Congratulations! You’re in charge. Or are you?

When you start a new leadership position, you do not have the luxury of a settling-in period. Given the pace of the modern IT environment, pausing to catch your breath would be a deadly mistake.

At the same time, you can’t do everything all at once. Your team may not know you, or at least does not know you as a leader. The team is not yet the well-oiled execution machine that you will build later. The team is still a bunch of people trying to figure out who the new boss is, and what the boss wants. Depending on the history of the group, some of your team members may not have your best interest or even the best interest of the company at heart. You have to lay the groundwork to get the team moving in the right direction.

Start by focusing on a few early wins. This will teach the team how you like to operate, get them used to achieving within that framework, and buy you some breathing room from your own boss.

Identifying early wins depends on what you learn about the environment, what your boss expects of you, and the direction you want to take the team. Select early win tasks that address all three issues. This is not the time to pick a fight.

A change in leadership is a tremendous opportunity for the organization to make needed changes in direction.

But it is also a time when the incoming leader is vulnerable. The new boss has not had time to develop the working relationships or loyalty needed to make the team work effectively.

Be aware of the vulnerability, but don’t be captured by it. Embrace the opportunity.

Team Building

In your first 90 days, you have to build your team, and learn to make your team work well within the overall organization.

One of the most critical drivers to your team’s success will lie in the decisions you make about how to structure your team. You have to decide on an appropriate structure for the team, and who will fill which roles within it. The earlier you make these decisions, the more you will be able to leverage the changes during your first critical 90 days.

The irony is that you may need to make these decisions after insufficient time to learn about the people in your team, and what their strengths and weaknesses are.

So you will have to gather as much high-quality information as you can, as quickly as you can. Interview team members personally. Speak with key stakeholders in other groups to get insight. But don’t get caught up in the echo chamber of the first person to catch your ear. Sometimes the most insight is held by the members of the team who are least likely to speak up. You have to gather the information quickly, but also filter the bad information from the good.

Besides building your team from within, you also need to be building relationships with other supporting teams. Your team needs to fit into the landscape of the overall organization.

Some of the people you are supervising may be jealous of your new position, especially if you are promoted to supervise people who were once your peers. Expect that your leadership will be challenged. Meet those challenges with firmness, fairness, and decency. If some people in your organization simply will not accept you as the leader, they will need to be moved out of your organization, the sooner the better.

The way you meet these challenges will set the tone for your tenure as the leader of the team. Grasp each challenge as an opportunity to set the tone for your team as it will become.

Evaluate Your Team

If you have inherited an existing team, you need to speak with them as early as you can. You need to find out who does what, how each person works, and who is ready to follow directions.

You also need to find out who is willing to give you a chance. Some team members may not be happy about you as their new manager. Try to work it out, but be prepared to shift them out of your team if necessary.

Don’t let problems fester. There is a temptation to ignore problems, but they will get worse rather than better. Try to address issues head-on, usually in one-on-one discussions. Explain your expectations and ask for a commitment. Make it clear that comments are welcome, and plans may be adjusted as the situation evolves, but the plan is the plan. The manager’s job is to define the plan; the team member’s job is to execute it.

Read the evaluations left by your predecessor, but take them with a grain of salt. Not all managers are entirely objective, and you need to be wary of evidence that the previous manager may have played favorites at evaluation time.

Take a look at the group dynamics to see how team members work together. Identify which strengths and weaknesses exist in the communication and interaction between team members.

You will need to identify which team members fall into which of the following categories:

• Key player. Keep these people where they are.
• Development project. This person isn’t quite there, but shows potential. Work out a plan to develop it.
• Move. This person might fit better in a different role.
• Observe. You aren’t going to figure out everyone right away. Give yourself space to watch and think if you aren’t sure.
• Replace eventually. This person should be replaced, but it can be done at the right time.
• Replace immediately. Find a way to move this person out. This can either be someone who has an attitude problem that can’t be resolved, or someone who is irredeemably incompetent.

Early Wins

The type of task that you select for an early win depends on the type of environment you have inherited. The strategy you employ needs to match the situation you find yourself in.

Even the definition of a “win” can shift over time. When you make your 90-day plan, present it to your boss. Get buy-in and define what success means, and how it will be measured.

