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Leadership transitions are critical times. In the tenth anniversary edition of his best-selling book The First 90 Days (Harvard Business Press, 2013), Michael Watkins shows new leaders and managers how to build career-transition competence. The book has helped a generation of executives identify and understand the challenges of promotion and onboarding and accelerate their readiness to add value to their new firm. Watkins' approach is to treat learning about a company when you are being offered a leadership position as if you were making a strategic investment. The process starts by planning to learn, that is, using structured methods to accelerate learning, then methodically diagnosing the situation to develop the right strategy. The book's main lessons are:
- How to collect job-critical information about a company and use structured methods to accelerate learning.
- How to diagnose the job situation to develop the right strategic framework for decision making.
- How to put together a 90-day plan for creating value for your new firm.
- How to identify the root cause of poor performance and how to lead your team to fix it.
- How to create and manage alliances and develop an advice-and-counsel network.
- How to accelerate the development of your whole team.
Strategy & Leadership: Many executives I know consider your book The First 90 Days , first published more than a decade ago, essential prep for every job move. You've just finished an updated edition. What are some of the lessons the new edition offers - for executive recruits, their new team members and hiring companies - before and as they start the new relationship?
Michael Watkins: The new book incorporates a decade of additional research and implementation experience. One important change is the focus on helping leaders more clearly identify the specific challenges of the type of transition they are experiencing - for example promotion vs joining a new company vs moving between functions - and adjusting their approaches accordingly. The most formidable impediment to successfully onboarding into a new organization, for example, often are about adapting to a new culture and learning to navigate in unfamiliar political currents. Promotions, by contrast, often challenge the new leader to learn to delegate and communicate differently.
Another major addition is the chapter...