Where Do You Start?

The first 90 days.

“The first thing you should do is read, or re-read, the book The First 90 Days*,” says Nigel Dessau, CMO of Stratus Technology and ex-CMO of both AMD and StorageTek.  “In the first 30 days of any new job I've taken, I gather data, qualitative and quantitative. I’m not choosy, at first. I meet with as many people as I can, and then review every night for what I've learned. From that I come up with six focus areas, two of which are most likely going to be people and budget. Then I sit with the leadership team and discuss. And then I discuss with my marketing team, to get alignment. What ensues becomes my plan for the next several years, which is the average tenure of a CMO."

Let’s go to the source: “The actions you take during your first three months in a new job will largely determine whether you succeed or fail, ” writes Harvard’s Michael Watkins, author of The First 90 Days. “The stakes are obviously high. Failure in a new assignment can spell the end of a promising career.”

Sobering.

Luckily for us, Watkins has researched the success and failure of new executives and offers a checklist of things you need to do :

1. Promote yourself. No, don’t hire a publicist. Mentally accept that you've been promoted into a new position that will require different skills than what’s made you successful in the past.
2. Accelerate your learning. Go into learning overdrive – spend as much time as you can reading about markets, product, technologies, systems and structures, and especially the company culture and politics.
3. Match your strategy to the situation. Start-ups are quite different than product line turnarounds which are quite different from new market entry situations
4. Secure early wins. This may be the most important thing you can do: nothing succeeds like success. It builds personal credibility.
5. Negotiate success. Your new boss thinks you’re the right person for the job, but isn't totally sure yet. Schedule time, weekly, to go over your assessment of the situation, his or her expectations, reporting style and the resources you will have available.
6. Achieve alignment. With each promotion, you’ll find that you “do” less and have to “get more done.” The only way to achieve this is to align, or re-align, the structure with the strategy
7. Build your team. Evaluate the team early and, if necessary, make tough calls. You can’t afford to depend on non-performers.
8. Create coalitions. More important jobs increasingly depend on your ability to influence people who don’t report to you. Make them your allies, and you succeed. Make them your enemies, and you fail.
9. Keep your balance. You’ll be drinking from a fire hose – you’ll find that the demands on your time are more than there are hours in the day. Find ways to keep your perspective and don’t be rushed into making risky decisions.
10. Expedite everyone. Bosses, peers and especially direct reports – the quicker you can get everyone up to speed, the better your performance will be.

Even - or maybe especially - if you've been in your job for some time, this is sound advice. Take some time to mentally promote yourself into that next position and contemplate what it would take to succeed. Then, follow these steps as if you were already in the position.

You may get that promotion faster than you think.

Next: Day 91

*Watkins, Michael, The First 90 Days, Harvard Business School Press, 2003