Nearly 40 percent of the American workforce has a younger boss (a number that is growing quickly), but here’s a scary set of stats. When leadership development adviser Jack Zenger reviewed the seventeen thousand worldwide leaders who had gone through his leadership training program, he found the average age was forty-two. And yet the typical individual in these companies had become a supervisor at around age thirty and remained in that role for nine years—that is, until age thirty-nine—but had never received any other training prior to Zenger’s program. That’s a dirty dozen years between thirty and forty-two during which young managers are running the orchestra pit without any formal guidance.

The data suggests that institutional inertia is endemic, and costly. Consider:

• Only 11 percent of the companies that made up the Fortune 500 in 1955 are on the list today

• The average age of a company on the S&P 500 Index has fallen from sixty years in the 1950s to less than twenty years currently

• Between 2010 and 2019, US public companies reported more than $550 billion in restructuring charges, which are typically the product of belated or inept attempts at strategic renewal

Though mere mortals, CEOs are often paid as if they were omniscient. At present, the average CEO compensation in America’s 350 largest companies is $17.2 million a year, or 278 times the pay of a typical frontline employee. It’s not clear those millions buy much in the way of vision. Repeated studies have shown that the correlation between CEO pay and relative share performance is negligible or slightly negative. No amount of money can transform an executive into Iron Man or Wonder Woman.

However, if you need to bring someone in from the outside to fill a senior leadership position, you should do this only once every six to nine months. It takes this length of time to find the right person, get him comfortable in the position, and transfer the DNA of the

organization into his psyche. In turn, the new executive will need this amount of time to positively impact the organization enough to pay back his salary.

And while some of the specific do’s and don'ts for CEOs are unique to their role, most essential things like setting expectations, developing a vision, establishing a management process, creating priorities, building your management team, and doing an exceptional job on your earliest projects apply equally to anyone in a new leadership role.

When Ron Daniel was the managing partner of McKinsey & Company from 1976 to 1988, he sent a memo to new recruits when they started, entitled, “On Becoming an Associate.” His advice is still memorable all these years later: “Recognize the necessity of getting off to a good start in the firm. Your first few engagements are critical. During these studies, you can establish an internal clientele for yourself - that is, by performing in an outstanding way, your reputation will be quickly established in your office and even the firm.” (We’ve incorporated Ron’s memo in the Appendix of the book.)

This is especially important because whenever you assume a new role, you’re in what Max DePree, former CEO of furniture company Herman Miller and author of Leadership Is an Art, calls “a temporary state of incompetence.” Even if you think you know a company - or a department or a division - before you take over its leadership, think again. As GE’s Immelt reminisces, “I worked for this place for twenty-one years before I got the CEO job and there were still things that shocked me when I took over.”

The knowledge gap is even wider for outsiders. “Anyone coming into a new situation is faced with the fact that they often have to do the most at a point they know the least. You may have previous experience and you may be smart and have insight into how things work, but you know the least about the actual company you’re engaged in at the same time you have to set things in motion,” says AOL chairman and CEO Jonathan F. Miller, himself recruited into the company from the outside.