The First 90 Days - Job and Career Transitions

Overview

The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter and https://hbr.org/books/watkins.

Transitions are a critical time for leaders. In fact, most agree that moving into a new role is the biggest challenge a manager will face. While transitions offer a chance to start fresh and make needed changes in an organization, they also place leaders in a position of acute vulnerability. Missteps made during the crucial first three months in a new role can jeopardize or even derail your success. Missteps made during the crucial first three months in a new role can jeopardize your success.

The first 90 days, by Michael Watkins, is a very useful read for anyone making a transition into a new organization. While the book focuses on leaders starting in a new role, it is useful for an employee at any level seeking to understand the way things work in a new organization.

You must establish priorities, define strategic intent, identify where you can secure early wins, build the right leadership team, and creating supporting alliances.

The Five Propositions

According to Michael Watkins, the five fundamental propositions form the foundation of the approach to transition acceleration:

1. The root causes of transition failure always lie in a pernicious interaction between the situation, with its opportunities and pitfalls, and the individual, with his or her strengths and vulnerabilities.
2. There are systematic methods that leaders can employ to both lessen the likelihood of failure and reach the breakeven point faster.
3. The overriding goal in a transition is to build momentum by creating virtuous cycles that build credibility and by avoiding getting caught in vicious cycles that damage credibility.
4. Transitions are a crucible for leadership development and should be managed accordingly.
5. Adoption of a standard framework for accelerating transitions can yield big returns for organizations.

Key Transition Milestones

First 90 Days - Summary Template

Stakeholder and Relationship Plan template includes what questions to ask

The Backbone of New Job Success

To be effective in applying The First 90 Days, you need to know what the backbone of The First 90 Days actually is. According to Michael Watkins, the backbone of The First 90 Days is:

• Prepare Yourself
• Accelerate Your Learning
• Match Strategy to Situation - using the STARS Model
• Negotiate Success
• Secure Early Wins
• Achieve Alignment
• Build Your Team
• Create Coalitions
• Keep Your Balance
• Expedite Everyone

STARS Model

Key to understanding how you will approach the new job is to look through the lens of the STARS model to determine how you will approach the job and each task you take on.

There are four types of situations according to a STARS model: Startup, Turnaround, Accelerated Growth, Realignment and Sustaining Success. Each require a different approach.

1. Startup: Decisive Decision making needed (hunter mentality rather than farmer mentality). Use the shoot, then aim approach. The energy is excited chaos, and your role is to make calls on what not to do. Climb quickly up the technical learning curve, political learning curve is less critical here. Take the offensive approach on the product and market.
2. Turnaround: Decisive Decision making needed (also hunter mentality). Shoot, then aim approach. Morale may be low here, but people are aware that change is needed. This means you can make changes by using the plan-then-implement approach (rather than the collective learning approach). Take the defensive approach on the product and market. Pare down to critical elements of the product and secure that as a base first, then go after more marketshare.
3. Realignment: Collaborative decision making is needed (farmer mentality). You have more time to assess the situation here, so aim carefully before firing. The Political learning curve is critical here, so set aside time to climb up this curve. People are not aware that change is needed, so to make change, you need to use the collective learning approach. Help people become aware that change is needed, and collaborate to create a plan for change that everyone is bought into. You may take an offensive or defensive approach on the product and market depending on the situation.
4. Sustaining Success: Collaborative decision making is needed (farmer mentality). You have more time to assess the situation here so it is an aim and fire approach. Spend time to climb the political learning curve so you can assert the right influence to get things done. Measuring success is tricky here, since it's more incremental successes rather than "splash" success. Set expectations with management accordingly. Take a defensive approach to the product and market, make sure you secure existing marketshare and keep the organizing moving forwards, not backwards.

First 90 Days - Key Practices for New Job Success

My Favorite Practices for New Job Success

There are a lot of practices to learn and absorb. If I reflect on the ones that I use the most for the greatest impact, they boil down to this:

• STARS (Start-up, Turnaround, Realignment, Sustaining Success)
• The Five Conversations (situation diagnosis, expectations, style, resources, personal development
• Build your advice and counsel network (technical advisers, cultural interpreters, and political counselors)
• Identify challenges and opportunities
• Secure early wins
• Setting up action-forcing events
• Identifying supporters, opponents, and convincibles
• Leverage “teachable moments”
• Make waves of change
• Structured reflection

As you can see, there is a lot of synergy across the practices. When you read The First 90 Days, be sure to pay extra attention to the language of STARS and think of it in terms of a lens across people, process, and product. Each of those can be a in a very different situation, and the better you understand the landscape, the more effective you can operate. For example, if you think that the product is in a Start-Up, but others think of it as a re-alignment, that can cause some serious problems in your effectiveness. Once you understand the lay of the land, you can better bridge where things are, with where you would like things to be.

Other First 90 Days Info