Finding the right balance between creating a compelling picture of where you plan to lead the organization and not becoming prematurely locked into a plan of action is one of the most important ways to make the most of your first hundred days. Think not about developing your strategic plan but about crafting your strategic agenda.

Most likely you have more time than you think to develop your strategic agenda. While people expect fresh perspective from a new leader, a new style, and probably a new energy level, most do not expect a wholesale new direction, at least early on.

There’s a lot to be said for effective listening and for not sharing plans prematurely. Not only does it tamp down the amount of potential distraction within the organization, it also nips public scrutiny and second-guessing in the bud. The last thing a new leader needs, especially in a crisis situation, is to have the media and industry pundits questioning, analyzing, and deconstructing your plans even more than they already will be doing. Big pronouncements, especially early in your tenure, make big impressions that can come back to haunt you. “If you’re going to make big calls, you better be right,” counsels Steve Bennett. “Because if you come in early and you make big calls and you’re wrong, the whole organization is going to lose a lot of confidence in you.”

Vision for vision’s sake is counterproductive. Determining a course for the organization is a process that usually requires more time than most people foresee. It should be iterative, building off your strategic agenda, sharpening and clarifying the path based in experimentation and feedback.

The short-term agenda should:

• Link to your business assessment, so that people understand the rationale;

• Identify the core initiatives you intend to launch and explain why they are important;

• Address short-term issues while not detracting from the long-term directions for the organization;

• Be built as a joint effort with your team; and

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

Don’t be a perfectionist. Not everyone has to be convinced of the advantages of your agenda. Achieving the buy-in of key influencers will provide the leverage you need. You don’t even have to make the right decisions nearly all the time. The key is to make decisions and create an environment where you can see how things work out and make course corrections as necessary. Confront your own fallibility and keep moving forward. Success is as much about taking action and recognizing your mistakes and addressing them quickly as about striving for the ideal.

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.