Mastering the Pivot: A Comprehensive Guide to Your First 90 Days in Any New Leadership Role

Quick Orientation

Michael Watkins’s “The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels” serves as an indispensable blueprint for anyone stepping into a new leadership position, from a first-time manager to a seasoned CEO. Published in 2003, this book cuts through the common “sink or swim” mentality of career transitions, offering a structured, actionable framework to ensure rapid success and sustained impact. Watkins argues that the initial three months in a new role are a critical window of opportunity, where small differences in a leader’s actions can have disproportionately large impacts on long-term outcomes.

This summary will meticulously break down every important idea, example, and insight presented in the book, providing a clear and accessible understanding of Watkins’s transition acceleration model. From diagnosing your new situation to building powerful coalitions and maintaining personal equilibrium, we will cover all the critical strategies and practical tools discussed. Readers can expect a comprehensive overview that ensures no significant concept is left out, empowering them to effectively navigate their own career transitions and drive organizational transformation.

Chapter 1 — Promote Yourself

This opening chapter tackles the crucial mental shift required when moving into a new leadership role, emphasizing that true promotion begins internally by letting go of past successes and embracing new imperatives. Watkins highlights that merely relying on what made you successful previously can be a fatal flaw in a new position.

The Peril of Past Successes

Watkins illustrates this pitfall with compelling examples. Julia Gould, a successful marketing professional, failed in her first project leader role because she continued to micromanage and focus solely on marketing aspects, areas where she felt competent. Her inability to lead without direct authority or superior expertise, and her tendency to stick to what she knew, alienated her cross-functional team and led to her demotion. Similarly, Douglas Ivester, the CEO of Coca-Cola after Roberto Goizueta, struggled because he couldn’t transition from a highly praised COO to a strategic CEO. His extraordinary attention to detail and tendency to act as a “super-COO” hindered his ability to engage in the broader strategic and statesmanlike roles required of a CEO. Both cases underscore the danger of believing that past strengths will automatically translate to future success without adaptation.

Essential Principles for Mental Promotion

To avoid these traps, Watkins outlines several key principles for mentally preparing for a new position. The first is to establish a clear breakpoint, consciously letting go of the old job and embracing the new. This might involve a dedicated weekend to reflect on differences and new challenges, or an informal celebration. The aim is to get into a “transition state of mind.” Second, leaders must hit the ground running by starting planning immediately, even before the official start date. Using the 90-day mark as a key milestone, leaders should outline goals for their first day, week, month, and beyond, however sketchy these plans may initially be. This proactive planning helps clear the mind and focuses early efforts.

Assessing Vulnerabilities and Adapting Strengths

A critical step is to assess your vulnerabilities, recognizing that over-reliance on past strengths can be a weakness. Watkins introduces the concept of problem preferences, the types of problems you naturally gravitate toward. He provides a tool (Table 1-1 and 1-2) to help leaders assess their intrinsic interest in solving technical, political, and cultural problems across different business functions. A low score in any area indicates a potential blind spot, suggesting a need for self-discipline to devote time to less preferred but critical activities, or to seek support from others skilled in those areas. Leaders must also watch out for their strengths becoming liabilities; for instance, attention to detail can devolve into micromanagement.

Relearning and Network Restructuring

The chapter emphasizes the need to relearn how to learn, acknowledging that new roles often involve a steep learning curve. Leaders may experience feelings of incompetence and vulnerability, which can lead to denial and defensiveness, effectively shutting down learning. Watkins cites Chris Argyris’s observation that successful people often struggle to learn from failure because they rarely experience it. Leaders must consciously embrace learning and avoid reverting to comfortable but unproductive habits. Finally, leaders need to rework their network, shifting from technical advisers early in their careers to more political and personal counselors as they advance. It’s also crucial to watch out for people who want to hold you back, whether former bosses reluctant to let go, friends resistant to changing dynamics, or former peers who are jealous. Leaders must set clear expectations and be prepared to make tough personnel decisions if acceptance of their new role isn’t achieved.

In sum, “Promote Yourself” sets the stage by highlighting that successful transitions are not just about external promotions but require a profound internal transformation. Leaders must be self-aware, adapt their approach, and proactively manage both their own mindset and their relationships to overcome inherent challenges and prevent self-sabotage.

Chapter 2 — Accelerate Your Learning

This chapter delves into the critical importance of rapidly understanding your new organization, outlining systematic approaches to acquire the necessary insights quickly and efficiently. Watkins stresses that efficient and effective learning is paramount to reducing a leader’s window of vulnerability and enabling timely, sound business decisions.

Overcoming Common Learning Disabilities

Watkins identifies several “learning disabilities” that new leaders often exhibit, which can cripple their ability to get up to speed. One common issue is a failure to understand the organization’s history, leading to missteps like tearing down existing structures without understanding their original purpose. Another significant affliction is the action imperative, a compulsive need to take action without sufficient learning. This can lead to poor early decisions that undermine credibility and create a vicious cycle where people are less likely to share crucial information. A third major disability is arriving with “the answer,” prematurely assuming solutions based on past experiences in different organizational cultures. Chris Bagley’s failure at White Goods exemplifies this; he alienated employees by immediately pushing for changes modeled on his previous company’s success without understanding the plant’s history, existing capabilities, or the workforce’s justifiable pride. These disabilities can lead to serious mistakes and alienate key stakeholders.

Managing Learning as an Investment Process

To counteract these disabilities, Watkins advises treating learning as an investment process, where time and energy are carefully managed resources to yield “actionable insights.” An actionable insight is knowledge that enables better, earlier decisions, helping leaders reach the breakeven point faster. This process involves defining a learning agenda, identifying the best sources of insight, and adopting structured learning methods.

Defining Your Learning Agenda

A learning agenda clarifies what you most need to learn, initially comprising focused questions and later evolving into hypotheses to explore and test. Watkins suggests structuring inquiry around the past, present, and future of the organization:

• Questions About the Past: Focus on historical performance, root causes of successes or failures, and the history of change efforts. Understanding “how we got to this point” prevents repeating past mistakes.
• Questions About the Present: Explore the stated vs. actual vision and strategy, identify key people (capable, trustworthy, influential), analyze core processes (quality, reliability, timeliness), and pinpoint potential “land mines” or damaging missteps.
• Questions About the Future: Investigate likely challenges and opportunities, necessary resources and barriers, and which cultural elements to preserve or change.

Identifying the Best Sources of Insight

Effective learning requires tapping into diverse sources of information, both hard data (financial reports, strategic plans) and soft information (culture, politics). Watkins emphasizes the importance of talking to people. Key internal sources include:

• Frontline R&D and Operations: For basic processes and external constituency relationships.
• Sales and Purchasing: For up-to-date market trends and customer insights.
• Staff (Finance, Legal, HR): For specialized perspectives on internal workings.
• Integrators: Project, plant, or product managers who reveal how internal links and functions mesh.
• Natural Historians: Long-time employees who provide company mythology, culture, and political roots.

External sources like customers, distributors, suppliers, and outside analysts offer objective assessments and broader industry context. The goal is to gain diverse perspectives to deepen insight and validate observations.

Adopting Structured Learning Methods

To ensure efficiency, Watkins advocates for structured learning processes, rather than simply diving into informal conversations. He suggests a standardized approach for meeting with direct reports:

• One-on-one meetings: Initially, conduct individual meetings, asking the same five core questions to each report: 1) Biggest near-future challenges? 2) Why these challenges? 3) Most promising unexploited opportunities? 4) What’s needed to exploit opportunities? 5) If you were me, what would you focus on? This standardization helps identify consistent and divergent views and reveals insights into team dynamics.
• Group discussion: After individual meetings, convene the group to feed back preliminary findings and invite discussion. This demonstrates the leader’s rapid grasp of issues and further reveals team dynamics.