Your boss, your peers, and your partners can also help align your priorities with the organization’s priorities. If you are succeeding at something that is less important to the overall organization, you are failing to reach your potential.

Organizational Wins

Some of your early wins may be organizational. Not all of these may be reportable to your boss, but you need to accomplish them to get your team off to a good start. Track these on your 90-day plan, and don’t let yourself get sidetracked from taking care of them:

• Get to know your team. Talk to each of them. Find out who they are, what they like to do, and what they want to do.
• Get acquainted with your colleagues. Find out how they work, and what their expectations are of your team.
• Talk to your boss. Find out what your boss’s expectations are.
• Find out how your team is currently structured. Who does what? Who owns what?

If you haven’t gathered this information, it will be impossible for you to work on your first early win: Structure the team for success.

Structure the Team for Success

It may be the case that the team is already well structured. In that case, reinforce the parts of the structure that work. Assure the leaders that you like the work they have been doing, and encourage the staff members to continue.

It is more likely that there are some adjustments that need to be made. There may be someone on the team who is hoarding knowledge or interesting work. There may be someone who is more interested in exercising authority than performing with excellence. Or there may be someone on the team with potential that has not been realized yet.

As an outsider, you have an advantage. People within a team see the work that they have always done, divided up the way they have always divided it. Based on your conversations with your peers and your boss, you have a view into the work that needs to be done, and what the priorities are.

When you restructure the team, you do not have to divide up the same work the same way and just reshuffle the names. You can take what you know about what needs to be done, add some tasks, de-emphasize some other tasks, and divide up the work in a way that matches up with the people best able to execute it.

Spread learning experiences and interesting work around as far as possible. Design and evaluation tasks should be spread among several people, not just always assigned to the same person. Teach your team to work together on these plum tasks, and those same work habits will carry over to the less fun work.

You will probably make some mistakes, so make it clear that responsibilities will rotate over time, as appropriate. Set an expectation that things are not set in stone.

Also make it clear that you expect success as a team, and that you value and reward teamwork. Just as your power comes from leveraging your team, your employees’ power comes from being part of a well-functioning team.

Defect Rates and Tracking Success

It is easy to claim early wins. Lots of people skate through their careers, claiming successes that they have not earned. You should be different: document your progress and track your successes.

Documenting and tracking progress needs to become second nature to your team. Set up a method for people to identify the work they are doing and to measure their success.

If you have a ticketing system, that is a good place to start. Work should be reflected on tickets, and the success of that work should be reported there. If you don’t have a ticketing or work tracking system, implement one. That can be one of your early wins.

Whatever your team does, the key thing to measure is the defect rate. Defects are what trigger rework. Defects are counted differently for different disciplines, and you will need to define defects in a way that works for your team.

If you are gathering requirements, a defect would be having to circle back and redefine the requirement. If you are coding, a defect would be a bug (i.e., a failure to meet a requirement). If you are building a server, a defect would be having to go back and reconfigure something on the server.

What you want to see is the defect rate dropping over time. That doesn’t happen by itself. The way to lower the defect rate is to analyze the defects and implement processes and procedures to avoid them. A better template for collecting requirements, a different type of code review process, or a more defined building process would be ways to correct the three types of defects we discussed earlier.

So, how do you track the defect rate?

It would be really cool if your team just collected and reported the defect rate, but that seems unlikely. Once you can convince your team of the power of tracking defects, you might be able to get them to do that.

Postmortems—On a Small Scale

One way of getting the team into the habit of tracking defects is to select work items (e.g., tickets) and ask your team members detailed questions about them. What were the time-intensive parts of that task? Which parts were frustrating? What mistakes were made? What rework was needed? How could the process have been changed to avoid those problems in the future? This sort of questioning is sometimes called a postmortem.

This is a habit your team should get into, and one that they should be able to execute without you. But you may need to jumpstart the habit by interviewing your team members individually or in groups about what they are working on. Take the time to listen and ask questions. You have an advantage that most managers don’t—you know the technology, or at least you know technology well enough to ask penetrating questions.

Take notes about the defects in the process and the suggestions that are raised to help avoid them in the future. Circulate the suggestions in the group, and get suggestions from other group members. Foster the conversation, and then stand back and let it happen. Assign someone to rank the suggestions, and assign the best ones to team members for implementation.

