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

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      The First 90 Days^®, Acceleration Coaching™, Rapid Rewire™, Transition Roadmap™, Transition Risk Assessment™, and Transition Heat Map™ are trademarks of Genesis Advisers.

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to [email protected], or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.

      The web addresses referenced in this book were live and correct at the time of the book’s publication but may be subject to change.

      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