Watkins also outlines various structured methods for learning (Table 2-1) tailored to different situations, including:

• Organizational climate and employee satisfaction surveys: Useful for understanding morale and culture.
• Structured sets of interviews with “slices” of the organization: To identify shared and divergent perceptions across levels or functions.
• Focus groups: For probing issues with key employee groups and observing interactions.
• Analysis of critical past decisions: To illuminate decision-making patterns and power sources.
• Process analysis: For examining interdepartmental interactions and assessing efficiency.
• Plant and market tours: For informal meetings with personnel and gaining external perspectives.
• Pilot projects: To gain deep insight into technical capabilities, culture, and politics by observing organizational responses.

Creating a Learning Plan and Understanding Culture

A learning plan translates learning goals into specific actions, outlining how to gather information from promising sources using systematic methods. It should be a primary focus for the first 30 days. Watkins emphasizes the importance of understanding organizational culture by peering below surface symbols and norms to grasp underlying assumptions, particularly those related to power (who can legitimately make decisions) and value (what actions create value). He introduces three intersecting dimensions of culture: organizational culture (internal norms, values, routines), professional culture (differences across functional groups), and geographic culture (regional or national business practices). Assessing the “culture adaptation challenge” on a 1-10 scale across these dimensions helps determine how much energy to devote to understanding and adapting to new cultures. The final decision is whether to adapt to or alter the existing culture, which requires knowing which cultural characteristics help and which harm performance.

In conclusion, accelerating learning is not a passive activity but a disciplined, strategic investment. By proactively defining a learning agenda, leveraging diverse information sources, and employing structured methods, new leaders can quickly overcome learning disabilities, gain actionable insights, and build a strong foundation for effective decision-making and organizational transformation.

Chapter 3 — Match Strategy to Situation

This chapter is about the critical necessity for new leaders to accurately diagnose their unique business situation and tailor their strategies accordingly, rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach. Watkins introduces the STARS model as a powerful framework for this diagnosis.

The Peril of Misdiagnosis

Watkins opens with the cautionary tale of Claire Weeks, who, upon becoming head of an industrial products division, mistakenly believed she was in a sustaining-success situation. She committed to ambitious growth targets inherited from her predecessor. However, she soon discovered underlying structural problems with pricing, inventory, and distributor relationships – indicating the division was actually in need of realignment. Instead of confronting these issues and resetting expectations with the CEO, Claire pushed forward with misguided strategies, alienating distributors, making bad calls on product launches, and failing in acquisition attempts. Her misdiagnosis led to eroded credibility and ultimately, her resignation. This story highlights how a mistaken diagnosis can lead to unachievable goals and costly, avoidable mistakes, illustrating the importance of clear-headed assessment of challenges, opportunities, and available resources.

The STARS Model: A Framework for Diagnosis

The STARS model categorizes business situations into four broad types: Start-up, Turnaround, Realignment, and Sustaining Success. Understanding these categories is crucial for leaders at all levels, whether managing an entire company, a small group, or a project.

• Start-up: Involves assembling capabilities (people, funding, technology) to launch a new business, product, or project. Leaders get to build from scratch and often deal with high energy and potential confusion.
• Turnaround: Taking on a unit or group in recognized trouble to get it back on track. This involves significant “construction work” from a broken base, requiring tough, decisive early calls.
• Realignment: Revitalizing a unit, product, process, or project that is drifting into trouble but not yet in crisis. This often requires reinvention of the business and changing deeply ingrained norms.
• Sustaining Success: Preserving the vitality of an already successful organization and taking it to the next level. The challenge here is to “invent the challenge” and combat complacency.

Understanding the History and Business Evolution

Watkins emphasizes that businesses often move predictably through these STARS situations, forming cycles. The STARS Model of Business Evolution (Figure 3-1) illustrates this:

• Growth Cycle: Successful start-ups mature into sustaining-success situations. Leaders often transition from start-up specialists to those more experienced in running larger businesses.
• Recovery Cycle: Sustaining businesses can drift into trouble, necessitating realignment. If successful, this returns the business to a sustaining-success state. A key hurdle in realignment is denial among employees, who may still believe they are in a sustaining-success phase.
• Crisis Cycle: If realignment efforts fail, the situation can escalate to a full-scale turnaround. This demands rapid, significant changes, often with widespread recognition of the dire need for action. If successful, it leads back to sustaining success. Failure leads to shutdown or divestiture.

Leaders must understand this historical context to grasp the current challenges and opportunities, enabling them to make informed decisions and gain consensus on the need for change.

Identifying Challenges and Opportunities

Each STARS situation presents distinct challenges and opportunities (Table 3-1):

• Start-up: Challenges include building from scratch, limited resources, and forming a cohesive team. Opportunities lie in the ability to “do things right from the beginning” and leverage the high energy of energized people who are open to new thinking.
• Turnaround: Challenges involve reenergizing demoralized employees, managing extreme time pressure, and making deep, painful cuts. Opportunities include universal recognition of the need for change, potential external support (e.g., from suppliers), and significant impact from even small successes.
• Realignment: Challenges stem from deeply ingrained cultural norms, convincing employees that change is necessary (piercing through denial), and restructuring the top team. Opportunities include existing “pockets of strength” (strong people, products, technologies) to leverage, and people’s desire to continue seeing themselves as successful.
• Sustaining Success: Challenges involve playing “good defense” to avoid problems, living up to the shadow of a revered predecessor, and finding ways to “take the business to the next level.” Opportunities include a strong existing team, highly motivated people, and established foundations (e.g., product pipelines).

Transforming Organizational Psychology and Leading with the Right Skills

Success also hinges on a leader’s ability to transform the prevailing organizational psychology:

• Start-ups: Channel excited confusion into productive directions by defining what not to do.
• Turnarounds: Provide hope and direction to people close to despair.
• Realignments: Pierce the veil of denial to make people confront the need for reinvention.
• Sustaining Success: “Invent the challenge” to combat complacency and find new growth.

The management skills required also differ. Start-ups and turnarounds call for “hunters” – people who are fast-moving, decisive, and willing to act on incomplete information. Realignments and sustaining-success situations demand “farmers” – those with subtle influence skills, focusing on understanding culture, politics, and painstakingly cultivating awareness for change. A hunter might stumble in a realignment by moving too fast, while a farmer might move too slowly in a turnaround. Leaders must assess their own inclinations and adapt to the situation, knowing when to “plow” versus when to “hunt.”

Focusing Energy: Learning vs. Doing, Offense vs. Defense, and Early Wins

The STARS diagnosis helps leaders make fundamental early choices:

• Learning Versus Doing: In turnarounds and start-ups, the premium is on doing (rapid, technical learning and decisive action). In realignments and sustaining success, more time is warranted for learning (deep dive into culture and politics) before taking major action.
• Offense Versus Defense: Start-ups are all about offense (getting something new going). Turnarounds begin with good defense (cutting to a defendable core), then shift to offense. Realignments prioritize offense (midcourse corrections), while sustaining success begins with good defense (preserving crown jewels) before gradually shifting to offense. Figure 3-2 visually summarizes these energy focus choices.
• Securing Early Wins: What constitutes a “win” varies. In start-ups, it’s getting the right team and strategic focus. In turnarounds, it’s identifying the defendable core and making progress in paring back. In realignments, it’s gaining acceptance for change and urgency. In sustaining success, it’s demonstrating understanding of past success.

Diagnosing Your Portfolio and Rewarding Success

Watkins notes that most situations are not “pure” STARS types; leaders manage a portfolio of products, projects, or teams that represent a mix of these situations. The final diagnostic step is to map these components (Figure 3-3) to the appropriate STARS categories and then tailor management approaches accordingly. This provides a common language for discussion with teams. The STARS framework also has implications for rewarding success. Turnarounds and start-ups are often best rewarded due to clear, measurable outcomes, while realignments and sustaining success are harder to measure and thus often less recognized. This can inadvertently encourage crisis rather than prevention.

