The First 90 Days

There is a lot that had been written about leading change, of course, there had been a lot about the general topic of leadership, but the specific and classic challenge of taking a new role, struggling your way up the learning curve, becoming effective, really hadn't been explored in a lot of detail, and it's something that leaders go through many times in their careers, and, at any given point, many leaders are going through that particular challenge.

Rachel Salaman: How surprised were you that it was such a hit?

Michael Watkins: I describe myself, Rachel, as the accidental guru. I really didn't plan to have this happen, I'd written a previous book with a co-author, Dan Ciampa, that had done well, it had done modestly well, it was a more specialized book on CEO transitions, but this book just hit a nerve and cut a wave and away it went, and it kind of was on the front end of a lot of thinking about what today we would call "onboarding" or "integration" work, and so as with so many things in life, timing is everything.

Rachel Salaman: So what's new in this updated edition?

Michael Watkins: I think that the big differences really are that there's been nearly a decade that I've had to both do research on the subject of transitions, but also gain a lot of experience working with new leaders, and so part of it is just a deepening of my understanding. And so there's a lot of places in the book where I've tuned the advice, or deepened the advice, or changed the kind of advice somewhat that I give.

I think also there's been such changes in the business environment, both in terms of the speed at which things are happening, which really means that there are so many more transitions going on, that leaders have even less time than they did when I wrote the book originally, to really establish themselves, begin to build credibilities, so the importance of transitions has only gotten greater.

I think also the role of technology has changed: I wrote a blog piece a couple of weeks ago on the first 90 days of a virtual team. Well, that's a really different thing today than what we were doing 10 years ago, in terms of the way people are needing to manage in a virtual distributed environment. I think there's been some research that we've done on the frequency of transition, on the type of transitions that have gone on. I've also been able to give more specialized advice, for example, about things like, what's the difference between taking a new role in a new company, as opposed to being promoted to a new level? As opposed to moving internationally?

So, really, pulling apart different types of transitions, applying the framework, has turned out to be pretty robust, but then really understanding how you adjust that framework and your approach based on the distinct types of transitions that you're going through.

Rachel Salaman: Obviously the book's title has remained the same: "The First 90 Days." Why are the first 90 days in a job so crucial to a leader's success?

Michael Watkins: There's a lot of reasons, but the most important is that people are forming impressions of you early, and once those impressions are formed they tend to be sticky, so your ability to begin to get in there, learn rapidly, establish relationships rapidly, build personal credibility, begin to get some momentum going. If you're not able to do that in the transition period, and we'll talk a little bit in a minute about the 90-day period, then you lose the window of opportunity. Impressions may form against you in important ways that may make it very difficult, because there is lots of good social psychology research on things that are known as the "confirmation bias" that basically say once people have made up their minds, they are going to tend to collect information that confirms their beliefs and push aside information that isn't, and so you just don't want to be on the wrong side of that.

Ninety days, I always have viewed it as a planning framework, rather than a length of a transition. Your transition may take a shorter time, it may take a longer time, regardless of what I want people to do is really think hard about how they are best going to use that critical first 90-day period.

Rachel Salaman: And your advice is shaped into 10 sections or steps, and you start off with "prepare yourself." So, what should they be preparing themselves for exactly?

Michael Watkins: I think the big thing here is really understanding both the organization on one side, and what they're going to need to do to begin to get up to speed with it. But also, what are the personal challenges that they are likely to go through. So, I see preparation as having those two components to it. What's the situation in the organization? How do we understand the culture we're going into, the political system we're going into? What do the expectations for success look like? What kind of change is going to be necessary?

That's the organizational change side, on the personal adaptive side there really is a question of what kind of transitions am I going through? Have I been promoted to a new level? Am I joining a new organization? And how do I factor that into my own personal work that I need to do on myself? And all that to me sits under the heading of preparing yourself to take a new role.

Rachel Salaman: So, when should this preparation take place? Because I imagine, for some people, they don't have much time?

Michael Watkins: It really varies dramatically. So, in that first book that I mentioned called "Right from the Start," Dan Ciampa and I coined the term "fuzzy front end." And it's fuzzy because it's of indeterminate length.

But my view is basically that your transition begins really when you start interviewing for a new role, or being considered for a new role. So, you should be leveraging the recruiting process or the selection process, you should be using the time between selection and when you actually take the role to the greatest degree possible to be engaging in some preparatory work, because once you're in the flow of the position, your calendar rapidly gets filled up, it becomes much harder to do certain things. So, really, the key is whatever time you have available, make the maximum possible use of it.