This is not magic. Postmortems are a common enough discipline, in the context of major undertakings. But if you look at your team’s work, most of it is done on a much smaller scale. Postmortems on a selected sample of common work items can result in a large overall improvement in your team’s efficiency, and in your team’s morale. Nobody likes rework.

How do you track the defect rate over time? There are a couple of ways to approach it. If you can get to where defects are self-reported consistently, you can track the defect rate directly. You can also sample a certain number of tickets of a certain type each month and look at them for defects, then track the defect rate and report it. Try to focus on work that is common and visible first. Those are the low-hanging fruit where your efforts will be most visible and have the best feedback effect by reducing the amount of time and effort your team spends executing them.

Once your team sees the power of postmortems, you will start to see team members executing them on their own. When you see that happening, you know that you have accomplished something.

Communication Structure

Leveraging your team will not be possible without communication. Your team should become used to communicating in a few standard ways. There is a balance between execution and communication. If people spend all their time on inefficient communication, they will have less time for executing the work.

It is most effective to standardize on a few ways of communicating. These should have different purposes and should be used appropriately.

• Face-to-face In-person communication allows for faster transmission of information than other communications methods. Eighty percent of what is communicated face-to-face is nonverbal. Video conferencing can capture some of this nonverbal communication, and may be a reasonable alternative when travel is not practical.
• Voice Telephone and conference calls allow for some of the nonverbal communication to take place. Tone and pacing can communicate as much as the actual words.
• IM Most companies specify an instant messaging standard. The advantage over email is immediacy because most people respond to IM more rapidly than email. On the other hand, that means people can spend all their time messaging rather than working. Mentor your team members on when to use IM to best effect.
• SMS This is similar instant messaging, but sent to a cell phone. I ask my team members to send me an SMS to notify me of an outage, or of a personal illness or emergency. That way, they can be reasonably sure that I will see their message right away.
• Tickets. Ticketing systems can allow for work to be submitted, then executed by the next available team member. All work requests should be submitted by ticket, not email. With tickets, team members can see if someone else has picked up the ticket, and the requestor can track progress as long as the implementer updates the ticket.
• Calendaring I ask my team members to send their vacation and sick day requests by requesting a meeting on the calendar system. That way they have a way to track my approval, and I have a reminder of who is going to be out on which day. (This is in addition to the SMS to notify me if the person needs to take a sick day.)

From the beginning, set up expectations about how people should communicate. The expectations you set in the beginning will set the tone for the time you manage the group.

Challenging Environments

When senior executives were asked about the most influential positions they held in their careers, they typically pointed at positions that had involved major challenges.¹ These included turnarounds, positions with significant new responsibilities, start-ups, or relocations overseas. The fact is that we learn more from challenging assignments than easy ones. If you are coming into a challenging position, all the more reason to treat the transition seriously.

For a lot of technical managers, we tend to be stronger at technical challenges than at political or cultural challenges. Our impulse may be to focus on what we are strongest at, and ignore challenges in the other domains. It is counterproductive to ignore these challenges. There are some strategies for dealing with challenges that make us uncomfortable:

• Self-discipline. You have gotten as far as you have because you are able to focus on unpleasant tasks. Recognize that political and cultural challenges are part of your job, develop a plan to take care of them, and devote the time to execute your plan.
• Find mentors. You have developed relationships during your career. Many of those people can give you good advice about how to deal with the challenges that may not be up your alley, whether they are technical, political, or cultural. But deal with these people from the mindset of your new position, not your old one. You will not succeed unless your mentors and friends see you in the light of your new position.
• Build your team. Some members of your team may be able to help you with areas that are not a particular strength of yours. Ask them to assist you with these challenges, as opposed to avoiding challenges you would rather not face. Recognize that this is a skill you must develop to succeed.

Manage Expectations

You face expectations from several stakeholders. Your boss, your direct reports, and your internal customers all have needs and expectations. Your former boss may not be willing to let you go.

All of these expectations have to be managed, or they will eat you alive. If your former boss needs you to transition, set explicit expectations and deadlines. Your priority is your new job, not your old one.

With your new boss, sit down to develop a 90-day plan of action. Identify some specific milestones that your team will meet within that time frame, and specify what qualifies as success for each one.

Be aware that some people may not have your best interests at heart. People may be jealous, or may be looking to dump responsibilities that they don’t want to carry any more. Some may be looking for a fall guy for a long-festering wound.