Adopting 4-D Development

Finally, the STARS framework can inform high-potential talent development by adding a fourth dimension: breadth of exposure to different STARS business situations. This complements existing dimensions of managerial functions, geographic regions, and career crossroads. Companies should decide whether to develop specialists or versatile managers who can “hunt and farm” across all situations. This framework also helps in integrating outside hires, as realignments are particularly risky for outsiders who must convince insiders their successful approaches are flawed.

In essence, “Match Strategy to Situation” equips leaders with a crucial diagnostic lens. By understanding the historical context and unique demands of their situation, leaders can make deliberate choices about where to focus their energy, what skills to leverage, and how to secure meaningful early wins, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of a one-size-fits-all approach.

Chapter 4 — Secure Early Wins

This chapter highlights the critical importance of securing early wins to build momentum and personal credibility during a leadership transition, emphasizing that these initial successes must be strategically planned and executed. Watkins underscores that early wins excite and energize people, proving a new leader’s effectiveness and accelerating their journey to the breakeven point.

Avoiding Common Traps in Pursuit of Early Wins

While securing early wins is crucial, Watkins cautions against several common traps that can derail new leaders:

• Failing to focus: Trying to do too much (“riding off madly in all directions”) dissipates effort and leads to frequent crises. Leaders must ruthlessly prioritize.
• Not taking the business situation into account: What constitutes a “win” differs dramatically across STARS situations. A small win in a turnaround might be a major accomplishment, while the same action in a sustaining-success situation could be irrelevant.
• Not adjusting for the culture: What is perceived as a “win” can vary by organizational culture. Individual glory-seeking might be lauded in one culture but seen as grandstanding in another team-oriented environment.
• Failing to get wins that matter to your boss: While employees’ buy-in is important, securing wins that align with your boss’s priorities is paramount for building credibility and accessing resources.
• Letting your means undermine your ends: Achieving results through manipulative or culturally inconsistent methods can erode trust and set you up for future problems. The process of achieving the win is as important as the win itself.

Making Waves (of Change)

Watkins introduces the concept of waves of change, drawing on John Gabarro’s research on general managers (Figure 4-1). Leaders typically plan and implement change in distinct phases:

• Early wave: Focuses on acclimatization and securing early wins to build credibility and identify “low-hanging fruit.”
• Second wave: A deeper, more thorough structural change based on consolidated learning. This is where real performance gains are achieved.
• Final wave: Fine-tuning and maximizing performance before the leader moves on.

This phased approach allows for consolidation and deeper learning between waves, preventing burnout and ensuring that changes are well-informed. The pace and intensity of these waves should be matched to the STARS situation: turnarounds and start-ups demand earlier, more intense first waves, while realignments and sustaining-success situations allow for more cautious, planned changes.

Establishing Long-Term Goals

Early wins should not be isolated events but rather double duty initiatives that build short-term credibility while laying the foundation for longer-term goals. These long-term goals consist of:

• A-item business priorities: Measurable objectives that define the destination (e.g., “increase customer satisfaction by 60% in one year”). These should be clear, ambitious, and flexible enough to be refined as learning progresses. They should stem from core problems and be neither too general nor too specific.
• Desired changes in behavior: Addressing dysfunctional patterns in the organization (Table 4-1), such as lack of focus, discipline, innovation, teamwork, or sense of urgency. Leaders must define a clear vision of how they want people to behave and plan how early wins will advance this behavioral change.

Securing Early Wins: Credibility and Tangible Results

The first 90 days are divided into two phases for securing early wins:

• Building Credibility (First 30 days): Focus on small victories and signaling change.
  • Identify key audiences (direct reports, employees, external constituencies) and craft tailored messages about who you are, your values, style, and how you will conduct business.
  • Think about modes of engagement, whether one-on-one meetings, group sessions, or broader channels like email.
  • Quickly remove minor but persistent irritants (e.g., redundant meetings, strained relationships, physical space problems).
  • Leaders gain credibility by being demanding but satisfiable, accessible but not too familiar, decisive but judicious, focused but flexible, active without causing commotion, and willing to make tough calls but humane.
  • Leverage “teachable moments”: Early actions, however small (like Lara Moore removing filing cabinets), can become symbolic stories that define a leader as a hero or villain, modeling desired behaviors.
• Securing Tangible Results (Next 60 days): Identify opportunities for quick, visible performance improvements with modest expenditure.
  • Keep long-term goals in mind: Actions for early wins should serve A-item priorities and desired behavioral changes.
  • Identify a few promising focal points: Areas or processes (like Elena Lee’s customer service) where improvement yields significant operational or financial gains.
  • Concentrate on the most promising points: Mastering a few key areas provides freedom for more extensive changes.
  • Launch pilot projects: Design small, targeted initiatives (like Elena Lee’s pilot program) that set the overall plan in motion, energize people, and yield real improvements. The Pilot Project Checklist helps ensure high standards and desired behaviors are embedded.
  • Elevate change agents: Identify and promote individuals with insight, drive, and incentives aligned with your agenda, rewarding them to send a clear message.
  • Leverage pilot projects to introduce new behaviors: Make early projects models for how the organization should function in the future.

Avoiding Predictable Surprises and Leading Change

Leaders must proactively identify and prevent predictable surprises – problems where all necessary information exists but isn’t synthesized or acted upon. This often stems from leaders’ problem preferences, information silos, or failure to ask the right questions. Watkins suggests probing the external environment (public opinion, economic conditions), internal capabilities (personnel loss, quality issues), and organizational politics (untouchables, subtle undermining).

Finally, Watkins discusses two approaches to leading change:

• Plan-then-implement change: Effective when there’s broad awareness, clear diagnosis, a compelling vision, a detailed plan, and strong support coalition. Often suitable for turnarounds.
• Promotion of collective learning: Necessary when conditions for plan-then-implement are not met (e.g., denial about change). Leaders engage in “guerrilla warfare,” slowly chipping at resistance by exposing people to new data, benchmarking, or collective visioning. The Diagnostic Framework for Managing Change (Figure 4-2) helps determine when collective learning is needed.

In conclusion, securing early wins is a deliberate, two-phase process that blends immediate credibility-building actions with strategic performance improvements. By avoiding common traps, leveraging teachable moments, and aligning short-term successes with long-term goals and desired behaviors, leaders can build unstoppable momentum and set the stage for profound organizational transformation.

Chapter 5 — Negotiate Success

This chapter emphasizes the paramount importance of proactively negotiating success with your new boss, highlighting that this relationship is the single most critical factor in determining a new leader’s ability to reach the breakeven point and achieve long-term success. Watkins provides a structured framework for five essential conversations to manage expectations, gain consensus, and secure necessary resources.

The Imperative of Proactive Engagement

Watkins introduces Michael Chen’s success story with his tough new boss, Vaughan Cates. Forewarned that Cates “was going to eat him alive,” Michael proactively engaged, negotiating for 30 days for diagnosis and planning before delivering a detailed 90-day plan. He consistently updated Cates, demonstrated his business case for resources, and even addressed their differing styles head-on, focusing on results over methods. Michael’s success underscores that leaders must shape the game rather than merely react to it, securing realistic expectations and adequate resources.

The relationship with the new boss is crucial because the boss sets benchmarks, interprets actions for others, and controls access to vital resources. While higher-level leaders may have more autonomy, the nature of support needed varies by STARS situation:

• Start-ups: Need clear, measurable goals, guidance at strategic breakpoints, and help staying focused and getting resources quickly.
• Turnarounds: Need support for tough personnel calls, managing external image, and making deep, early cuts.
• Realignments: Need help making the case for change, especially for external hires.
• Sustaining success: Need constant reality testing and support for playing good defense while finding new levels of growth.