Rachel Salaman: In this part of the book you include a really useful checklist of what you call "cultural norms" for transitioning leaders to use. Could you talk us through some of those areas?

Michael Watkins: So, the thing is, when you think about culture in an organization, there are some different levels or dimensions of culture you may want to focus in on. So, there's some surface stuff that really is things like how do people dress? What do offices look like? What are some of the symbolic signifiers of the organization?

There's also specifically specialized language and vocabulary that needs to be learned, you need to figure out what the lexicon is for the new organization, because it's going to seem like people often are speaking a very strange language. But that stuff is relatively easy to get your hands around, what is harder sometimes to get your hands around are the behavioral norms that operate in the organization, and you can think about these as sort of boundaries within which people usually work, and if you go beyond those boundaries you're going to tend to get some pushback, typically in one form or another. And so it's things like how do people behave in meetings? Do people raise tough issues in meetings, or are meetings places where agreements that have been negotiated and socialized before the meeting really happened?

That would be a classic example of a behavioral norm, and so the key is really to begin to tune yourself into what are some of the norms that are operating in this particular organization, in this particular culture. It's important to understand those, even if ultimately you want to be there to change the culture, because my belief is you first need to be seen to be part of a place before you can really begin to effectively transform it.

Rachel Salaman: You make a really interesting point here about using strengths, and you warn that characteristics that may have helped someone succeed in the past might not actually be strengths in the new situation. Could you give an example of this?

Michael Watkins: Sure. So, I think that is the key point, which is that the things that have made you very effective up to one point in your career may not in fact be what are going to take you to the next level. The American author Mark Twain has a quote which I paraphrase which I really like, which is: "To a person with a hammer everything looks like a nail."

And up to a certain point in your career, maybe the director level in US companies, manager level, you've been able to rely on that hammer, you've developed that hammer, it's a big hammer, that hammer may be your functional expertise, it may be your analytical capability, it may be a variety of those things.

But as you move, for example, into a more enterprise leadership role, or you've got to manage functionally where you've got to be integrating things, where you've got to be perhaps more diplomatic than you have been before, where you've got to define the agenda for the organization rather than be a problem solver, the very things that may get you up to that mid-senior level may in fact be not at all what it's going to take, or certainly not sufficient to get you to the next level.

Rachel Salaman: Your next tip is "accelerate your learning." And what kind of learning are you talking about here?

Michael Watkins: So, there's a management theorist named Noel Tichy, who did a lot of work with GE, that developed a framework I liked a lot about learning. He described learning as consisting of technical learning, cultural learning, and political learning, and I really picked up and have elaborated on that framework. And technical learning is exactly what it sounds like, products, markets, technologies, strategies, competitors. It's the substance of the business.

Culture is what we were talking about, how does the organization operate in terms of norms? In terms of values? In terms of language? What do you really need to learn about those things to be effective?

And politics with a small "p" is about power, about influence, who is influential in the organization? Why do they have influence? What are sources of power? What alliances exist? What agendas are operating in the organization? So, each of those points of view is really a lens for looking at and focusing the learning process in the organization. The degree to which they're important varies.

If you're being promoted inside the same organization you may understand the culture very well, and the big issues maybe more political, learning to operate at a new level, whereas if you're coming in from the outside it may well be that the cultural piece is really crucial.

If you're moving to a new industry, or to a new business, the technical piece may be really what you need to be focusing your attention on, but it just provides a way of understanding how to engage in the right kinds of learning when you go into a new role, and not be missing some key dimensions.

Rachel Salaman: So, how open should leaders be about their need or their desire to learn when they go into a new role, given that at the same time they will surely need to establish their authority?

Michael Watkins: I think that this is an interesting question, in part because there is a cultural dimension to it, that is, to what degree does the culture you're going into permit you not to have all the answers? So, if we're talking about a US culture of going in and basically asking the "dumb questions" and engaging in the learning process very actively, can in fact generate credibility. Whereas there are other cultures where you have to be a whole lot more subtle about the learning, that because there really is an expectation in some circumstances, that the leader will have the answer or answers, and people will be coming to you early on to test that, does this person have the answers or not?