Keep an eye out, and concentrate on the areas that you have actually been assigned. Make sure that expectations are documented and clear. And then keep your boss up to date about progress on those tasks as well as any challenges you are working through.

And when you set expectations, always err on the side of under promising and over delivering. Allow yourself a margin of error, whether it be in terms of money or time. Something will always go wrong, so you need to allow for that in your plans.

Managing Your Boss

Part of managing is managing up, not just down. You have to develop a good working relationship with your boss. Your boss is ultimately the person who will give you the resources to succeed. Fighting with your boss is almost never a good idea.

There are some key pitfalls to keep in mind as your relationship with your boss develops:

• Stay in touch. You are responsible for keeping your boss up to date, not the other way around. Schedule regular one-on-one communication with your boss; otherwise other people in the organization will do your communicating for you. And you will almost certainly not like the results.
• Come clean on problems. Nobody likes to be the bearer of bad news. But it is all going to come out anyway, so it is better to communicate early rather than late. When you tell your boss about a problem, also explain what you are doing about it, and how and when you expect the problem to be resolved. If you handle this right, you can turn the problem resolution into one of your early wins.
• Don’t lecture the boss. Your boss probably has a different working style from yours. You need to respect the difference and learn to work with it. This doesn’t mean that you should try to mimic your boss’s style; you need to develop your own style. But learn your boss’s rhythms and how and when to communicate information and plans to fit into that style.
• The relationship is your responsibility. Don’t expect your boss to make contact with you or ask you leading questions. You need to provide your boss with the information before your boss even knows that he or she needs it.
• Negotiate expectations and timelines. Part of providing the information is providing updates and renegotiating expectations if necessary. It is obviously better to negotiate solid timelines and expectations up front, if at all possible.
• Align with the boss’s priorities. Just like you expect your direct reports to follow through on the tasks you assign them, your boss expects you to work on issues according to the priorities you are given.
• Be aware of your boss’s peer relationships. Your boss gets information about your team from several sources. Be aware of who else is feeding your boss information, and make sure that they know what you are doing to help them with their priorities. If your boss is getting mixed messages about you, it will only undercut your effectiveness.
• Don’t touch the untouchables. There may be particular areas where your boss does not want you interfering. It is important to identify those as early as possible, because it will be a waste of time and effort to take those on. You may have to rely on subtle cues like body language or the tone of a response to a query.

“Managing up” is one of the critical skills you will have to learn as a new manager. Observe how other managers interact with their manager. Tap into your network of mentors and friends for advice. Do whatever it takes to get this relationship right, or nothing else is going to work.

Drinking from the Fire Hose

Every new job brings new challenges, but new management jobs more than most. Not only do you have to learn a vast amount of information in a short amount of time; you are the one responsible for identifying and prioritizing what you need to learn so that you learn the most important things first.

Identify the most critical pieces of information you need, and then develop a plan for finding and verifying that information. If you just try to drink from the fire hose without structuring your learning efforts, you are not going to learn what you need to know in time to be able to use the information.

One key question that has to be answered is how things got to be the way they are. If you don’t learn the history of the group, you are likely to make the same mistakes that were already made. The people who work for you are not stupid; they have probably tried a lot of different things. Maybe some of the things that look strange at first glance are just creative ways to work around an issue you may not realize that you have yet.

Admitting that you have to learn new information can be difficult. For some technical people, it can feel like an admission of weakness to admit that we don’t know everything yet.

But we have to deal with reality as it exists. And reality is that we don’t know everything, and we have a lot to learn in a short amount of time. Pride is just going to get in the way.

On top of that, the denial that comes with pride can cause us to start to blame our team members for our own failings. Once that dynamic gets started, nothing good will come of it.

Accept that you have a lot to learn. You are going to have to ask for help. It is not weakness; it is reality. Prioritize what you need to learn, make a plan, and get on with it.

What You Need to Find Out

There are several types of questions you need answered. Michael Watkins suggests several topics that you should explore when generating your list.² Here are some of the questions I ask; you will need to create a list for your environment.

