The first time I took over a country operation, I arrived with a plan.
I had written it before I met a single member of the team. It was a good plan. Clear priorities, sensible sequencing, everything I had learned in the role before.
It was also, I discovered by the second month, a plan for a company that did not exist.
The mistake was speed, not direction
New leaders are afraid of one thing above all: looking as if they are doing nothing.
So we act. We restructure something in week three. We announce a direction in week five. And in doing so we answer questions the organisation has not yet asked us.
From where I stand today, I would spend the first thirty days almost entirely listening. Not passively. Listening is work when you do it properly.
The first thirty days: understand what is actually true
I now ask every person I meet the same four questions, and I write the answers by hand.
- What is working here that I should not touch?
- What is broken that everyone knows about and nobody says?
- What did the last person in my chair get wrong?
- If you had my authority for one week, what would you change?
The fourth question is the one that surprises people. It also produces the most honest answers, because it invites someone to be a leader rather than a witness.
By the end of thirty conversations you will know things no handover document contains. You will also have done something more valuable than any early decision: thirty people will have experienced being taken seriously by the new boss.
The second thirty days: one visible thing
Trust is not built by declarations. It is built by evidence.
Somewhere in those thirty conversations, something will have come up repeatedly. Usually something small and irritating that has been ignored for years because it belonged to nobody.
Fix that.
Not the strategy. The small thing. Fix it quickly, say publicly that you fixed it because people told you about it, and the organisation learns something important about you: speaking to this man produces results.
I once removed a weekly report that eleven people were preparing and nobody was reading. It took one email. For months afterwards people brought me problems they had never raised with anyone.
The final thirty days: now say where you are going
Only now do I put the direction on the table. Three priorities. Not seven.
By this point it is no longer my plan imposed on their company. It contains their words. People recognise their own sentences in it, and defend what they recognise.
What I would tell my younger self
Your credibility in the first ninety days does not come from being impressive. It comes from being accurate.
The leader who says, in week four, "I do not yet understand this business well enough to decide that" gains more authority than the one who decides confidently and wrongly.
A quiet moment
If you are new in a role, or about to be, ask yourself this:
In the last two weeks, how many hours did you spend explaining yourself to the organisation, and how many did you spend understanding it?
The ratio tells you what kind of start you are having.
Adapted from themes in my book, "Take The Lead."