At Gillette, I felt comfortable only about a year after I walked in that we knew exactly what we would need to do over the next five years.

“A leader must take action immediately to fix obvious problems. But developing an insightful strategic plan will take three to five months. There is too much information and too steep a learning curve to try to implement solid strategy in the first thirty to sixty days.” - Jim Kilts.

As you involve more and more people in the change process, you may feel as if you’re treading water. This feeling comes from having to introduce and convince each new wave of people as your changes percolate down through the organization. During your first year there will never be a time when your strategic agenda isn’t being criticized, questioned, and debated. Be patient, and remember that the new converts will need the same time that you and others did to get it.

Ten Guidelines for Crafting Your Strategic Agenda

1. You have more time than you think. You don't have to deliver a fully baked strategic plan on day one… or even in the first hundred days. Find the right balance between creating a compelling picture of where you want the organization to go and not becoming prematurely locked into your plan.

1. In developing your agenda, diagnose the company’s (or department’s) problems starting with the customer perspective and continuing with a grounded view of what the company stands for.

1. Strictly limit the number of themes and priorities so that they can be easily remembered by the organization.

1. When crafting your short-term agenda, always endeavor to underpromise and overdeliver.

1. Build the strategic agenda in a joint effort with your team versus in a silo.

1. Incorporate an explicit plan to address cultural issues and barriers to change.

1. Define the operating mechanism / process - the meetings, documents, and report formats to conduct the day-to-day business.

1. Secure some early wins; look for obvious flaws in the organization and fix them quickly to establish your credibility as a leader.

1. Expect pushback on your agenda, but rather than resist, coalesce that input in a positive way to maximize buy-in.

1. Don’t be a perfectionist; your strategic agenda is by definition a work in progress. Use it to help you and the organization make decisions, see how they work, and make adjustments as necessary.

Communication is a central aspect of leadership and indeed all human activity. It has a magnified effect during your first hundred days. Take care to do it well and do it often, which requires active listening, tailoring communication approaches both to your natural strengths and to the situation, and giving and getting direct feedback. It will help support your strategic and cultural agenda; it will also help you avoid many of the most common pitfalls that threaten new leaders as they try to get off to the right start.

4. A living agenda.

Develop a spacious, adaptable agenda so the participants can shape the meeting.

Again, our tendency is to make use of the precious in- person time of a meeting by filling up every minute, from the beginning to the end of the day, with formal session time, creating schedules that are hard to change when new information comes along. These agendas are often burdened by an unrealistic hope, an underestimation of how long conversations may actually take. Most conversations need at least 1.5 hours to adequately cover a basic orientation around the content, identify what is needed, and identify clear next steps. And that’s conservative.

Add an introduction round and you have a two- to three-hour conversation.

A meaningful full group conversation needs roughly five minutes per person. Underscheduling the amount of time a conversation needs means that energy will start to build up as people look for a way to release their thoughts and ideas into the group. Pair this with the power dynamics that often emerge—that some people feel really comfortable talking, and others don’t—and you have a frustrating waste of time on your

on your hands.

Folks are so used to not being heard. So used to not getting their needs met. When people feel heard, the time starts to expand as people move past expressing and start to be able to listen.