Focusing on the Fundamentals: Do’s and Don’ts

Watkins outlines clear do’s and don’ts for building a productive relationship with a new boss:

• Don’ts:
  • Don’t trash the past: Avoid criticizing predecessors; focus on current behavior and needed changes.
  • Don’t stay away: Actively reach out, even if the boss doesn’t; prevent communication and expectation gaps.
  • Don’t surprise your boss: Report emerging problems early; never let them hear bad news from someone else.
  • Don’t approach your boss only with problems: Always bring a plan or thought-out approach, even if not a full solution.
  • Don’t run down your checklist: Focus on discussing what you’re trying to do and how the boss can help, not just reporting activity.
  • Don’t try to change the boss: Adapt to their style and idiosyncrasies.
• Do’s:
  • Take 100 percent responsibility: Assume it’s your job to make the relationship work.
  • Clarify mutual expectations early and often: Manage expectations proactively, especially if they are unrealistic.
  • Negotiate timelines for diagnosis and action planning: Buy time to understand the situation before committing to action.
  • Aim for early wins in areas important to the boss: Align your priorities with theirs to build credibility and gain their ownership of your success.
  • Pursue good marks from those whose opinions your boss respects: Be aware that your reputation will be influenced by what others say about you.

Planning for Five Conversations

The relationship with your boss is built through ongoing dialogue. Watkins proposes five essential, intertwined “conversations” that should be explicitly planned for in your 90-day plan:

• 1. The Situational Diagnosis Conversation: Aim to reach a shared understanding of the business situation (using the STARS model), its challenges, opportunities, and resources. This forms the foundation for all subsequent actions.
• 2. The Expectations Conversation: Clarify and negotiate short- and medium-term goals, success metrics, and timing. Understand what success looks like for your boss and how your performance will be measured. It’s vital to underpromise and overdeliver to build credibility. Pay attention to “untouchables” – areas or people your boss is proprietary about.
• 3. The Style Conversation: Determine how you and your boss can best interact. This covers preferred communication modes (e.g., face-to-face, email), frequency, desired involvement in decisions, and adaptation to differing work styles. Diagnose their style by observing, talking to others judiciously, and noting consistency. Understand the “dimensions of your box” – your decision-making boundaries.
• 4. The Resources Conversation: An ongoing negotiation for critical resources (funding, personnel, political support, information). Needs vary by STARS situation (e.g., financial resources in a start-up, authority in a turnaround). It’s best to articulate needs early, use a “menu” approach (costs/benefits of different resource levels), and be prepared to push hard if necessary.
• 5. The Personal Development Conversation: Discuss how the role contributes to your growth, identifying areas for improvement, relevant projects, or training. This is best introduced once the relationship is established and is particularly important during career passages.

Putting It All Together: Your 90-Day Plan

Watkins recommends creating a written 90-day plan (even if bullet points) and getting buy-in from your boss. This plan serves as a “contract” for how you will spend your time. It typically divides into three 30-day blocks:

• First 30 days: Primarily focused on learning and building personal credibility. This involves conducting structured learning, establishing initial connections, and identifying minor irritants to address. The output is a preliminary diagnosis and a plan for the next 30 days.
• 60-day mark: Review progress on early wins, assess initial strategy/structure, and present early team assessments.
• 90-day mark: Should show significant traction, as key stakeholders expect results.

Developing Yourself as a Boss

The chapter concludes by highlighting the “Golden Rule of Transitions”: Transition others as you would wish to be transitioned yourself. Leaders will likely have new direct reports, and the same five-conversation framework can be applied to build productive relationships with them, accelerating their own transitions. This not only aids their development but also helps you achieve your goals faster. Leaders are encouraged to learn from both good and bad bosses to refine their own management approach.

In summary, “Negotiate Success” provides a robust framework for building a strong, productive relationship with your new boss. By proactively engaging in strategic conversations about situation, expectations, style, resources, and personal development, leaders can establish clear boundaries, secure vital support, and significantly accelerate their path to success in a new role.

Chapter 6 — Achieve Alignment

This chapter focuses on the leader’s role as an organizational architect, emphasizing the necessity of aligning strategy, structure, systems, and skills to enable superior performance. Watkins explains that ignoring misalignments will make a leader feel like they are “pushing a boulder uphill every day,” highlighting the crucial link between internal organizational coherence and external success.

Designing Organizational Architecture

Watkins presents a framework of five interconnected elements of organizational architecture (Figure 6-1), building on the McKinsey “7-S” model, all of which must work together to achieve goals:

• Strategy: The core approach to accomplish goals.
• Structure: How people are grouped into units and how their work is coordinated, including decision rights, performance measurement, reward systems, and reporting relationships.
• Systems: The processes used to add value (e.g., production, customer service, financial management).
• Skills: The capabilities and knowledge of the various groups in the organization (individual expertise, relational knowledge, embedded knowledge, meta-knowledge).
• Culture: The values, norms, and underlying assumptions that shape behavior.

Strategy drives the other elements, but is also influenced by them. Changing strategy necessitates adapting structure, systems, and skills. Even if a leader lacks direct authority to change all elements, understanding this architecture is vital for diagnosing problems, influencing key stakeholders, and demonstrating potential for senior roles.

Identifying Misalignments

Organizations often become misaligned, hindering performance. Common types of misalignment include:

• Skills and strategy misalignment: When a group’s capabilities don’t support its strategic goals (e.g., R&D aiming for new products but lacking the latest techniques).
• Systems and strategy misalignment: When processes don’t support the strategic focus (e.g., marketing targeting a new customer segment but lacking systems to analyze their information).
• Structure and systems misalignment: When the way people are organized clashes with how work gets done (e.g., product-line structure hindering integration of overlapping expertise due to poor information-sharing systems). Hannah Jaffey’s case exemplifies this, where separate business units with overlapping customer bases lacked incentives to cooperate, leading to “confused customers and conflicts.”

Avoiding Some Common Traps

Leaders often fall into traps when attempting alignment:

• Trying to restructure your way out of deeper problems: Overhauling structure without understanding root causes can create new misalignments and damage credibility.
• Creating structures that are too complex: Overly complex structures (like matrix organizations) can lead to bureaucratic paralysis and diffused accountability. Simplicity and clear lines of accountability are preferred.
• Automating problem processes: Speeding up an inefficient process with technology only amplifies existing flaws; processes must be analyzed and streamlined before automation.
• Making changes for change’s sake: New leaders feeling pressure to leave their mark may make changes before fully understanding the business, often resulting in disaster.
• Overestimating your group’s capacity to absorb strategic shifts: Ambitious strategies can be hard to implement. Incremental changes, experimentation, and a focus on a vital few priorities are more effective.

Getting Started: A Logical Flow

Aligning an organization follows a logical sequence, like preparing for a sailing trip:

1. Start with strategy: Ensure it’s well thought out and logically integrated, aligning with the larger organization’s goals and your A-item priorities.
2. Look at supporting structure, systems, and skills: Assess if existing capabilities support the envisioned strategy. Identify gaps and plan how to adapt the strategy or build needed capabilities.
3. Decide how and when to introduce the new strategy: Chart a realistic path for strategic shifts, blocking out both positioning changes and capability development.
4. Reshape structure, systems, and skills simultaneously: Avoid isolated changes; structure and systems are tightly linked and impact skills.
5. Close the loop: Continually deepen understanding of capabilities and cultural capacity for change, refining the strategic positioning as you learn.

Crafting Strategy: Coherence, Adequacy, and Implementation

A robust strategy defines what your organization will and won’t do, focusing on customers, capital, capabilities, and commitments.