• How have objectives been set for this team in the past?
• How well has this team met them?
• Do people external to the team agree with that assessment?
• Were the objectives appropriate? (Were the objectives too easy, or too hard?)
• How was success measured?
• What behaviors were encouraged by these measurements?
• Which behaviors were discouraged?
• What were the consequences if deliverables were late or of poor quality?
• What are the root causes of this team’s successes?
• What else contributed to those successes?
• What caused or contributed to the team’s failures?
• How has the environment (strategy, structure, team capabilities, culture, and politics) contributed to the team’s success or failure? What changes have been attempted to the environment? What was the effect?
• Who has driven the changes that were attempted?
• What changes have been suggested but not attempted? Why?
• Is the stated strategy taking the organization in the right direction? Is it getting in the way? Or is it unclear?
• Which team members have contributed to the successes and failures of the organization?
• Can less capable team members be trained to fill bigger roles or to behave in ways that contribute to success?
• Who can be trusted?
• Who has influence within the organization?
• How are the existing processes contributing to team success or failure?
• Are there hidden surprises in your team’s environment that need to be addressed before they blow up?
• Are there cultural or political land mines that need to be avoided?
• What challenges does the organization face in the near term?
• What long-term challenges does the organization face?
• Are there opportunities that need to be exploited?
• What barriers have prevented change?
• Which teams are already performing at a high level?
• Which capabilities do we need to develop?
• Which aspects of our culture helped us to succeed or caused us to fail?
• Who has the authority to make decisions? Is that a function of the person’s position, expertise, or personality?
• What actions within the organization are perceived as creating value? Which are perceived as destroying it?
• What structural or geographic culture differences exist within the organization?
• How do different professional groups (managers, engineers, and support staff) interact with each other?
• Where are policies and procedures documented? How complete is that repository? Are staff members following standard procedures where possible?

These are the questions you need to answer for yourself. You can’t reasonably put these questions to everyone in the environment. But you can schedule the time to speak to individuals and ask them open-ended questions to get the information you need.

One problem to avoid is a bias toward the responses of the first people you interview. One technique for avoiding this problem is to start with the same script for everyone you interview. For example, the answers to the following open-ended questions will get you a lot of the information you need. They will need to be customized for your environment:

What challenges do you see, either now or in the near future?

Where are these challenges coming from? Are the causes internal or external?

What opportunities do you see that are not being exploited? What barriers are preventing them from being exploited? What do you see as the most important thing for me to focus on?

Keep notes, use the same script, and look for similarities and differences between the responses. This technique can be used (with different scripts, of course) to look at responses from your customers and peers as well as your team members. Compare responses from people at the same level as well as looking at responses within the same vertical within the organization.

Some information may also be available from things such as employee or customer satisfaction surveys. If it is not, find a way to take the temperature of both your team and its customer base.

If a root cause analysis has been run on areas where the team has failed, you will also need that information. If it has not, you may need to convene a group to investigate the failure and suggest responses. In Chapter 9, we discuss techniques to run a group troubleshooting session.

Conversations with Your Boss

One of your key constituents is your boss. You have to find out how your boss sees the situation to identify the early wins, align with the overall organization, and negotiate expectations.

Some key information that you need from your boss:

• Current situation. What are the characteristics of the environment as it exists today? Are you building it, are you continuing the success of a previous leader, or are major changes needed? You may not end up agreeing with your boss’s diagnosis of the situation, but you will need to discuss that from a starting point of what the boss thinks today.
• Expectations. How will your performance be measured? What specific milestones do you need to hit?
• Style. How does your boss prefer to communicate? How should you present information? What level of information does your boss want you to provide, and how frequently?
• Resources. What do you need? How will you use it? When will the resources be needed? What is the impact of not getting some of the resources? (You may want to phrase this conversation in menu fashion, e.g.—“If you want x%, it will cost $y; a% will cost $b.”)
• Personal development. How will your performance affect your growth within the organization? What is it you want, and how can your boss help you get it?

Not all of these questions should be addressed the first day. In fact, some of them require that you gather information beforehand or at least develop a level of trust between you and the boss.

In particular, the personal development conversation will need to wait until you have developed some trust with your boss, and hopefully after you have achieved some of your early wins.

These conversations will go better if you prepare beforehand. Your boss also needs to prepare, so agree to an agenda beforehand.

Draft a Learning Plan

At different stages in your 90-day plan, you need to include activities to learn the environment so that you can steer your team in the right direction. Include your learning plan in your overall 90-day plan. Here are some suggestions of the types of learning activities you can include for different stages of the 90-day plan.