So, there's an adjustment I think that needs to be made along these lines for culture, but, at the same time, the need to learn is indisputable, it's a question of whether you're doing it openly as part of the process of building credibility in an organization that's open to that, or whether it's a little bit more covert, while you, at the same time, put on an appearance at least of knowing what you're doing.

Rachel Salaman: Another tip is "match strategy to situation," and here you talk about STARS situations. Can you explain that acronym and tell us how it helps?

Michael Watkins: Sure. So, back when I started doing research on transitions, it became very clear very quickly that the way you transition depends a lot on the kind of situation you're transitioning into. So that was the starting point for this thread of my work, which was: there's a big difference between going into a crisis situation where people know there's big problems, and action is really demanded, and no one is going to argue with that, versus a more subtle change problem where there are gathering problems that perhaps people are not fully aware of or accepting, or perhaps even are actively in denial about the need for change.

So, the way you transition really depends a lot on the kind of situation, or the mix of situations, you find yourself in. From there it was a matter of beginning to develop, over time, a framework for thinking about different types of situations, and that framework actually has evolved since the first edition, I've added some more dimensions to it. But STARS stands for Startup, Turnaround, Accelerated growth, Realignment and Sustaining success, which are the five big categories of situations that I focus people on. Start up, getting something off the ground. Accelerated growth, really scaling something rapidly, putting in place structures and systems. Sustaining success, the challenge of taking an organization that's successful and continuing to make growth happen or reigniting growth. Realignment, a more proactive change challenge, problems are beginning to mount, the air is going out of the tire slowly, metaphorically. Turnaround, the classic burning platform of crisis and the need to respond pretty quickly. But the big point here is make the punishment fit the crime. That is, make what you do match reasonably the situation you find yourself in, and be sure that you also have agreement with others about what the situation is that you find yourself in, because that's really pretty crucial.

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Rachel Salaman: Next in the book comes "negotiate success." So, what do you mean by that?

Michael Watkins: Well, again, it's just observations about the way that some of this works, which is when you come into a new role you're going to have a boss, you're going to have other key stakeholders, they're going to have views about what needs to be done, they're going to have beliefs about the situation, and about the severity of the problems, you can't take that as simply a given from those people for multiple reasons, one is they may not have as deeply informed a view as you will have once you get in there.

In addition, they may have conflicting views about what needs to be done, or conflicting sets of interests, and so as you get to more senior levels, the process of managing expectations becomes more like a negotiation and less like a "yes, sir," "right away, sir," kind of phenomenon. And so that's really the big message that I focus people in on there, which is really you've got to go in there and get a shared view of what the situation is, what are we up against, what mix of things, there's pieces in turnaround, there's pieces in realignment, so that you get people on the same page, your boss, other key stakeholders, your team, so that everyone is really lined up around that.

And then there always is an element of negotiating what's going to be done here, and you can't divorce setting expectations from negotiating over what resources are available to you, or you do that at your peril because the last thing you want to be doing is over promising and under delivering, and finding that you don't have the resources for example to deliver what you've committed to.

Rachel Salaman: You offer some really useful advice here about how to build a relationship with a new boss. What are some of your dos and don'ts?

Michael Watkins: I think by the time people are getting to more senior levels they're not making the mistakes that people make at lower levels, but I think a couple that I would point to, for example, are be really clear as you think about your early wins, making sure that your boss or bosses would view those as early wins. Understand how you can help them achieve their agendas, I think is something that is something that's always worth doing pretty well.

The second one would be understand that your working style may be very different, but in the end it's up to you to adjust yourself to your boss, and you shouldn't be expecting your boss to adjust him or herself to you. So, those would be two examples, Rachel, of watch out as you take a new role.

Rachel Salaman: In the same section you talk about planning for five conversations. Could you give an example of the types of conversations you mean here?

Michael Watkins: So, one example would be working style. How are we best going to work together, and how would you prefer me to communicate with you? Another would be around situation, how do you see the situation? How serious do you think the issues are? So those would be two examples of conversations that you'd want to have.

Rachel Salaman: You talked just a minute ago about securing early wins, and this is another one of your steps, what kinds of wins can a leader aim to secure in their first 90 days?

Michael Watkins: It really depends on the situation, there's not a one size fits all answer to that, and again it goes to what kind of situation you find yourself in. If you're in a turnaround it may well be that doing a rapid diagnosis, identifying what needs to be done to stop the bleeding, those may be the things that you need to be doing to get early wins. Whereas if you're coming into a more successful organization, it may be seen to be learning and understanding and beginning to add value in a more incremental way fairly quickly. So, early wins depend crucially on the situation that you find yourself in, and, in addition, they need to be thought about through the lens of culture.