• Assessing Coherence: Evaluate if market segments, products, technologies, plans, and goals logically fit together. Are there clear connections and mutual support among components?
• Assessing Adequacy: Determine if the strategy is sufficient to achieve goals in the next 2-3 years and support larger organizational objectives. This involves probing questions, using SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), and examining the history of the strategy’s creation (e.g., rushed or compromise-driven).
• Assessing Implementation: Observe what people are actually doing versus saying. Are performance metrics used daily? Is teamwork practiced if required? Is training in place for new skills? This reveals if problems are in formulation or implementation.
• Modifying Strategy: Proposing changes requires considering the STARS situation and your ability to persuade. In realignments, where denial is common, gently raising questions and gathering data (like Hannah Jaffey did) is more effective than radical changes. Incremental tweaks might be best initially.

Shaping Your Group’s Structure

Once strategy is clear, leaders address structural changes to support it. Structure includes:

• Units: How direct reports are grouped (function, product, geography).
• Decision rights: Who makes what decisions and how.
• Performance measurement and reward systems: What’s measured and rewarded.
• Reporting relationships and information-sharing mechanisms: How work is controlled and information flows.
  Leaders must assess how these elements interact to support strategic goals, recognizing that “no perfect organization” exists and all structures involve trade-offs. Common problems include narrow/broad knowledge bases, inappropriate decision-making scope, misaligned rewards (e.g., individual rewards hindering teamwork, as in Hannah Jaffey’s company), and compartmentalization/diffusion of accountability from reporting relationships.

Aligning Key Systems (Processes)

Systems or processes transform information, materials, and knowledge into value. Leaders must ensure these processes support the strategy and align with the structure. The extent and type of processes depend on whether the goal is flawless execution (requiring highly detailed processes) or stimulating innovation (requiring processes focused on ends, not overly prescriptive means).

• Process Analysis: Identify core processes (Table 6-1, e.g., application processing, quality management), map them, and evaluate their productivity, timeliness, reliability, and quality.
• Aligning Systems with Structure: Like anatomy and physiology, structure and processes must be sound and reinforce each other. Mismatches (e.g., competing sales teams using different processes) hinder strategy.
• Improving Core Processes: Use process mapping (Figure 6-2) to chart task flow and identify bottlenecks. Leaders can pursue radical process reengineering or incremental continual improvement. Caution is advised against automating problematic processes, as deeper issues like miscommunication are often the root cause. Leaders should manage processes as a portfolio, not radically changing too many at once.

Developing Your Group’s Skills Base

A group’s skills and knowledge must support its core processes and strategy. The skills base includes:

• Individual expertise: Training, education, experience.
• Relational knowledge: How to work together effectively.
• Embedded knowledge: Core technologies (e.g., databases).
• Meta-knowledge: Awareness of where to get critical information (e.g., research institutions).
  The goal is to identify critical gaps between needed and existing skills, and underutilized resources (e.g., unexploited technologies, squandered expertise). This requires envisioning an ideal knowledge mix and then assessing current capabilities.

Understanding Your Group’s Culture and Initiating Cultural Change

Culture influences all other architectural elements. Leaders must diagnose existing cultural problems, particularly assumptions about power (who legitimately wields authority) and value (what actions are believed to create value). Cultural change is difficult but vital. In the first 90 days, leaders can only diagnose and begin to shift some behaviors. Five ways to initiate cultural change include:

1. Change performance measures and incentives: Align metrics and rewards with desired behaviors.
2. Set up pilot projects: Allow experimentation with new tools and behaviors.
3. Bring in new people: Introduce fresh thinking and discipline (substance experts or process consultants).
4. Promote collective learning: Expose group members to new data, benchmarking, and external perspectives.
5. Engage in collective visioning: Bring people together to brainstorm new approaches.
   The key is to identify both functional and dysfunctional elements of the existing culture, preserving the good while changing the bad.

In conclusion, achieving alignment is a multifaceted process that requires the leader to meticulously assess and harmonize the organization’s strategy, structure, systems, skills, and culture. By addressing misalignments, avoiding simplistic fixes, and making changes in a logical, phased manner, leaders can create an environment where superior performance is not only possible but inevitable.

Chapter 7 — Build Your Team

This chapter underscores that building a high-performing team is one of the most critical challenges for a new leader, particularly when inheriting direct reports. Watkins provides a systematic approach to assessing existing team members, making personnel decisions, restructuring the team, and aligning goals, incentives, and processes to achieve superior results.

Avoiding Common Traps in Team Building

Watkins identifies several frequent pitfalls leaders encounter when building their team:

• Keeping the existing team too long: Leaders often hesitate to make tough personnel calls due to hubris or avoidance, leading to less-than-outstanding teams. A rule of thumb is to decide who stays and who goes within the first 90 days, and communicate changes by six months.
• Not repairing the airplane in midflight: Unless in a start-up, leaders inherit a team that must be molded while maintaining ongoing business operations. This may require temporary hires or internal talent assessment.
• Not working organizational alignment and team restructuring in parallel: Team building cannot occur effectively before clarity on strategy, structure, systems, and skills is established (Figure 7-1). The right people must be in the right jobs for the new direction.
• Not holding onto the good people: Uncertainty can drive top performers to seek opportunities elsewhere. Leaders must signal recognition and provide reassurance to their best talent.
• Undertaking team building before the core team is in place: Launching activities like joint problem-solving prematurely can strengthen bonds with individuals who may soon leave. Avoid explicit team-building until the desired team is assembled.
• Making implementation-dependent decisions too early: Defer major decisions requiring team buy-in until the core team is established, unless delaying is more costly.
• Trying to do it all yourself: Team restructuring is complex, involving emotional, legal, and policy issues. Seek support from HR and other advisors.

Assessing Your Existing Team

The first 30 to 60 days are crucial for understanding the team’s internal dynamics and sorting out who’s who.

• Establish Your Criteria: Leaders must be self-conscious about their evaluative criteria. Watkins provides a table (Table 7-1) for assessing relative weights assigned to competence, judgment, energy, focus, relationships, and trust. Identifying a “threshold issue” (e.g., trust) means a person not meeting that basic level is automatically out. This exercise helps identify potential blind spots in evaluation.
• Factor in the Situation: Evaluative criteria should adapt to the STARS situation and the nature of the role (e.g., independent sales managers versus interdependent product development team). In a turnaround, immediate high performance is prioritized; in a start-up, energy might outweigh some trust.
• Assess Your People: Meet one-on-one with each team member. Prepare by reviewing personnel history and performance data. Ask a standard set of probing questions (e.g., on existing strategy, challenges, opportunities, team improvement). Look for verbal and nonverbal clues (volunteering information, taking responsibility vs. blaming, emotional responses) and observe team interactions to detect alliances and conflicts.
• Test Their Judgment: Assess judgment (ability to make sound predictions and develop good strategies) rather than just technical competence or intelligence. Watkins suggests testing judgment in a domain they are passionate about outside work to see their “mental models” and willingness to “go out on a limb.”
• Evaluate Key Functional People: For diverse functional teams, solicit opinions from trusted people in each function. First-time general managers might develop an evaluation template for each function.
• Assess the Team as a Whole: Study data (reports, meeting minutes, climate surveys). Analyze consistency in responses to common questions (overly consistent might signal a party line; inconsistency, a lack of coherence). Observe team interactions in meetings to spot alliances, attitudes, leadership roles, and deference patterns.

Restructuring Your Team

Based on assessments, categorize each team member: Keep in place, Keep and develop, Move to another position, Observe for a while, Replace (low priority), or Replace (high priority).

• Consider Alternatives to Outright Termination: Termination can be difficult and time-consuming. Alternatives include having poor performers move on voluntarily (responding to clear messages), lateral moves within the team (temporary solution), or working with HR to find a suitable position elsewhere in the organization. Do not simply shift a problem to another department.
• Develop Backups: Discreetly look for successors for those you plan to replace, assessing internal talent (skip-level meetings) or launching external searches.
• Treat People Respectfully: During all phases, treat everyone with respect and fairness. How leaders manage terminations or reassignments significantly impacts their reputation and the morale of remaining employees.

