Addressing Five Critical Challenges in the First 90 Days

Studies show that 40-50% of senior level executives entering new organizations fail to meet expectations within their first year. Transitioning to a larger role within an organization can be just as perilous as leaders try to adapt to changing expectations. Coaching can help. Leaders undergoing transition coaching are 8 times more likely to succeed when on-boarding to a new role. Why? Coaching and a robust transition and onboarding plan helps leaders lay the foundation for long-term success by overcoming five critical onboarding challenges. 

Challenge #1: Confining Legacy. Leaders coming into a new role often are confined by the legacy of their predecessor, their position, or their people. This saddles the new leader with problems and challenges from the past, making it difficult for them to act. For example, one leader I coached was compared to their predecessor who was nice and much loved. The new leader wanted to focus on performance and execution but was viewed as harsh and uncaring when compared to the previous leader who did not manage performance problems. Another leader faced a situation where stakeholders excluded them from meetings and processes because previous managers in the position did not assert their need to be involved. Finally, a leader promoted from within a company faced issues because they were promoted into a senior position over their peers who also had applied for the position. Transition coaching helped these leaders explore stakeholders and their assumptions. Coaching also helped them explore their own strengths, opportunities, and leadership principles to craft transition messages that they used as part of their onboarding. As one leader stated, “I was able to get better support from my team and stakeholders as I openly addressed their concerns and communicated how and why my approach was different.”  

Critical Challenges

	Actions to Take	When to Act
Confining Legacy	- Assess style and skills to identify strengths and opportunities - Identify and address stakeholder and team assumptions - Create transition messaging - Recontract by being clear on their needs and your approach	- Pre-start planning - Manager Assimilation - Stakeholder and team 1:1s - First 60 days
Cultural Rejection	- Assess style, skills, derailers - Explore leader identity - Understand company culture - Engage stakeholders - Manage derailers - Build new skills	- Pre-start planning - New manager and HR 1:1s - Stakeholder and team 1:1s - Team meetings - First 6 months
Unaligned Expectations	- Document expectations of all stakeholders - Explore mental models - Exhibit 3 elements of trust - Identify quick wins - Align expectations	- First manager meetings - Stakeholder 1:1s - 30-, 60- and 90-day goals - Agreements on quick wins or milestone reviews
Insufficient Capacity	- Focus team on key priorities - Eliminate non-value add work - Build x-team collaboration - Assess team skills - Align on plan to upskill	- Strategy team and process - Direct report 1:1s - Skip level reviews - Talent plan in first 90 days
Resistance to Change	- Assess People FIRST practices - Include others in the change - Adapt to overcome resistance - Build a change strategy	- Change teams - Townhalls - Manager information cascades - 1:1s and team meetings

Challenge #2: Cultural Rejection. Leaders moving into a new company, or into a new country, often face cultural rejection. They find that what made them successful in the past leads them to failure in a new environment. For example, one leader I coached came from an execution-driven culture and found it difficult to get support for their initiatives in their new company’s collaborative culture. We used the Growth Leader Assessment to assess his skills and identified that he was not using many practices he needed to engage, integrate input from, and align stakeholders. Coaching helped him build new skills in these areas. More importantly, coaching helped transform his leader identity. He shifted his role from focusing on ‘identifying and fixing a problem’ to one of ‘building a common strategy and mobilizing support’ to have impact in the organization. Insight into the new culture and into his own leadership strengths and opportunities helped him better adapt and succeed in his new role. 

Challenge #3: Unaligned Expectations. Despite performance metrics and goal setting, leaders also fail when expectations are not aligned. This is often caused by not meeting unwritten expectations, resulting in negative perceptions of a new leader across the organization. For example, one leader was promoted into a role to drive revenue growth. To do this, he leveraged his strengths with customers to meet their needs, resulting in modified service agreements and contracts for many new customers. Unfortunately, this went against a global shift to standardize offerings and contracts to simplify the business. This led to conflict between the leader and a global operations team and ultimately to conflict with his manager’s manager. A timely intervention of coaching helped him explore his mental models and how he was building trust with customers at the expense of trust with his stakeholders. This helped him demonstrate better trust building behaviours and helped him build alignment processes to set and align on expectations amongst his multiple managers and stakeholder groups.   

Challenge #4: Insufficient Capacity. Some leaders fail because their team or organization lacks capacity to deliver. Leaders can’t perform if their teams don’t focus on and have the capabilities to address complex problems. Some leaders address this by quickly changing out the leadership team, most often leading to chaos and poor performance as new leaders are brought in without knowledge of the organization. Others change the team too slowly. Coaching can help leaders strike the right balance. I’ve coached two leaders who first built capacity by defining a clear strategy to focus the team’s efforts. By clarifying priorities and responsibilities, they freed up capacity so that their teams could focus on critical strategies. While doing this, they assessed their team members and identified whether to hire or develop the capabilities they needed to succeed. Coaching helped them build a strong human resource plan that enabled them to selectively hire, keep a stable team, and build capabilities that enabled them to turn around their failing businesses within a year. 

Challenge #5: Resistance to Change. Other leaders fail because the organization resists changes that they try to implement. Resistance can result in initiative failure and can impact how stakeholders view their ability to lead others. Coaching helps by equipping leaders with the skills they need to lead change. In these cases, I often start by having the leader reflect on how they plan to approach change and then assessing this against our People FIRST principles for change and transformation. In one case, a leader realized she was not inclusive enough in her approach. After an initial launch of initiatives, she found that people didn’t understand the changes. Coaching helped her create an inclusive process where employees could have a voice in shaping the change initiatives and how they were implemented. This resulted in more excitement and support for the changes, which helped her transform the organization to get the results she needed to succeed.  

Each leader brings great skills and capabilities to a new role. But leaders often find that they lack skills when facing new challenges. To succeed, they must: 

• Identify the transition challenges they face  

• Assess their skill and knowledge gaps 

• Build new skills and capabilities 

• Address transition challenges with stakeholders 

• Build quick wins in the first 90-120 days 

A small amount of transition coaching can help. With the right focus and guidance, new executives can significantly shorten their learning curve, build critical relationships, and build momentum for long-term success. If you want to know more, contact us to find out how transition coaching can help you or your organization. 

Dr. James Eyring is CEO of Organisation Solutions and Lead Science Advisor for Produgie. James has over 30 years of experience assessing, coaching, and developing executives and their teams. With a PhD in Industrial / Organizational Psychology, James is actively involved in research on leadership, growth capabilities, and potential. He has taught Undergraduate and Graduate level courses and published in academic and practitioner publications. Most recently he authored book chapters on Strategic Workforce Planning and Innovations in Assessment in SIOP’s Professional Practice Series.

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