Your first 90 days in a senior role: what to decide, what to postpone
By Eylem Samland — FIERA Leadership
New senior leaders fail in predictable ways, and almost none of them are about competence. They are about sequence: acting before you understand, or understanding forever without acting.
Here is a way to sequence the first three months that keeps both risks in check.
Weeks 1 to 3: buy information, spend no authority
Your currency in the first weeks is attention. Use it to build a map, not a mandate.
- Run one-to-ones with every direct report and with the two or three people outside your team whose work you will constantly depend on.
- Ask the same four questions in every conversation so you can compare answers: What is working? What is broken? What would you change if you had my job? What are you worried I will do?
- Write down what you are told about the previous leader. It tells you the standard you are measured against and the wound you inherited.
- Resist the invitation to fix something visible in week two. It buys applause and costs you the chance to change something that matters later.
Weeks 4 to 6: make one early, reversible decision
Pure listening past a month reads as indecision. Pick one change that is small in blast radius but clearly yours: a meeting you kill, a decision right you push down, a metric you make visible. Explain the reasoning out loud, not just the change. People are learning how you think, and that lesson is worth more than the change itself.
Early on, your team is not evaluating your decisions. They are evaluating how you make them.
Weeks 6 to 10: name the two or three things that matter
By now the map is good enough to commit. Write a short document: what this team is for, the two or three priorities for the next two quarters, and what you are explicitly deprioritising. The deprioritising is the hard half and the part people remember.
- Test the draft with your boss before your team sees it. Misalignment above you will be discovered anyway, and private is better.
- Test it with the two most sceptical people on the team. If they can poke a hole, so can everyone else.
- Then say it publicly, more than once, in the same words. New leaders under-repeat by an order of magnitude.
Weeks 10 to 13: make the people decisions you have been avoiding
You know by now who is in the wrong seat. Waiting past the first quarter converts a legacy problem into your problem: after three months, the team assumes the situation has your endorsement. Move carefully, humanely, and without further delay.
What to postpone deliberately
- Reorganisations. Almost always a substitute for understanding. If it is genuinely needed, it will still be needed in month five, and you will design it better.
- Importing your last company's playbook wholesale. Bring the principles, rebuild the practices.
- Culture pronouncements. Culture is inferred from your first three hard decisions, not from a values slide.
The measure that matters at day 90
Not how much you changed. Whether the team can state your priorities without looking them up, whether people bring you bad news early, and whether your boss knows what you will do next. If those three are true, you have earned the room to make the bigger moves.
Stepping into a bigger role? 1:1 executive coaching gives you a place to pressure-test the sequence before you commit to it. (See how coaching works)