Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter
MICHAEL D. WATKINS
Harvard Business Review Press • Boston, Massachusetts
Copyright 2013 Michael D. Watkins
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Watkins, Michael, 1956-
The first 90 days : proven strategies for getting up to speed faster and smarter / Michael Watkins. —[Updated and expanded edition].
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4221-8861-3 (hardback)
1. Leadership. 2. Executive ability. 3. Strategic planning. 4. Management. I. Title. II. Title: First ninety days.
HD57.7.W38 2013
658.4 — dc23
2012047185
To Aidan,
Maeve, and Niall
My beautiful children.
—M. W.
CONTENTS
Preface for the 10th Anniversary Edition
Introduction: The First 90 Days
Why transitions are critical times. How new leaders can take charge more effectively. Building career transition competence. Assessing transition risk in taking a new role.
1. Prepare Yourself
Why people fail to make the mental break from their old jobs. Preparing to take charge in a new role. Understanding the challenges of promotion and onboarding. Assessing preferences and vulnerabilities.
2. Accelerate Your Learning
Learning as an investment process. Planning to learn. Figuring out the best sources of insight. Using structured methods to accelerate learning.
3. Match Strategy to Situation
The dangers of “one-best-way” thinking. Diagnosing the situation to develop the right strategy. The STARS model of types of transitions. Using the model to analyze portfolios, and lead change.
4. Negotiate Success
Building a productive working relationship with a new boss. The five-conversations framework. Defining expectations. Agreeing on a diagnosis of the situation. Figuring out how to work together. Negotiating for resources. Putting together your 90-day plan.
5. Secure Early Wins
Avoiding common traps. Figuring out A-item priorities. Creating a compelling vision. Building personal credibility. Getting started on improving organizational performance. Plan-then-implement change versus collective learning.
6. Achieve Alignment
The role of the leader as organizational architect. Identifying the root causes of poor performance. Aligning strategy, structure, systems, skills, and culture.
7. Build Your Team
Inheriting a team and changing it. Managing the tension between short-term and long-term goals. Working team restructuring and organizational architecture issues in parallel. Putting in place new team processes.
8. Create Alliances
The trap of thinking that authority is enough. Identifying whose support is critical. Mapping networks of influence and patterns of deference. Altering perceptions of interests and alternatives.
9. Manage Yourself
How leaders get caught in vicious cycles. The three pillars of self-efficacy. Creating and enforcing personal disciplines. Building an advice-and-counsel network.
10. Accelerate Everyone
Why so few companies focus on transition acceleration. The opportunity to institutionalize a common framework. Using the framework to accelerate team development, develop high-potential leaders, integrate acquisitions, and strengthen succession planning.
Notes
About the Author
PREFACE FOR THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
What a difference a decade makes. When I set out to write The First 90 Days in 2001, little was out there about getting up to speed in new roles or onboarding new hires (hereafter “leadership transitions”).1 At the time, I was teaching negotiation and corporate diplomacy at Harvard Business School. Although I had coauthored a modestly successful book on senior executive transitions in 1999—Right from the Start with Dan Ciampa—I had been counseled by my colleagues at HBS that it was a risky career move to focus further on the subject.2
While I appreciated their advice, in the end I decided to push forward to write the book. Leadership transitions were just too interesting and ripe for study; it was virtually an untilled field from both intellectual and practical points of view. Also in late 1999, soon after the publication of Right from the Start, I had been asked by Johnson & Johnson’s corporate management development group to develop workshops and coaching processes to accelerate the company’s leaders in transition. This work soon evolved into an engaging development partnership, and J&J became a test bed for the development and deployment of my ideas.
The First 90 Days was a distillation of what I had learned during roughly two and a half years of working with hundreds of leaders at the vice president and director levels in all regions of the world. The book built on some foundational ideas developed in Right from the Start; for example the importance of accelerating learning, securing early wins, and creating alliances. However, the ideas had been augmented, tested, modified, and turned into practical frameworks and tools for helping leaders at all levels accelerate their transitions.
It was that distillation—the mix of concepts, tools, cases, and practical advice—that really hit the mark with leaders in transition. I had the wonderful experience of seeing sales of The First 90 Days, which was published in November 2003, take off like a rocket. By the summer of 2004, the book was on the BusinessWeek best-seller list; it stayed there for fifteen months. This success coincided fortuitously with my departure from Harvard and fueled my decision not to seek another academic position. Instead I cofounded a leadership development company—Genesis Advisers—dedicated to helping companies accelerate everyone who is taking new roles.
Business books, even highly successful ones, tend to sell strongly for a year or two and then fade. This has not been the case for The First 90 Days. I have had the pleasure of seeing the book sell strongly for a decade, having so far sold almost