The First 90 Days....In The New World of Work.

The first ninety days in a new leadership role can be tricky to navigate. This was captured brilliantly by Michael D Watkins in his now legendary book on the topic which advises people how get up to speed quickly.

20 years later the learnings first published in "The First 90 Days" still hold very true but I wanted to write this article to augment this playbook with some observations and advice for the new world of work.

Typically, you’ll be trying to balance a range of emotions when you’re in a probation period and aware that people are making early judgements and analysing who you are and what you are about.

The most common challenge with the first ninety days is the race to deliver a return on the investment of hiring you and proving you can walk your talk. No one likes to feel they’re an overhead, and no one wants to think they made a poor career choice. You may also be frustrated as the newbie on the team who has to learn a new business language and internalise a range of new colleague relationships and products all at once. It’s not unusual to feel overwhelmed; even anxious, but you can channel these feelings as a positive driving force when you know how to harness their power.

Navigating the Ninety Day Dip

One thing to be wary of is what I call the “Ninety Day Dip” which refers to the fact that when you join a new business, your motivation will be at an all-time high.

You will start the new role full of hope and optimism and excited by the feeling of a clean slate and fresh challenge. The trouble is that while for a fleeting moment, this incredible feeling is wonderfully energising, your motivation is liable to decline when the initial euphoria wears off. The trajectory of the decline usually depends on the quality of the onboarding you receive, combined with the way you think and act, which directly relates to your understanding of how motivation works.

?This Ninety Day Dip is a well-documented phenomenon where around the ninety-day mark, people often begin feeling stressed about the future and grasp the size of the challenge for which they signed up. This is that pivotal moment you may recognise from past endeavours when you’ve taken on a new challenge—suddenly everything seems deadly serious and the challenge looks like Everest! Your perspective changes and things look difficult or even impossible and you doubt your abilities. You may even have trouble remembering why you were so enthused and confident at the beginning!

Most people go through some type of dip; especially when they don’t understand how their mind plays tricks on them, and they take those pesky insecure thoughts seriously. It also happens when people get promoted into a new role. They pushed hard to get the promotion and fell under the illusion that achieving what they wanted would magically fix everything, but then they woke up to the cold reality that the job was tougher than they expected and brought with it all the usual problems and challenges. This is the human condition!

While everybody experiences some kind of ninety-day adjustment, the name of the game is to help you navigate any dip gracefully, which is easier to do when you understand why it’s happening, and that it is only a fearful state of mind. ?

How to Navigate the Ninety Day Dip

You can avoid the classic Archetypes that result in catastrophic ninety-day problems by being aware of them:

Archetypes

The Bull in the China Shop

Pent up with the anxiety of proving their worth and having an impact, the Bull in the China Shop charges in to the ninety-day period and creates havoc. It is as if every person, process and product is bright red, and they must smash them up and rebuild them, to show how great they are. This is a fast way to destroy trust, alienate the people on your team, and create chaos.

Captain Hindsight

This is the leader who joins and tells everyone what should have happened before they turned up! We’ve all met people who behave like this. It’s annoying, comes across as smug, and while doing a “black box” challenge type of exercise may be constructive after negative events have occurred, this type of approach doesn’t build connection or trust, and just irritates the people who’ve been working hard before you arrived.

?The Procrastinator

They spend their time analysing, undertaking diagnostics and planning but they miss one critical thing: action! The Procrastinator is the antithesis of the Bull in the China Shop in that by ensuring they don’t “throw the baby out with the bath water” they don’t make any progress at all. As with any progress, done is better than perfect and sometimes you have to make some moves to gather the data you need to decide what you next step is.

?The Rebounder

I came up with this term for those who obsess about the ex, which in this context is the former employer—not a reference to romantic relationships. The Rebounder talks about their old employer constantly, shares endless anecdotes about their old team and clients, and spends much of their time looking in the rear-view mirror, rather than being present and looking through the windscreen at the road ahead. It’s difficult to form productive new relationships when you are obsessed with old ones.

Some of those Archetypes may have resonated with you based on your experience of seeing new leaders in action. Avoid them and you’ll be off to a solid start.

So What does good look like?

There are five rules of engagement we use for the first ninety-days to help guide people to early success as they navigate the dip:

Rule No.1: Two ears, one mouth

Listen more than you speak. Listen to customers, stakeholders and to your new team. The practice of “Active Listening”, not only helps build trust but also gives you vital insights to inform your strategy on what happens next.

?Rule No.2: Find the quick wins

A sensible balance between the Procrastinator and the Bull in the China Shop is to take considered action, but also secure some quick early wins. Finding low hanging fruit that you pick off easily and help deliver results and value straight away, is a simple way to eliminate the risk element for you and your new employer.

Rule No.3: Have a no surprises policy

When you join a business, the speed in which you are effective is often directly correlated to your ability to build trust. The essential relationships to get right are those with your new boss and team. From the start of your tenure make sure that bad news travels as fast as good news and over-communicate both upwards and downwards so that there are no surprises. Throughout my career, I have never met a team that complained that their new boss over-communicated with them!

Rule No.4: Its a Contact Sport

This is very important to remember in our currently digitally enabled, hybrid fuelled new world of work! Don't hide behind Teams - even if you have the option of working remote invest in some plenty of time in the key workplaces getting to know people in person early into your tenure. No amount of forced fun on Zoom will ever replace the chemistry and trust that is built up collaborating side by side.

Rule No.5: Remind yourself that you are not still interviewing

They picked you out of everyone they met! You should therefore not act as if you are still being interviewed and operate on high alert the whole time - it will cloud your thoughts badly if you do. Instead be both confident and humble, dial in on the above 4 rules and prove the hiring team right.

When you join an organisation, you have a brief window of time when you naturally view the business with “fresh eyes”, before you integrate into the culture and the fabric. Don’t let it slip by without maximising the opportunity.

Sticking with these rules should help you assimilate fast and begin building the next stage of your career positively.

Go get em!

Andrew