Aligning Goals, Incentives, and Measures

Having the right people is insufficient; they must be motivated and aligned.

• Designing Incentive Systems: Use a blend of push and pull tools (Figure 7-2).
  • Push tools: Compensation plans, performance measurement systems, budgets (motivate through authority, loyalty, fear, reward).
  • Pull tools: Compelling vision (inspire through positive image of future).
  • The mix depends on individual preferences and the extent of observability and measurability of contributions.
  • Decide whether to base rewards on individual or collective performance. If success is from independent efforts, individual incentives (e.g., sales) are better. If cooperation and integration are critical, group goals and incentives (e.g., new product development team) are essential. The Incentive Equation (monetary/non-monetary, fixed/performance-based, individual/group) helps define the right mix. Incentive misalignment is a significant danger.
• Defining Performance Metrics: Establish clear, explicit, and quantifiable performance metrics (e.g., “Increase sales of product X by 15-30%” rather than “Improve sales”). This encourages accountability and ensures unambiguous evaluation.

Establishing New Team Processes

Once the team, goals, and incentives are set, establish how the team will work collectively (meetings, decision-making, conflict resolution).

• Assess Existing Processes: Talk to team members, support staff, and your boss/predecessor. Review meeting minutes. Probe: participant roles (influencers, innovators), meeting frequency/agendas, decision-making authority, and predecessor’s leadership style.
• Target Processes for Change: Introduce new processes. Common areas include meeting structures (e.g., reducing size of core meetings, judiciously broadening participation) and decision-making.
• Managing Decision Making: Watkins, drawing on research with Amy Edmondson and Mike Roberto, identifies a spectrum of decision-making approaches (Figure 7-3):
  • Unilateral decision making: Leader makes the call with limited/no consultation. Risky for missing insights and lukewarm implementation.
  • Unanimous consent: Can suffer from “decision diffusion” and lowest-common-denominator compromises.
  • Consult-and-decide: Leader seeks input but makes the final call. Separates information gathering from decision closure.
  • Build consensus: Leader seeks both information and buy-in for decision. Aims for “sufficient consensus” where a critical mass agrees, and others can support implementation.
  • Choosing the right process: Not solely based on time pressure.
    • If highly divisive, use consult-and-decide (leader takes heat).
    • If energetic implementation is needed from people whose performance is hard to control, use build consensus.
    • If team is inexperienced, rely more on consult-and-decide initially.
    • If establishing authority (e.g., supervising former peers), start with consult-and-decide.
  • STARS situations influence choice: Start-ups and turnarounds often suit consult-and-decide (technical problems, hunger for strong leadership). Realignments and sustaining-success situations often suit build consensus (cultural/political issues, strong intact teams).
  • Leaders should explain the chosen process and strive for fairness (even if people disagree, they support if views are heard and rationale is plausible). Avoid charades of consensus. Leaders can shift between modes as insights deepen.

In essence, “Build Your Team” provides a rigorous, phased strategy for transforming an inherited group into a high-performing team. By systematically assessing individuals, making strategic personnel decisions, aligning incentives, and establishing effective team processes, leaders can magnify their impact and achieve breakthrough results.

Chapter 8 — Create Coalitions

This chapter addresses the crucial horizontal dimension of influence: building coalitions with peers and external stakeholders to achieve your agenda, especially when direct authority is insufficient. Watkins emphasizes that influence networks are vital for gaining support for initiatives and getting things done.

Mapping the Influence Landscape

New leaders often err by focusing too heavily on vertical influence (bosses and direct reports) and neglecting horizontal influence with peers and external constituencies. This is a mistake because leaders often have no direct authority over these groups and little relationship capital to draw upon. Building this capital early is critical; you don’t want to first approach people when you desperately need something from them. Leaders must discipline themselves to invest in these relationships proactively.

Identifying Key Players and Informal Networks

To accelerate this process, leaders should:

• Identify key interfaces: Customers, suppliers, and other units that interact with your group are natural focal points for relationship building.
• Get your boss to connect you: Request a list of key people to meet outside your group.
• Diagnose informal networks of influence: Understand “the shadow organization” or “company behind the organization chart.” These networks are crucial for both enabling and blocking change. Leaders should:
  • Analyze patterns of deference: Observe who defers to whom in meetings and interactions.
  • Trace alliances: Identify implicit or explicit cooperations.
  • Notice information flow: Who goes to whom for advice, who shares news.
  • Figure out sources of power: Expertise, access to information, status, control of resources (budgets, rewards), and personal loyalty.
  • Pick out opinion leaders: Individuals exerting disproportionate influence through formal authority, expertise, or personality. Their support can galvanize broader acceptance; their resistance can ignite opposition.
  • Recognize power coalitions: Groups explicitly or implicitly cooperating for goals or privileges. Their support offers leverage; their opposition may necessitate breaking them up.

Drawing an Influence Map

Watkins suggests creating an Influence Map (Figure 8-1) to visualize patterns of influence among members of a hypothetical business unit. Arrows indicate the direction and relative strength of influence, helping to understand who influences whom and on which issues. This tool aids in strategizing how to gain support.

Identifying Supporters, Opponents, and Convincibles

The purpose of influence mapping is to identify three key groups:

• Supporters: People who will approve of your agenda because it aligns with their interests, they respect you, or they believe in your ideas. Look for those who share your vision, have been quietly working for similar changes, or are new to the company. Support should never be taken for granted; it needs to be solidified and nurtured.
• Opponents: People who will oppose you regardless of your actions. Reasons for resistance include comfort with the status quo, fear of incompetence, perceived threat to values or power, or negative consequences for their allies. Leaders must understand these motives to counter arguments and, if possible, convert some early opponents (e.g., by addressing fear of incompetence with skill development). However, it’s crucial not to waste time on staunch opponents.
• Convincibles: These are the “swing voters” – people who are undecided or indifferent, but who can be persuaded with the right influence strategy. Leaders must understand what motivates them (status, financial security, relationships, new challenges) and identify competing forces that might pull them towards resistance. Direct dialogue and leveraging “intelligence networks” are key here.

Using the Tools of Persuasion

Watkins outlines various persuasion strategies:

• Shaping Perceptions of Choices: Influencing how people see their alternatives.
  • Bribery/Compensation: Offering incentives to make change more palatable (e.g., trading support for an initiative they care about). This alters the benefits of compliance (Figure 8-2, Status Quo vs. Change).
  • Threats/Eliminating Status Quo: Making noncompliance more costly. This can involve convincing people that change is inevitable (Figure 8-3, Participating vs. Having Change Happen Anyway), thereby transforming their choice.
• Framing Compelling Arguments: Providing persuasive rationales backed by data. Appeals can be based on logic and data (addressing pragmatic interests) or values and emotions (Table 8-1, invoking loyalty, commitment, individual worth, integrity).
• Setting Up Action-Forcing Events: Events that induce people to make commitments or take action, eliminating inaction as an option. These can be meetings, reviews, or deadlines that create psychological pressure for follow-through. Care must be taken not to force a stand before the balance of forces tips in your favor.
• Employing Entanglement: Moving people from resistance to support through a series of small, often irreversible steps.
  • Leveraging small commitments into larger ones: Each small agreement creates a new psychological reference point. Public or written commitments create barriers to backsliding.
  • Multistage problem solving: Guiding people through shared data collection, problem definition, criteria development, and alternative evaluation. By working through these steps, people may accept outcomes they initially rejected.
  • Behavior change to drive attitude change: Altering behavior (e.g., through changing measurement and incentive systems) can lead to a shift in attitudes, as people strive for consistency between their actions and beliefs.

