Managerial Success:
The First 90 Days
The most important
decisions you make in your first 90 days will probably be about the
people on your team. If you succeed in creating a high-performance
team, you can exert tremendous leverage in value creation. If not, you
will face severe difficulties, for no leader can hope to achieve much
alone.
— Michael Watkins, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for
New Leaders at All Levels, Harvard Business School Press, 2003.
Assessing a
team—deciding who should stay and who should go—is one of the most
critical tasks an executive faces when transitioning into a new
position. It can create or destroy leverage—and leadership is
ultimately about leverage.
Each year, about 25 percent of managers in typical Fortune 500
companies change jobs. Most spend an average of four years in a given
position. High-potential leaders in mid-senior ranks move more
frequently: every 2.5 to 3 years. These statistics demonstrate why
leaders must build strong teams, composed of the right people in the
right jobs, as quickly as possible.
The first weeks are crucial for learning and evaluating. Leaders must
maintain the right balance of confidence and humility, while asking
probing questions and actively listening. During this time, leaders are
most vulnerable. Without a firm support network in place, they must
learn everything they can about the organization, its strategies,
customers and team members in the shortest possible timeframe.
Leaders must dedicate a large percentage of learning time to getting to
know existing team members. If you are promoted to a new position from
within the organization, you are likely acquainted with some of its key
people. Transition from the outside, and you face the task of
identifying and placing the right people into the right positions—a
much greater challenge. Either way, you must choose wisely, without
disrupting short-term performance.
How do you assess your existing team as quickly as possible? How do you
reduce your learning curve and jumpstart your team’s performance in the
first 90 days? What are the most common mistakes leaders in a new
position make?
How to Assess an Existing Team
When performing
your evaluation, you’ll find some excellent, some average and some
unsatisfactory people in place. You will inherit a group with its own
dynamics and habitual ways of working. You cannot afford to make one of
the most common errors: gathering them in a room, telling them that
you’re in charge now, and that you’ll be making some changes. Instead,
you will need to sort out who’s who, the functions people perform and
how the group has worked in the past.
Go in and shake
the tree, and you’re guaranteed to lose some of the best leaves along
with the rotting ones. Always evaluate thoroughly before acting. Hasty
action compromises trust and credibility and you may inadvertently lose
valuable team members.
If you are like
most leaders, you will form an impression each time you meet someone.
Hold onto those thoughts, but don’t hold them as truths. Remember: They
are merely first impressions. Allow them to register, don’t suppress
them, and then allow other factors to influence your ultimate appraisal.
You also must
decide which criteria to use when evaluating your people. Michael
Watkins, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard
and author of The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New
Leaders at All Levels, suggests using the following:
- Competence – Does this person have the technical skills and experience to do the job well?
- Judgment – Does this person exercise good judgment under pressure or when faced with sacrifice for the greater good?
- Energy – Does this team member bring the right kind of energy to the job, or is he/she disengaged, burned out or unfulfilled?
- Focus – Does this person stick to priorities, or is he/she easily distracted and scattered?
- Relationships – Does this person get along well with other team members, supporting team decisions?
- Trust – Can you trust this person to be honest, consistent and reliable?
Probing Questions
Prepare
to meet formally with each person by reviewing available personnel
history, performance data and other appraisals. During your meeting,
ask probing questions. Watkins suggests the following for a
comprehensive evaluation:
- What do you think of our existing strategy?
- What are the biggest challenges we face in the short term? In the long term?
- What are the biggest opportunities we face?
- What resources could we leverage more effectively?
- How could we improve the way the team works together?
- If you were in my position, to what would you want to pay attention?
Be
on the alert for nonverbal cues. While a person’s actual words have
merit, much is revealed by body language, as well as what a person
omits and the way in which he communicates:
- What doesn’t he say?
- Does he volunteer information or wait until he’s asked?
- Does the person reveal areas of weakness or only strengths?
- Does the team member blame others or take responsibility for specific things?
