The New Leader’s 100 Day Plan

You really want to know this before you start. You don’t want to get on a ship that’s already sunk! These follow-up questions can help you dig deeper (1):

This question goes hand in hand with the previous one.

Because the lack of winning strategy might not be a problem, if the organisation is ready and willing to do what it needs to change.

If you’re a turnaround expert AND the organisation is aware of its need to urgently make significant changes, that’s one thing - but otherwise you are setting yourself up for failure from the outset.

Many leadership roles are effectively impossible from the start because of unrealistic or conflicting expectations among key stakeholders. Speak with your key stakeholders and listen carefully for contradictions, uncertainty or signs of internal friction.

Specifically, find out what each stakeholder understands as regards your (1) role and responsibilities, (2) goals and timeframe, (3) authority, (4) access to essential resources.

This gets at the tricky question of personal fit. You need to be ruthless about your motivation, your skill set and your cultural match - otherwise you and your employer will be both heading for a rude awakening in a few months time.

For example, I’ve seen a number of cases where a VP at a tech giant has jumped into a CXO role in a hot new startup - only to be shocked and disillusioned at the lack of resources and the amount of ‘rolling up their sleeves’ that’s necessary in the new environment.

Get a sense of what your stakeholders see as the critical issues. Remember, this is a listening and rapport exercise. With senior stakeholders, you’re looking for direction. With peers, you’re building mutual understanding. With your own reports, you want to learn about their reality and needs.

Now’s a great time to start to map out your communications plan, so ask about their communication preferences: their idea of what the best manner (email, call, coffee/chat,…) and frequency would be, and how they would prefer you to handle disagreements (for example: no holds barred, tell me privately, never ever disagree with me,…).

Ask about the decision-making process, control points and vetos, who to keep in the loop, personalities to be aware of, and so forth.

This is a question to be asking yourself during this period. You have a fantastic opportunity to “up your game” and play at a higher level, so think about your tendencies and consider how they are most likely to undermine you in the early months.

For example, introverts might have a tendency to under-communicate; extraverts to fail to listen deeply and to pick up on subtle warnings. Visionaries might tend to frustrate operationally-minded folk with vague inspirational speeches, and more hands-on leaders may fail to step back from immediate operational requirements to develop fresh new strategies.

Identify one or two key tendencies to be aware of.

This is the other question to be asking yourself during this period. You need to prepare a couple of ready-to-go speeches about who you are, why you’re here, what you believe in, and why people should listen to you. You’ll need to set some expectations from day one.

First impressions count. A lot. So your first day on the job will be a crucial moment. Make the most of the insights you’ve gained in ‘day zero’ to structure your first day so that your actions speak just as loud as your words.

For example, if “listening to the customer” is a big part of your message, set things up so that you do just that on your very first day.

Bradt et al (1) suggest the following checklist as a good template to start with, but you’ll need to adapt it quite considerably to your situation:

As you meet the most obvious stakeholders, get their view on the less obvious people to speak with. You’ll want to spend a good amount of time with people on the frontline of the business, such as salespeople and customers. But ask around for ideas.

As Boston Consulting Group say, “understand the problems that reside on the balance sheet and communicate them early. You get one chance to erase the mistakes of your predecessors. Identify and deal with these legacy issues immediately.

Unpleasant surprises—obsolete inventory, insufficient warranty reserves, excessive goodwill, unresolved customer disputes, and festering litigation—have a way of hiding behind the numbers.”

Towards the end of the first 30 days it’s normally a good idea to bring your leadership team together to define the overall narrative of the business. This includes the high-level vision/mission, strategic anchors and key performance indicators (KPIs).

But most critical of all, this workshop needs to build agreement and clarity on the all-encapsulating phrase or tagline that defines the burning imperative in the business.

This is the rallying cry - the #1 priority for the organisation right now.

Once you have this in place, it becomes so much easier to communicate your vision of a better future and help employees understand how they can contribute to the new direction.

As you explore the business, keep a list of potential quick wins by asking as many people as possible this question.

You can then filter and prioritise. Bradt et al (1) give 6 helpful criteria for quick wins:

You’ll need to judge how many you can truly deliver “quickly”. Allocate enough resources, give the team responsible a clear charter, and celebrate and communicate on early successes (champion the champions!).

Now’s also a good time to understand the bigger systematic issues that are holding your teams back. Organisational inefficiencies in decision-making, unclear roles/responsibilities, linkages across groups, information flows and inadequate collaboration can all come into play. You need to start to understand which are annoyances and which are real roadblocks.

You need to have your leadership team pretty much in place by day 60.

Sometimes you need to move faster, though there is a risk that you’ll make poor decisions and come across as too impulsive. But moving too slow is a greater risk. 

After 100 days, the team will be seen as ‘your team’. The problem children become your problem children, and no longer the legacy of your predecessor. High performers will be frustrated if low performance is still being tolerated or ignored.

A consistent drumbeat of communication to all stakeholders - up, down and across - is something I see leaders struggle with on a regular basis. After the initial flurry of activity, good intentions can fade away around the 61-100 day period. Work with your leadership team to make sure that everyone - from your board of directors to the front line - is receiving consistent, relevant communication.

One of my Founder/CEO clients, Mike, was shocked during a workshop we were running to find that his management team didn’t know his strategic priorities. He believed he’d communicated incredibly clearly - but the reality was was very different. It was an ‘aha moment’ for him and made a big difference to how the team pulled together.

At around the 61-100 day period, it’s good to give some thought into the ongoing governance that will continue to drive your change initiatives forward. How are you going to ensure cross-team interlock? Solve strategic issues? Identify and resolve roadblocks on strategic projects? Periodically review and refine the organisational strategy?

Our experience is that separate meeting formats are needed for each of these aspects. Merging them into a general ‘management meeting’ is a recipe for the typical “meeting muddle” of updates, discussions, debate - but not a lot of strategic decision-making and bold moves forward.

In a future article I’ll cover this essential topic in a lot more detail, but for now the graphic above can give you a simple structure to follow.