The First 90 Days, Updated and Expanded. Michael D. Watkins
understand the types of transitions you’re experiencing. To illustrate the challenges associated with different types of transitions (discussed in the introduction), I focus here on the two most frequently experienced types of transitions: promotions and onboarding into new companies.
Getting Promoted
A promotion marks the result of years of hard work to persuade influential people in the organization that you’re willing and able to move to the next level. But it also marks the beginning of a new journey. You must figure out what it takes to be excellent in the new role, how to exceed the expectations of those who promoted you, and how to position yourself for still greater things. Specifically, every promotion presents new leaders with a core set of challenges to be surmounted.
Balance Breadth and Depth
Each time you’re promoted, your horizon broadens to encompass a wider set of issues and decisions. So you need to gain and sustain a high-level perspective in your new role. To be successful, Julia needed to shift her focus from her marketing function to the full array of issues relating to the product launch.
You also need to learn to strike the right balance between keeping the wide view and drilling down into the details. This juggling act can be challenging, because what had been the fifty-thousand-foot view in your previous role may be equivalent to the world at five thousand feet, or even five hundred feet, in your new job.
Rethink What You Delegate
The complexity and ambiguity of the issues you are dealing with increase every time you get promoted. So you’ll need to rethink what you delegate. No matter where you land, the keys to effective delegation remain much the same: you build a team of competent people whom you trust, you establish goals and metrics to monitor their progress, you translate higher-level goals into specific responsibilities for your direct reports, and you reinforce them through process.
When you get promoted, however, what you delegate usually needs to change. If you’re leading an organization of five people, it may make sense to delegate specific tasks such as drafting a piece of marketing material or selling to a particular customer. In an organization of fifty people, your focus may shift from tasks to projects and processes. At five hundred people, you often need to delegate responsibility for specific products or platforms. And at five thousand people, your direct reports may be responsible for entire businesses.
Influence Differently
Conventional wisdom says that the higher you go, the easier it is to get things done. Not necessarily. Paradoxically, when you get promoted, positional authority often becomes less important for pushing agendas forward. Like Julia, you may indeed gain increased scope to influence decisions that affect the business, but the way you need to engage may be quite different. Decision making becomes more political—less about authority, and more about influence. That isn’t good or bad; it’s simply inevitable.
There are two major reasons this is so. First, the issues you’re dealing with become much more complex and ambiguous when you move up a level—and your ability to identify “right” answers based solely on data and analysis declines correspondingly. Decisions are shaped more by others’ expert judgments and who trusts whom, as well as by networks of mutual support.
Second, at a higher level of the organization, the other players are more capable and have stronger egos. Remember, you were promoted because you are able and driven; the same is true for everyone around you. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the decision-making game becomes much more bruising and politically charged the higher up you go. It’s critical, then, for you to become more effective at building and sustaining alliances.
Communicate More Formally
The good news about moving up is that you get a broader view of the business and more latitude to shape it. The bad news is that you are farther from the front lines and more likely to receive filtered information. To avoid this, you need to establish new communication channels to stay connected with what is happening where the action is. You might maintain regular, direct contact with select customers, for instance, or meet regularly with groups of frontline employees, all without undermining the integrity of the chain of command.
You also need to establish new channels for communicating your strategic intent and vision across the organization—convening town-hall–type meetings rather than individual or small-group sessions, or using electronic communication to broadcast your messages to the widest possible audiences. Your direct reports should play a greater role in communicating your vision and ensuring the spread of critical information—something to remember when you’re evaluating the leadership skills of the team members you’ve inherited.
Exhibit the Right Presence
“All the world’s a stage,” as William Shakespeare put it in the play As You Like It, “and all the men and women merely players.” One inescapable reality of promotion is that you attract much more attention and a higher level of scrutiny than before. You become the lead actor in a crucial public play. Private moments become fewer, and there is mounting pressure to exhibit the right kind of leadership presence at all times.
That’s why it’s important to get an early fix on what “leadership presence” means in your new role: what does a leader look like at your new level in the hierarchy? How does he act? What kind of personal leadership brand do you want to have in the new role? How will you make it your own? These are critical considerations, worth taking the time to explore.
These core promotion challenges are summarized in figure 1-1.
Onboarding into a New Company
In promotion situations, leaders typically understand a lot about their organizations but must develop the behaviors and competencies required to be effective at new levels. If you’ve been hired into a new organization, you will confront very different transition challenges. Leaders joining new companies often are making lateral moves: they’ve been hired to do things that they’ve been successful doing elsewhere. Their difficulties lie in adjusting to new organizational contexts that have different political structures and cultures.
FIGURE 1-1
Core promotion challenges
For each core challenge there are corresponding strategies that newly promoted leaders should employ.
| What’s really changed? | What should you do? |
| Broader impact horizon. There is a broader range of issues, people, and ideas to focus on. | Balance depth and breadth. |
| Greater complexity and ambiguity. There are more variables, and there is greater uncertainty about outcomes. | Delegate more deeply. |
| Tougher organizational politics. There are more powerful stakeholders to contend with. | Influence differently. |
| Further from the front lines. There is greater distance between you and the people executing on the ground, potentially weakening communication and adding more filters. | Communicate more formally. |
| More scrutiny. There is more attention paid to your actions by more people, more frequently. | Adjust to greater visibility. |
To illustrate, consider the experience of David Jones at Energix, a small, rapidly growing wind energy company. David was recruited from a highly regarded global manufacturing firm. An engineer by training, David had risen steadily through the ranks in R&D to become vice president of new-product development for the company’s electrical distribution division. David learned to lead in a company that was renowned for its leadership bench strength. The culture leaned toward a command-and-control style of leadership, but