The First Ninety Days

Congratulations on the role. I want to give you the advice I wish somebody had given me, which is mostly about what not to do.

In your first month, the pressure to act will be enormous, and almost all of it will be self-generated. You will feel that you were hired to change things, and that a month without a visible change is a month of failure. It is not. A month spent understanding why the current arrangement exists is the highest-return month you will have all year, because every arrangement you inherit is somebody's solution to a problem you cannot see yet.

So spend the first four weeks asking three questions of everyone you meet. What is working that I should be careful not to break? What is broken that everybody has stopped mentioning? And what would you do if you had my job? That third question is the one that pays. People will tell you exactly what they think, and they will tell you in the first month because you are still new enough to be safe to talk to.

In the second month, pick one thing. Not five. One visible, unambiguous improvement that the team has already told you they want, and that you can finish. What you are buying is not the improvement. It is the evidence that saying something to you results in something happening — and that evidence determines the quality of every piece of information you receive from that point on.

By the third month you can start on the thing you were actually hired to do, and you will do it with a map instead of a guess.

One warning. Everything you say now carries more weight than you intend. A thought you offered out loud will be reported as a decision by the end of the week. So say less than you think, and when you do decide something, say plainly that it is a decision. Ambiguity from a manager is not modesty. It is work you have handed to somebody else.