Sequencing to Build Momentum

Knowledge of influence networks can be leveraged into disproportionate influence through a sequencing strategy. The order in which you approach potential allies and convincibles significantly impacts coalition-building. Gaining a respected ally first makes it easier to recruit others, initiating a virtuous coalition-building cycle (Figure 8-4). This expands your resource base and increases the likelihood of success, making it easier to recruit even more supporters.

• Who to approach first: Focus on people with whom you already have supportive relationships, individuals whose interests are strongly compatible with yours, those with critical resources, and people with important connections who can recruit more supporters.

In essence, “Create Coalitions” equips leaders with the tools to navigate the complex social and political landscape of an organization. By systematically mapping influence, identifying key stakeholders, and deploying tailored persuasion and sequencing strategies, leaders can build the essential support networks needed to drive change and achieve their agenda, even without direct authority.

Chapter 9 — Keep Your Balance

This chapter addresses the crucial, often overlooked, personal aspect of leadership transitions: maintaining equilibrium and perspective amidst uncertainty, ambiguity, and the demands of a new role, especially when relocation is involved. Watkins emphasizes that self-efficacy and a robust support system are vital to prevent burnout and ensure continued effectiveness.

The Perils of Imbalance: Avoiding Vicious Cycles

Watkins begins with a “Balance Assessment” (Table 9-1) to help leaders identify if they are at risk, categorizing potential pitfalls as “personal traps” that can lead to vicious cycles:

1. Riding off in all directions: Dissipating efforts by trying to do too many vital tasks simultaneously, leading to mental lock-up and constant firefighting.
2. Undefended boundaries: Failing to set limits on what you are willing to do, leading others (bosses, peers, direct reports) to demand too much, eroding respect and causing resentment.
3. Brittleness: Rigidity and defensiveness due to uncertainty, leading to overcommitment to failing courses of action or disempowering others with equally valid ideas.
4. Isolation: Losing connection to people who drive action and to the informal flow of information, leading to uninformed decisions and damaged credibility.
5. Biased judgment: Loss of perspective due to human decision-making weaknesses like confirmation bias, self-serving illusions, and optimistic overconfidence, particularly when stakes are high and emotions run high.
6. Work avoidance: Consciously or unconsciously delaying tough decisions (e.g., personnel, major business direction) by burying oneself in other tasks, leading to problems festering and becoming harder to solve.
7. Going over the top: Succumbing to dangerous levels of stress, moving beyond the optimal performance zone on the Yerkes-Dodson curve (Figure 9-1) into chronic underperformance or burnout, as exemplified by Kipp Erikson.

The Three Pillars of Self-Efficacy

To avoid these traps and create virtuous cycles, Watkins proposes building self-efficacy on three pillars:

Pillar 1: Adopting Success Strategies

The strategies from previous chapters (promoting yourself, accelerating learning, matching strategy to situation, securing early wins, negotiating success, achieving alignment, building your team, creating coalitions) provide a template for effective action. Applying these builds confidence and energy, creating momentum and leverage. Leaders should periodically revisit the Assessment of Core Challenges (Table 9-2) to reflect on their progress.

Pillar 2: Enforcing Personal Disciplines

Knowing what to do is different from doing it. Personal disciplines are ruthless, regular routines essential for effective execution:

• Plan to Plan: Daily and weekly “plan-work-evaluate” cycles. Spend 10 minutes at the end of each day and week to assess progress and plan for the next period.
• Judiciously Defer Commitment: Never say “yes” on the spot. Always say, “Let me think about it and get back to you,” especially for future commitments, to avoid over-scheduling and regret. “Future you” will appreciate “present you” saying no.
• Set Aside Time for the Hard Work: Dedicate specific blocks of time daily (even 30 minutes) to focused, high-priority work, free from distractions like phone calls or email.
• Go to the Balcony: Cultivate the skill of stepping back from emotional or difficult situations to gain perspective before intervening.
• Focus on Process: When implementing ideas, prioritize how decisions are made and how others are engaged, as fair processes increase support even for unpopular decisions.
• Check in with Yourself: Engage in structured reflection (e.g., 15 minutes weekly to answer questions about feelings, interactions, successes/failures, missed opportunities). The Guidelines for Structured Reflection prompts introspection on personal reactions and the source of difficulties.
• Recognize When to Quit: Transitions are marathons. Learn to recognize when you’re hitting diminishing returns or going over the top of your stress curve, and take breaks to refresh.

Pillar 3: Building Your Support Systems

Solidifying personal support systems is crucial for maintaining balance:

• Assert Control Locally: Quickly set up your new office, establish routines, and clarify expectations with administrative staff. Assemble temporary resources to tide you over.
• Stabilize the Home Front: If relocating, acknowledge the family’s transition (Kipp Erikson’s mistake). Minimize disruption by:
  • Analyzing existing family support systems: Identify and replace essential services (doctors, babysitters).
  • Getting your spouse back on track: Encourage active job search and ensure company relocation support.
  • Timing the family move carefully: Consider waiting until the end of the school year for children.
  • Preserving the familiar: Reestablish family rituals and seek help from relatives.
  • Investing in cultural familiarization: For international moves, get professional advice on cross-cultural transition.
• Build Your Advice-and-Counsel Network: Cultivate a network of trusted internal and external advisors (Table 9-3):
  • Technical advisers: For expert analysis in specific domains.
  • Cultural interpreters: To understand the new culture’s norms and assumptions.
  • Political counselors: To help navigate political relationships and implement advice.
  • Ensure a right mix of internal and external advisors: Insiders know the organization, while outsiders offer dispassionate perspectives. Loyalty to you (not just the organization) from external supporters is critical. Internal advisors should be trustworthy and provide accurate advice. Also, seek representatives of key constituencies for diverse perspectives.
  • Assess your current network (Table 9-4) to identify gaps and proactively build new relationships for your current and future roles.

In closing, “Keep Your Balance” serves as a vital reminder that a leader’s effectiveness is profoundly linked to their personal well-being and equilibrium. By proactively managing vulnerabilities, adhering to personal disciplines, and fortifying support systems, leaders can sustain their energy, make sound judgments, and navigate the inherent tumult of transitions with resilience and success.

Chapter 10 — Expedite Everyone

This concluding chapter argues that accelerating transitions should not just be an individual pursuit but an organizational priority, institutionalizing the transition acceleration model to yield massive collective gains. Watkins addresses the prevailing “sink-or-swim” mentality and advocates for a systematic approach to leadership development across the entire enterprise.

The Mystery of Neglected Transitions

Watkins opens by posing a mystery: Why do so few companies make it an organizational priority to accelerate manager transitions, despite the significant potential benefits? He notes that roughly 25% of managers change jobs annually, and each transition impacts many others, yet most companies offer little to no support.

• Reasons for Neglect:
  • Changes in leadership development: Flattening hierarchies and faster business pace reduce time for senior managers to mentor direct reports on “soft skills” like taking charge. Professional development units focus on “hard” skills, leading to a reduction in managerial wisdom transfer.
  • “Sink-or-swim” managerial culture (Darwinian leadership development): Many companies intentionally use transitions to “winnow talent,” viewing it as a test of evolutionary fitness. This can verge on hazing and, in dysfunctional organizations, lead to setting up “up-and-comers” for failure.
• Flaws in the Darwinian Approach:
  • It’s an inefficient way to develop leaders; many high-potential individuals make early mistakes and “drown” unnecessarily.
  • The lessons learned may not generalize to different levels or STARS situations, leading to leaders succeeding by luck (right position, right lifeguard) rather than consistent skill.
  • It hinders true meritocracy by not leveling the playing field.
    The core argument is that institutionalizing the transition acceleration model (beyond individual application) can prevent failures and capture massive gains from everyone settling in faster, leading to quicker market share gains, cost reductions, and product launches. Watkins challenges organizations to consider the bottom-line impact of getting everyone to the breakeven point just 5% faster.

