Whether your new role as a leader is in an organization you have worked for or a completely new terrain, your first 90 days in the office are pivotal to your success. If you wonder why, here are a few reasons. Your first 90 days as a leader are significant to the organization and your legacy because the few months often set the tone for your tenure, help manage expectations, and ultimately determine your success rate.
Moreover, whether you were aware of your appointment months before it became official or it was impromptu, transitioning automatically ends 90 days after assuming office. The milestone metaphorically marks the end of your honeymoon with the company as people start looking for transformational moves you have made to feel or experience any positive impact shortly. Therefore, you must use the period to learn, understand, strategize, build trust, and a formidable team to execute your plans.
Due to the pressing need to know what to do in the first few weeks in office to succeed as a leader, many experts have come up with various ways to navigate success in the first 90 days in office. However, this article will focus on things you should ensure you do as a matter of urgency and necessity and the common pitfalls you should avoid at all costs as they hover around managing expectations.
As interesting as it may sound, many people expect so much from you as a newly announced leader of a group, team, department, or organization. It may even shock you that some of these people include clients, business partners, vendors, and competitors aside from the board, your direct boss, colleagues, and subordinates. This is why managing expectations is very crucial to your success within this period. It is worth noting here that everyone has a boss no matter how highly placed you are. Even the head of a country is answerable to people whose high expectations must be managed with a great deal of clarity, especially on agreed goals.
You therefore need to engage your boss, board, or the people you are answerable to determine and agree on realistic targets you need to meet while in office. Establishing reasonable expectations, reaching an agreement on deadlines based on the situation on the ground, and obtaining relevant approvals to secure enough resources for the task ahead seems to be the way to go after completing a thorough situation assessment of your organization. While at it, be guided to take the following steps as well.
Take full responsibility: Do not be tempted to condemn the past regardless of your findings or feelings. The past in this context includes your predecessors, old systems and structures, existing culture, and office politics. Criticizing or bad-mouthing any of the past leaders will backfire aside from the fact that there is absolutely nothing to gain from doing so. Even though you must have a good knowledge of the past, your focus should be on how to make your mark in the best possible way by learning from other people’s mistakes without tearing them down. Make good use of the historical and current performances to accurately predict and proactively decide on how to forge ahead in moving the organization forward without trading blame.
Assess the situation: Assessing the current business situation of the organization is probably the very first move you need to make. Having been appointed and announced, you have all the support you need to access the information required for necessary evaluations. This exercise is integral to an insider just promoted to the leadership role as an outsider who just got appointed to lead. Your new position automatically opens you up to privileged information you may not be privy to before assuming the role, so take advantage of it to understand the company’s status. Another reason to do this is that your diagnosis will prompt your next strategic move within the next couple of months. For example, your reaction and moves in a company with accelerated growth will be completely different from what you would do if you found out that your company is in a turnaround state.
Build a formidable team: This may seem tricky but is as simple as keeping an open mind. Don’t fall into the trap of immediately disbanding, redeploying, or laying off, rather carry out a people audit. This will make you well-informed about the people you are leading, especially your direct report. You will be able to identify their strengths and weaknesses just as much as you have assessed yours, which makes alignment of goals easier to fashion out. Once you complete the audit and the business diagnostic exercise, you will be in a better position to re-assign duties based on people’s strengths and approve training based on needs. You will also know the roles that need to be taken up, especially in your A-team which will be charged with strategic portfolios for your success.
Find a mentor: Aside from your high-performance team, you must strategically find a mentor. You need someone well-versed in your new role and whose opinions are highly valued, respected, and cherished by your boss or group. Also, in choosing this mentor, you must consider what he or she possesses that you are lacking in terms of management style and idiosyncrasies. Therefore, your mentor must with no doubt complement you and be more knowledgeable than you in the industry you operate and have leadership experience. Having a mentor(s) like this will keep you a step ahead of the game. Not only that, your moves and ideas will be back-to-back hits with full support from your boss and attendant successful results.