- Does the person make excuses?
- How consistent is his body language with his words?
- Which topics evoke a lot of energy?
- What is this person like outside of meetings, when he interacts on an informal level with others?
- Does he tend to be cordial, polite, tense, competitive, judgmental or reserved?
Testing for Judgment
It
can be difficult to assess an individual’s ability to make decisions
and judgments. This is quite different from evaluating technical skills
and knowledge. You must observe the person’s ability to make sound
predictions and develop good strategies for avoiding problems.
One
strategy for evaluating judgment involves asking questions about areas
outside of work, such as sports, hobbies or other interests. Ask people
to offer predictions for their favorite athletic teams and how they
have reached their conclusions. Observe whether they easily commit to
predicting an outcome or prefer to play it safe. Your goal is to gauge
whether their rationale makes sense and how capable they are in
exercising expert judgment. Individuals who have found passion outside
of the work world are likely to do so in their chosen business field,
as well.
Assessing the Team
After
evaluating individual team members, you need to learn and understand
how the existing team functions. This requires you to study data and
reports from meetings, as well as any climate surveys. Take the time to
determine whether team members share similar impressions of the
situations they face. Major differences point to a lack of team
coherence.
Group
dynamics will become evident in first meetings. Observe how individuals
interact in your presence and the roles people take. Who speaks easily?
Who holds back? Are there alliances? Nonverbal cues inevitably surface
each time someone speaks up in a meeting.
Restructuring a Team
Within a short period, you will be able to outline a plan for restructuring your team:
- Who will you keep in place?
- Who will you keep and develop?
- Who will you move to another position?
- Who will you observe for a while?
- Who will you replace (low priority)?
- Who will you replace (high priority)?
Alternatives to Termination
Even
if poor performance is well documented, it can be difficult and
time-consuming to let people go. Consider alternatives, such as moving
them to other positions within the team that are better suited to their
skills. Or, you may want to remove someone from the team and place him
elsewhere in the organization. Do this, however, only if you are
positive that he can perform well there. Shifting one problem employee
to another department will damage your credibility and reputation.
To keep
your team functioning while you build a better one, you may need to
retain an underperformer while searching for his replacement.
Always
treat people with dignity and respect, and allow them to find positions
elsewhere when it becomes clear that their skills no longer suit the
organization’s needs. Do what you can to help them find a better fit.
Remember: People form lasting impressions of you based on how well you
manage this part of your job.
Common Mistakes
When
it comes to building a winning team, many leaders in new positions
stumble, partly because it is extremely difficult to let people go.
Failure to act decisively and quickly prolongs the transition period
and can derail your efforts. Here are some of the most common mistakes
leaders make, from Watkins’s book The First 90 Days:
Keeping the existing team too long.
You should decide who will remain and who will go within your first 90
days. After six months, you should have communicated your planned
personnel changes to key stakeholders, your boss and HR.
Not repairing the glitches.
Develop options right away, even if you have to hire people in
temporary positions. You can’t let the engine stop running while you
recharge the batteries. You may be able to find people at lower levels
of the organization.
Not working organizational alignment and team-restructuring issues in parallel.
It isn’t enough to have the right team in place. Members must be
aligned and clear about the organizational mission, goals and values.
Not holding onto the good people. You need to look for ways to signal to the top performers that you recognize their capabilities. Reassurance can do wonders.
Undertaking team-building before the core team is in place.
Don’t strengthen the bonds of a team whose members will not continue
with you as a cohesive group. Wait until you have the right people in
place.
Making implementation decisions too early. Wait
until core members of your new team are in place before attempting to
secure their buy-in for changes. You cannot afford to delay some
issues, but it’s difficult to get buy-in from people when they haven’t
been part of the decision-making process.
Trying to do it all yourself.
The process of restructuring a team is full of legal, emotional and
company policy complications. Don’t undertake this on your own. You
have HR people who can advise you and help you chart a strategy.