Creating a Common Language

The single most important step to institutionalize transition acceleration is to introduce a new vocabulary for discussing transitions. Imagine if everyone in the organization could discuss:

• Their STARS situation (start-up, turnaround, realignment, sustaining success) and associated challenges/opportunities.
• Their learning agenda (technical, cultural, political learning) and learning plan.
• Progress on the five conversations with their boss (situation, expectations, style, resources, personal development).
• Their A-item priorities, desired behavioral changes, and plans for early wins.
• Priorities for strengthening their advice-and-counsel network.

This common language makes discussions more efficient, encourages transparency and information sharing, and fosters tolerance for transition struggles, moving the organization “beyond sink or swim.” Leaders are encouraged to start locally, experimenting with their own direct reports by pressing them to apply the framework and cascade it down to their teams.

Working with a Team

If you are building a new team or integrating an existing one, the transition acceleration framework provides a common language for shared challenges, leveling the playing field between existing members and newcomers. Leaders can introduce the framework, lead a shared situational diagnosis (STARS model), clarify challenges/opportunities, address alignment issues (strategy, structure, systems, skills), define A-item priorities, and plan for early wins and coalition building.

Bringing in People from Outside

Healthy organizations bring in outside hires to inject new ideas and energy, but often fail to support their integration. The transition acceleration model can help:

• Use the STARS model to identify appropriate jobs for outsiders: Don’t set them up for failure by placing them in realignments without adequate support.
• Teach them the common transition acceleration vocabulary: Enable easy conversation with insiders.
• Develop a primer on company culture: Provide resources like videos of successful outside hires discussing what works and what doesn’t.

Developing High-Potential Leaders

An executive-development program based on the transition acceleration model can be a central component of a broader strategy for high-potential leaders. These programs (e.g., multi-day cohorts, new-leader simulations, case studies) introduce the model, facilitate first-90-days planning, and foster advice-and-counsel relationships.

Strengthening Succession Planning

Effective succession planning systems need to factor in the STARS framework. This strengthens:

• Rigorous evaluation of leadership potential: Provides a basis for evaluating performance across very different types of situations.
• Thoughtful design of developmental pathways: Enables charting the progression of high-potential leaders through a sequence of positions that build their capability to manage a broad range of business situations.

Watkins introduces the Development Grid (Table 10-1), a tool for charting professional development by mapping management positions and project assignments to functional areas and STARS situations. This helps identify blind spots and readiness for general management roles. The STARS model adds a fourth dimension to leadership development (breadth of exposure to business situations), complementing functional expertise, international experience, and career passages.

Accelerating Postmerger Integration

The transition acceleration model can be a powerful driver of postmerger integration. When organizations collide, they often “speak different languages,” leading to culture clashes and misunderstandings. The model provides a new common language that both organizations can learn together, smoothing the integration process beyond just accelerating individual managers.

Employing Performance-Support Tools

Finally, Watkins suggests leveraging tools like Harvard Business School Publishing’s online Leadership Transitions tool (www.harvardbusinessonline.com). This Web-based resource provides diagnostics and tools on a just-in-time basis, allowing efficient “blended approaches” (e.g., short face-to-face introductions followed by online support) to cascade the model throughout a geographically decentralized organization.

In summary, “Expedite Everyone” argues that moving beyond a “sink-or-swim” approach to transitions is a strategic imperative for organizations. By institutionalizing the transition acceleration model through common language, structured development programs, and support tools, companies can transform leadership transitions from risky individual endeavors into a powerful engine for collective growth, performance improvement, and sustained competitive advantage.

Key Takeaways

“The First 90 Days” by Michael Watkins profoundly shifts the paradigm of leadership transitions from a chaotic, individual struggle to a structured, strategic process. The core lesson is that your first 90 days in any new leadership role are a disproportionately critical period that dictates long-term success or failure. By meticulously diagnosing the situation, proactively managing relationships, building strong teams, and securing early wins, leaders can dramatically accelerate their impact and reach the “breakeven point” where they add more value than they consume. The book’s overarching message is to move beyond “sink or swim” by embracing a systematic, self-aware approach that is equally vital for individual career advancement and organizational health.

Here are the key takeaways from the book:

• Proactive Self-Promotion is Paramount: It’s not enough to be promoted externally; you must mentally “promote yourself” by letting go of past successes and embracing new challenges and skills. Relying on old strengths in a new context can be a fatal flaw.
• Context Dictates Strategy (STARS Model): There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Accurately diagnose your situation as a Start-up, Turnaround, Realignment, or Sustaining Success, as each demands different priorities, skills, and energy allocation (learning vs. doing, offense vs. defense).
• Systematic Learning is Non-Negotiable: Overcome learning disabilities like the “action imperative” or “arriving with the answer.” Treat learning as an investment process, using structured methods and diverse sources to gain actionable insights into the organization’s past, present, future, and its unique culture.
• Negotiate Success with Your Boss: This is the single most critical relationship. Proactively engage in “five conversations” (situation, expectations, style, resources, personal development) to align on goals, manage expectations, and secure the support you need. Always aim to underpromise and overdeliver.
• Secure Early Wins Strategically: Initial successes build credibility and momentum. These wins must be tied to your long-term “A-item priorities,” introduce desired behavioral changes, and be visible and important to your boss and key stakeholders. Avoid predictable surprises by proactively identifying potential land mines.
• Align the Organizational Architecture: As an organizational architect, ensure your strategy, structure, systems, and skills are coherent and mutually reinforcing. Address misalignments and understand the existing culture to avoid pushing a “boulder uphill.”
• Build Your Team Decisively: Assess inherited team members systematically. Make tough personnel calls early, develop backups, and restructure the team to fit the new strategy. Align goals, incentives, and processes (including decision-making) to motivate desired performance.
• Create Coalitions to Extend Your Influence: Direct authority is rarely enough. Map your influence landscape, identify supporters, opponents, and “convincibles.” Use persuasive tools like choice shaping, compelling arguments, action-forcing events, and entanglement strategies, carefully sequencing your approach to build momentum.
• Maintain Personal Balance: The inherent stress and ambiguity of transitions can lead to “vicious cycles” of overwork, isolation, or biased judgment. Cultivate self-efficacy through systematic planning, personal disciplines (e.g., planning to plan, judiciously deferring commitment), and robust support systems (personal, family, and professional advisors).
• Expedite Everyone for Organizational Impact: Move beyond “sink or swim” at an organizational level. Institutionalize the transition acceleration model by introducing a common vocabulary, applying it to team building, supporting outside hires, developing high-potential leaders, and strengthening succession planning.

Next Actions:

• Conduct a “Promote Yourself” self-assessment: Immediately reflect on your past strengths and how they might become liabilities in your new role. Begin planning your mental transition.
• Develop a 90-Day Learning Plan: Based on your new situation, create a focused agenda of questions and identify key people and documents to learn from. Prioritize learning for your first 30 days.
• Schedule a “Five Conversations” with Your Boss: Proactively initiate discussions about the situation, expectations, and working style to establish a strong foundation.
• Identify Potential “Early Wins”: Pinpoint 2-3 high-impact, visible opportunities that align with your boss’s priorities and your long-term goals.
• Assess Your Team and Influence Network: Begin evaluating your direct reports against clear criteria and start mapping key internal and external stakeholders whose support you will need.

Reflection Prompts:

• Considering your current or upcoming transition, which of the ten core challenges do you anticipate being the most difficult for you personally, and why? How will you specifically address that challenge based on the strategies presented?
• If your organization were to fully embrace the “expedite everyone” philosophy, what immediate changes would you advocate for, and what long-term benefits do you envision for the company culture and performance?