  • Succession planning