Matching the Strategy to the Situation

Broadly speaking, Michael Watkins identifies four major types of situations you may encounter as a new leader.³

1. Start-up. You are building a new team, possibly entirely from scratch.
2. Turnaround. The team or organization is in serious trouble that must be fixed now.
3. Realignment. Move a once successful team into sync with the larger organizations goals and requirements.
4. Sustaining success. Take over the leadership of an already successful organization.

Each of these situations has unique characteristics. For example, start-ups and turnarounds require that the leader make difficult and critical decisions right away, possibly on the basis of inadequate information. That same strategy would be wrong for a sustaining success or realignment situation, where the existing team has significant strengths that should be leveraged to meet new challenges.

Identifying Problems

As you build your team, keep an eye out for some common types of management failure. Be honest with yourself; if you have any of these problems, they will not go away on their own. It will require concentrated effort to overcome them. It will be easier to resolve these issues in your first 90 days than later. Spend the time and energy to resolve them now.

• Unclear direction . Your staff needs to understand what your priorities are, and how they fit into the overall organization’s direction. When people don’t understand the priorities, or why the priorities are what they are, they will waste a lot of time on unproductive work. When people understand why they are being asked to do something, they will be empowered to make the right decisions and to spend their energy in the right direction.
• Living in the past. It may be that your team is doing things that made sense some time ago, but don’t match the way things are now. This is common in environments that have undergone significant growth, where people try to apply a small group mindset to a data center environment.
• Complacency Things have been going okay, but people have stopped looking for ways to improve the environment. Your competition is not sleeping, and you should not be sleeping either.
• Change fatigue Teams can only digest so much change at a time. If everything is changing at once, the team’s members will lose focus. Mistakes and shoddy workmanship will result.
• No consequences for poor performance A symptom of this is when there are a lot of oddball reporting relationships that are left in place to avoid hurting peoples’ feelings. Sometimes demotions are necessary. They aren’t easy, and should not be undertaken without trying to mentor the person to fix the problem. On the other hand, you cannot tolerate poor performance, or your good performers will not see the incentive to keep pushing.
• Inadequate delegation When managing a turnaround situation, or when training inexperienced staff, the manager may need to be more involved in the beginning. But the expectation needs to be that the manager manages by delegating work to the team members, and the team members execute the work. The lines get muddied a bit if you are expected to be a “working manager” or “team lead” for a small group, but delegation is important. Assign responsibility along with the task, and try to foster a sense of ownership among your team members.
• Unclear communication Set expectations, set them clearly, and set them in a standard way. Follow up and ask questions to ensure that the team member understood what you were asking for. Track assignments, and make sure that deliverables come back with what you expected.

Selecting Your Early Wins

When you are planning out your early wins, it is important to recognize that they are stepping stones into the future. You have to pick early wins that will be templates for what you want to accomplish and how you want to accomplish it in the future.

You can’t improve everything at once. Focus is important, so you will need to pick wins that matter, either in isolation or as part of a larger win that is coming later. If you spread your attention across too many areas of focus, you are not focusing on anything.

Wins should be something that matters both to your plans and to the overall organization. Emphasize to your team that business alignment is a key part of measuring success.

If your boss or the organization culture does not recognize your wins as important, they will not garner you the credibility you need. That is why it is critical that you sell your proposed wins to your boss as part of your 90-day plan, and that you are selecting things that will be seen as legitimate wins within your team and throughout the organization.

The process is important too. If you accomplish the goal, but you don’t use it to set up the processes you want, you have wasted an opportunity. Early wins are important for building momentum, team morale, and credibility, but they are most important for setting up future changes in processes, strategy, skills, and structure in future waves of change. Early wins have to be selected and executed with the bigger picture in mind. Early wins are most valuable as learning opportunities. The tasks leading up to the wins are your opportunity to get the team working together the way you need them to work together going forward.

As you are selecting items for early wins, look for structural, strategic items that can be put in place to make your team work more effectively. If you can implement something to replace or optimize manual processes that will pay off in spades later on.

Your Team’s Transition

Your direct reports will need to work with you in your new role. Help them to make the same transition you are making with your own boss.