So, you need to be thinking about what are culturally appropriate ways to get wins. If it's a culture that's a more team-based culture, and you're coming out of a culture that's more an individual star performer culture, you may well be doing things that are going to get wins, but you may be doing them in ways that are not viewed as attractive in the organization that you're a part of. I would also just add that I think some people sometimes criticize the work, saying, "Well, Michael Watkins is saying you should get quick wins." I never say that, I say "early," and there's a difference, and quick wins implies find a bunch of low hanging fruit, or maybe even superficial things, and do it.

Absolutely not, a win can be learning quickly, a win can be being seen to connect to people effectively, but nonetheless, you do have to be thinking about how you are going to build personal credibility and begin to create momentum of whatever form is appropriate during that crucial transition period.

Rachel Salaman: Then you say they should achieve alignment, and the passage that talks about turning around the classic SWOT analysis is really useful. Can you tell us about that?

Michael Watkins: Sure, so back up slightly. So, the idea of alignment basically says, look, as you get to a more senior level, you are there to design the organization, you're kind of the architect in chief of strategy, structures, systems, talent and so on, and your goal is to make sure that the organization fits the demands of the situation that you face, which may mean changing a number of those elements, but also that there's alignment among those elements.

And so, when I talk about achieving alignment that's really what I mean, creating a powerful alignment really around the organization. So, when I talk about alignment, that's really what I'm referring to. The SWOT analysis piece, there are many tools that one can use to help launch the process of assessing what needs to be done with an organization, and, of course, SWOT, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is a classic tool. I've just found, over time, in using it with executive teams, that it actually helps to do it the opposite direction, which is focus first on the external environment; what are the threats that we face? What are the opportunities we can exploit? And then work into the internal pieces of what are our strengths? What are our weaknesses? How might we mobilize to deal with the emerging threats, but also exploit the opportunities? And that simple act of turning the framework around, and it's an old framework, it's been around since the early 1970s, it turns out to make it surprisingly much more useful in the end.

Rachel Salaman: Let's move onto team building now, and you warn people against some common traps that they may fall into when they're putting a new team together. Could you tell us about a few of these?

Michael Watkins: I think that the issue here really again revolves in part around making the strategy match the situation. So, if you're in a turnaround, you may well be making many changes in your team fairly quickly, and it may be quite acceptable for you to be going outside to organizations that you were formerly at and pulling in people you've worked with before to form a team you can work with quickly.

The other side, if you're in a more realignment or sustaining success environment, being seen to go outside and pull people in that you've worked with before can seem like the invasion of the Barbarian horde, and it can create polarization in the organization, so that would be one example. Another example would be making sure you do this in a way that is culturally appropriate. If you don't understand, for example, the ethnic culture that you're operating in...

I worked with a guy who came out of the U.S., went to China to take over the Chinese business of a big food company. If he had made assessments the way he normally would have in the U.S., he would have made very bad choices about his people, because culturally there was some reticence on the part of some people that turned out to be very good to really engage with him, until they got a sense of who he was, and so his initial impressions may well have been that they're pretty passive, they're pretty disengaged, and that would have been really wrong.

So, the way that you go about doing this also has to match with the culture that you're operating in.

Rachel Salaman: Your chapter on creating alliances reads like a guide to navigating office politics. How can a new leader be sure that they're creating alliances with the right people when they're in a new environment?

Michael Watkins: Well, you can't be 100 percent sure that you're doing that ever. But I think that step one is to make sure that at least as much as possible you're not creating alliances or inadvertently appearing to with the wrong people, because the key to the first starting point is to recognize first that organizational politics are a fact of life. So, I sometimes hear people say, "I hate politics, blah blah blah," and my basic response is, "Get over it, because that's just the way life is, that an organization's human systems are inherently political and there is no point in pretending otherwise."

Now, if it helps you, instead of talking about politics, to talk about building alliances in support of achieving important organizational objectives, then great, that's the framing you need to feel good about, by all means go forward, but let's not pretend that it's not necessary. I think rule number one is the version of the Hippocratic oath which is first "do no harm." And, in this case, to yourself, which means be careful not to be pulled into the orbit of people that you may regret being pulled into the orbit of, because any time someone enters the organization there's often going to be a competition for their allegiances.

