But you also need to occasionally stop and reevaluate your meetings and communications processes and change things up when they’re no longer an effective or efficient use of time. You might turn some meetings into status update reports and reduce the number of people who attend. But then you have to be wary of too many reports—you don’t want the teams spending tons of time releasing information that nobody reads. It’s a constant battle. Managers should always be paying attention to how many hours teams are sitting in meetings—both intra-team and inter-team—and working to keep those numbers under control.

A useful exercise to go through at the beginning of your transition is to sit down and make a list of all the things that are awesome about the current state of the world. Does everyone get along? Are your processes efficient? Is your team known for rigorous and high-quality work?

Now, next to that, create a list of all the things that could be better. Is your team cagey about deadlines? Does it seem like priorities are always shifting? Is there that one really long weekly meeting nobody wants to attend?

These two lists give you the start of a plan for what you should and shouldn’t change. You don’t need to fix what isn’t broken, but neither should you feel like you’re stuck in a time machine of this is how it was always done. After all, that’s why you got the job! Taking the time to reflect on the biggest opportunities for improvement helps you understand how to best act as a multiplier for your team.

Read recognized the critical point that even if the organization had the wrong priorities, he had to be accepted and fit into the culture before he could start transforming it. “I think I was right in very quickly making some visible changes to the national office to bring spending and staffing into alignment with its means,” he says. “There were a couple of people here who had been in place for a long time and needed a change. Their departure reinforced the message that changes in Outward Bound were needed and would start here.

“Decentralized organizations like ours generally don’t react well to directives,” Read adds. “It’s more of a cat-herding exercise than command and control. I went to business school to learn how to keep the club in the closet until needed. In this job, there’s no club and no closet that I can locate, so it’s more a matter of organizing the data to make visible what the problems are, so the people who have the authority have no resources but to face up to the real issues. In this kind of culture, expressing the facts with data succinctly can drive action.

As Lou Gerstner says, “Changing the attitude and behavior of hundreds of thousands of people is very, very hard to accomplish. You can’t simply give a couple of speeches or write a new credo for the company and declare that the new culture has taken hold. You can’t mandate it, can’t engineer it.

“What you can do is create the conditions for transformation. You can provide incentives. You can define the marketplace realities and goals. But at some point you have to trust. In fact, in the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.

Creating the conditions for a cultural transformation takes all the tools at your disposal. You can’t, for example, command an internally focused culture to magically metamorphose into one that canonizes its customers. You have to nudge, suggest, cajole, and ultimately convince people that the new environment you’re proposing really is the best one for the business and, perhaps more important, for themselves. That takes time - and a good sense of timing.

Some leaders look back on their first hundred days and say, “If I could do it again, I wouldn’t hesitate so long to make those key people changes or that strategic move.” Others were glad they exercised restraint. In most cases the timing are dependent on the situation.