The steps are basically the same as what you need to carry out with your boss, but in reverse. Make things easier for them. Reach out, schedule time, and make yourself available. Structural items such as regular planning meetings in small groups can help create the team identity you are trying to create.

Get to know your team members, and let them know that they are valued. Identify their strongest characteristics, compliment them on those characteristics, and think of ways that you can assign work to take advantage of their strengths.

Everyone likes to be valued; value your employees. Make them look good, and they will make you look good.

Communicate your expectations clearly. Be fair. Be available. Be the kind of boss you would like to have.

The New Boss’s To-Do List

Helping your people get used to you involves a lot of the same things that we listed earlier on how you should learn to work with your new boss:

• Stay in touch. Make yourself accessible to your team members, and schedule time with each of them. You will need to spend a lot of time with them early so they can learn how you like things done.
• Teach them that they can trust you with problems. Nobody likes to report a problem to the boss. Don’t shoot the messenger. Teach your team that you want to have problems reported to you. But also teach them that you want them to report possible solutions at the same time they report the problem (“I see XYZ, and I think ABC would help”).
• Learn your people’s working styles, and learn to fit them into your team’s work. Different personality types are needed for different types of tasks; assign work intelligently.
• Take responsibility for the relationship. Don’t let resentments fester. Discuss them. You are the boss, and never forget it. That doesn’t mean you are perfect, or that all the decisions you make are optimal. Learn to listen, and consider what is said. You may not agree with it, but most people appreciate being heard out, even if the decision goes against them.
• Lay out expectations and priorities clearly. This includes timelines, as well as concrete deliverables.
• State your untouchables clearly. You have some bottom lines about what you expect, things that you will not compromise on. Communicate those clearly and explicitly, and label them as nonnegotiable.

The 90-Day Plan

Your 90-day plan will be a living document. Include your early wins, as well as the steps you are taking toward the longer-term changes you will put into place. Include your learning plan, and report the results to your boss.

Throughout your first 90 days, update your plan and review it with your boss. Make sure your boss understands what wins you have logged, what challenges you have overcome, and what plans you have for facing other challenges within the organization.

The exact format for your 90-day plan depends on what you and your boss decide is a good way to capture your observations and goals. It could be a spreadsheet, or a project plan, or a text document. The key is that it captures and documents your priorities for your critical first 90 days.

You will probably want to have a few different versions of your 90-day plan. These can be maintained by using a filtering function on a spreadsheet or a project plan, or they can be separate documents. You may want to keep versions of your 90-day plan for different audiences.

• Yourself. This can be the most detailed version of your plan, and can include specific action items for developing your relationship with different team members.
• Your boss. This version should be geared toward the meetings you have with your boss to track your progress. Your boss does not want to know every detail, just your progress toward your goals, and the areas where you need air cover, a decision, or executive support.
• Your team. Your team should understand where you plan on taking them. State and restate your goals. Publish them. Make sure that your plan reflects your priorities, and then engage your team to work the plan.
• The organization. Your peers and other related groups need to understand what direction you are going. Sell them on the advantages of what you are doing, and publish your progress, so they can see what your team is working toward.

The 90-day plan can provide a focus and agenda for your regular discussions with your boss. It will help keep you aligned with what the boss wants, the organization needs, and what you want to accomplish as the leader of your team.

Summary

Here are a few ideas of questions you should think about when drawing up your 90-day plan:

• What are the gaps between what my team is doing now and what the company needs?
• Which of these gaps have a direct impact on client satisfaction?
• What skills or expertise does my team lack? What can we do about that?
• Where does my team lack depth? Who can be cross-trained to fill the gap?
• What structural changes do I need to make to my team?

Discussion Questions

1. What are the most important data to gather about your new position?
2. What questions will you ask of your new team members?
3. Where do you think your most significant challenges will arise?
4. Who have you seen make a smooth transition into a leadership position? What did that person do to ease the transition?
5. What is the most important thing you want to accomplish while leading your team?
6. What are the most important things you want your team members to accomplish?

Further Reading

Harvard Business Essentials. Manager’s Toolkit. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2004.

Watkins, Michael. The First 90 Days. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.

¹ Helen Handfield-Jones, “How Executives Grow,” McKinsey Quarterly, February 2000.

² Michael Watkins, The First 90 Days (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003).

³ Michael Watkins, The First 90 Days (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003).