I tell leaders going in, try to maintain a fairly studied neutrality with regard to a political system, until you have some degree of understanding of it. I think the learning piece really goes back to the conversation we had about political learning, about beginning to size up who does seem to have influence in the organization, who does seem to defer to whom, how is influence appropriately used and inappropriately used in the organization. This typically takes time. You've got to immerse yourself to some degree in the organization, although getting out and talking to people, even before you are formally in the role, if you're able to do that, can often be very helpful.

Rachel Salaman: Towards the end of the book there's a chapter on managing yourself, and here you outline three pillars of self-management. Could you briefly tell us about those?

Michael Watkins: So, one is just simply being really good at putting in place the first 90 days acceleration plan, and that's dealt with in the rest of the book. The other two I've come to believe are pretty core to what differentiates effective leaders from ineffective leaders, and the first of those two is self-discipline.

Do you have the ability to discipline yourself, to do things that don't come naturally? And that really goes back to the conversation about understanding your strengths, about understanding your potentially vulnerabilities, it goes to a core issue of how much ability do you have to flex as a leader in the face of new situations. So, you're a natural go-getter turnaround person, but you're in a sustaining success environment. Do you have the ability to slow yourself down, to engage in more consensus-building than you probably naturally would? Can you control your inner need to be seen to be in action or not? And I think the questions I typically ask when I'm coaching people are, "What are things you love doing, that you're really good at doing, that you need to do less of?" and, "What are some things that perhaps you're not so good at, or don't really enjoy doing, that you need to do more of?"

And to me that's the core of beginning to put in place a new set of habits, a set of disciplines that are going to help you be successful given the demands of the situation you find yourself in. The other is advice and counsel. No leader is an island, you need to be thinking about what's the right kind of advice and counsel network; how am I going to build that network? Advice, Dan Ciampa and I made this distinction between advice which is really more technical advice about marketing or information technology, versus counsel which is more political and personal, helping you make the right choices, helping you navigate the political currents of the organization.

It's also important to look at to what degree are you going to try and build an advice and counsel network, within your organization or the larger organization of which you're a part, as opposed to have a more personal and portable network to take with you. And so we try to give people some tools to make those kinds of assessments. But if you build a good first 90 days plan, if you really pay attention to disciplining yourself to do what really needs to be done, and if you build an effective advice and counsel network, typically those are pretty important pillars for being successful in your transition.

Rachel Salaman: Your final tip in the book is "accelerate everyone," which is about applying some of this advice to a team or even an organization, rather than an individual, yourself. So, what are the most useful things to apply in this context?

Michael Watkins: I think that this is more recent work that I've been doing over the past few years, which is really, "How do organizations take this set of ideas and apply them more systemically?" The starting point is to realize that there are many, many transitions going on in typical companies, and one study we did said 25 percent of the leadership ranks of a typical Fortune 500 company are taking new jobs every year.

That's a tremendous amount of change, and every one of those transitions impacts other people, so if you're successful in institutionalizing first 90 days thinking in the organization, and you're able to speed up all those transitions, even by 10 percent, it can have an enormous impact on the organization. So, I really focus in on what's the value of institutionalizing these kinds of frameworks, creating a common language, a common set of frameworks, a common set of tools, so that really transition becomes a core part of the culture of the organization, that's really the essence of what I'm trying to do there.

Rachel Salaman: We've covered a lot of ground in this interview. What, to you, are the key takeaways for a leader who wants to succeed in a new role?

Michael Watkins: I think the first and most important one is really do your homework, understand as early as possible what it is that you're up against, both in terms of the organizational change challenge you face, but also the personal adaptive challenges that you're going to confront.

I think the second one would be simply take the time to put together a first 90 days plan, be thoughtful about what you're trying to do there, don't just go in and wing it because that's not going to get you too far. And I guess to recognize that the foundations of successful transitions really are about accelerating the learning process on one side and making those crucial relationship connections into the organization on the other. And, if you do those two things, it will typically then build a foundation for success as you move forward into the new role.

Rachel Salaman: Michael Watkins, thank you very much for joining us.

Michael Watkins: It was a pleasure, Rachel.

Rachel Salaman: We were talking about the classic business book, "The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting up to Speed Faster and Smarter," updated for its 10th anniversary.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then goodbye.