Be available: Always make it a point of duty to regularly reach out to your boss, the board, or the people you are accountable to, your business partners and employees even if it’s not quite convenient to do so. If you find yourself in a situation where there is less cordiality between you and your boss, it is on you to suck it up and still reach out to ensure there is no irreparable damage to your work relationship or terrible communication gap that cannot be bridged. Bearing in mind that, if your work relationship goals align, everything else will be sorted at its required pace.
Keep them in the loop: It is advisable to avoid sharing negative information or breaking bad news of any kind at this level. So, the best way to achieve this while ensuring you are not seen to be hiding anything will be to always carry your boss or board along. It may be in the form of picking their brains, getting approval, asking for an introduction, or just in the regular update report of the situation of things in the organization. By so doing, no one will feel spooked or blindsided in any way if an unexpected happens. Also, seize the opportunity to negotiate timelines for SLAs (service level agreements) or TAT (turnaround time) and other exercises, especially the diagnostic and planning exercises. Even though, these timeframes are not cast in stone, having them in place drives the projects and gives your people a great deal of comfort and confidence in your ability to deliver.
Balance is key: Ensure you always strike a balance in your discussions with your boss, the board, or the people to whom you are accountable. Always find good news and positive feedback to share with them first before presenting any form of challenge the organization may be facing. Even after letting them in on these challenges, have a list of ways to resolve them with a report that something is currently being done to de-escalate the issue(s) as you seek their support for stronger moves. The initial positive news will make them more receptive and genuinely open to help. Also, even if they frown at your moves to quench the fire, they will be eager to approve whatever is required to resolve the issue while offering support in their diverse unique ways.
Go for gold: Aim for quick wins that matter to your boss, the board, or a group of people to whom you are accountable within the first few months. Identify the areas that matter to them most and find ways to achieve positive results within the earliest possible time in those areas. This will strengthen their confidence in your ability to perform and that they’ve made a good decision hiring you. Your first ninety days represent the general thirty seconds needed by people to form an opinion of you. Make a lasting positive impression that would make their perceptions of your capability great.
Avoid singing your own praises: As much as getting in some quick wins is highly recommended within your first few months in office, don’t be eager to celebrate them all at once. Even if you are doing excellently well, never sing your praises. Although you must let your people know what you have achieved vis-à-vis the agreed-set goals and targets, let the information be passed across in work discussions, reports, and meetings while you try as much as possible not to have a big head doing so. A more effective way of doing this is making careful comparisons with previous years in your reports without castigating any previous past performance. Remember you are expected to take ownership of past, present, and future performances even as the new leader.
Never assume: Don’t make any assumption without enough facts and figures to back it up. More importantly, never assume your boss or a certain board member will change through your actions or inactions. Rather, identify, understand, and get used to their ways and style of doing things. You are not there to change someone but rather the way things are done for a much better outlook and results from the organization.
Even though it is normal to feel overwhelmed and probably somewhat lost in the first few weeks of assuming a leadership role, you must make them all go away by hitting the ground running. Doing this may not be as easy especially when it’s been experiencing a rollercoaster of emotions manifesting as fear of failing, imposter syndrome, unwillingness to celebrate the appointment, or staying away from people. Stepping up to the plate to take charge and control is the best way to tackle this headlong. Bearing in mind three key things – (i) you are more than qualified for the role, hence your appointment, (ii) anything you need to know to be fully functional in the role can be learned with complete dedication and self-discipline, (iii) you are in it to succeed with no other option.
Call to action
Having provided several calls to action in the form of exercises for some time, I’m currently soliciting your workplace situations as case studies. Please send your email with the workplace wellness issue requests to [email protected]. Kindly modify your company’s details with the real names of the actors kept confidential.
Opaleye, a well-being specialist and corporate wellness strategist, writes from Lagos
