You’re in Charge - Now What?

Pressler’s process was as important to this as the specific expectations he set. He conducted one-on-one interviews with the company's top fifty managers, asking each of them the same six carefully considered questions to get their insights about the business, to solicit their advice, and to see what themes emerged. He and the Gap Inc. communications department also created a weblog for all the company’s employees, posting all of his activities and what he was learning. As a result, “people saw that I was genuinely engaged and was willing to listen before I talked about where we needed to go or communicated a vision or approach,” Pressler says. “And that put people at ease. More important, people felt very connected to the learning experience I went through, and all those folks in the field who felt underappreciated began to feel that they were significant. I wasn’t making promises or changes as much as being a listening post.

Pressler recognized that it would be premature in the first hundred days to develop a comprehensive strategic plan - and even if he did, it might be wrong. But he knew that in an organization of 165,000 employees, he needed to find a way to set a direction and motivate the people.

As with his management team and employees, Pressler set the stage for working well with the company’s board of directors by being straightforward, communicative, and organized and by listening well. Gap Inc. had had only two CEOs in its entire history. As a first-time CEO, Pressler did not pretend to be an expert in working with a board, and his disarming candor about being a neophyte was exactly the right approach. The board was thrilled at the prospect of starting a partnership based on mutual openness and respect. “Later on, when I started to present strategy to them, they were very dynamic and engaged,” Pressler says.

Pressler felt many pressures, both from within the company and externally, to make changes fast, to be decisive, and to set bold visions. But he recognized that these were seductive traps. He did not allow himself to be portrayed as a savior, he most certainly did not attempt to be a know-it-all, and he made sure to keep open to the torrent of data and information that flows into any leader when they start a new role. He remains steadfast to his agenda of listening and learning, working with his management team, spending time on the sales floor and in the stockrooms at various company stores, and describing the discoveries, thoughts, and ideas to the management team and the company’s employees at large.

No matter what your present level of leadership, the first hundred days of a new job holds both a unique window of opportunity and a heightened state of risk. The opportunity comes from the fact that a leadership transition is a time of maximum uncertainty, when all assumptions are up in the air and open to change. As the new leader, you’re generally given the benefit of the doubt. “I think it’s you’re one chance to ask stupid questions,” says Robert Eckert, chief executive of Mattel, who had an exceptional first hundred days.

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.

You shouldn’t expect to walk into a new leadership job with an established strategic plan. Rather, you should walk in prepared to lead a strategic process” - Dave Petersschmidt

During our research, we asked leaders which actions they rated are the most important for getting off to the right start. Topping the list were five items:

1. Absorb information.

2. Define the company’s challenges.

3. Establish credibility and win employees’ trust.

4. Access the senior management team.

5. Prepare yourself emotionally.

Gillette found itself trapped in a downward spiral. In a pamphlet Kilts produced entitled “Escaping the Circle of Doom,” he pointed out that businesses get in trouble by setting overly ambitious objectives, such as increasingly unrealistic sales growth targets; then, in trying to meet those targets, making bad decisions. Gillette compounded its circle-of-doom problems by allowing its spending and overhead to grow out of control. The company had become the fastest bill-payer in the industry and the slowest collector of receivables. As part of its lack of financial discipline and poor information systems, sales results were not tallied every day or even every week - merely at the end of each quarter.

You cannot possibly have enough insight yet to craft a detailed plan or an in-depth strategy. But you should certainly have a clear idea of what you believe, the key issues that you are going to be focusing on, and some form of organizing framework for the key actions you will want to take.

So the art is to find the right balance between setting a direction and keeping practical.

What Pressler did instead was formulate an agenda for his first hundred days as CEO. the backbone would be one-on-one meetings with Gap Inc.’s fifty top executives, as which he would ask each executive the same five questions:

• What about Gap Inc. do you want to preserve and why?

• What do you hope I do?

• What are you concerned I might do?

• What are you concerned I might not do?

• What is your most important tool for figuring out what the consumer wants?

“Similarly, when Terry Semel became chairman and CEO of Internet bellwether Yahoo! in May 2001, he had a twenty-one-year track record building Warner Bros. from an $850 million single-revenue-stream company operating in one country into an $11.5 billion diversified entertainment and consumer products powerhouse with operations in fifty-five countries.

But rather than uproot the family all at once, Dunaway moved up solo for sixty days, a move she says was critical for helping her get off to the right start. “I am a big believer in balancing an intense professional life with a healthy and fulfilling family life, especially with a five-year old,” Dunaway says. “But when you’re a new CMO at a new company in a new industry, the first couple of months is not the time for balance.” She adds that once you get your grounding, start building relationships, and begin to establish priorities, then it’s the right time to come back all together.

But the advantages of being an insider are counterbalanced by two major drawbacks. First, you cannot possibly have the clarity and fresh perspective of an outsider. Longtime habits and perceptions may blind you to inefficient processes or misplaced assumptions. Without even realizing it, you may have fallen into the “that’s not how we do things around here” trap, which cuts off the possibility of doing things differently. By contrast, when you are new to a company or an industry, you have the ability to ask “dumb” questions - questions that ultimately and frequently turn out to be not so dumb after all. Asking these questions can get you unvarnished feedback and provide you the ability to test underlying assumptions in new ways.

The second drawback to entering a new leadership position as an insider is that you typically have less “permission” to shake things up. When an insider is appointed to a new leadership position, the organization may not have the expectation that a new direction is called for. This is precisely why an insider was appointed in the first place, presumably. But change always accompanies a new leadership appointment, regardless of where the new leader is coming from. The challenge for insiders is that they may find themselves forced to behave in ways that run counter to what they’ve grown up believing - and what their colleagues expect of them.

His advice to leaders coming into new positions from the inside: “I would take the opportunity to make yourself an outsider. Having an outside facilitator can help with this - he or she can bring in a third-party perspective and independent facts or research that might be different from what you have at the top of your mind or readily at hand.

Many leadership transitions are made more turbulent than necessary because of misconstrued or misaligned expectations. We can’t stress enough how crucial aligning expectations is to getting off to the right start. Making sure everyone agrees on the important issues and priorities is literally the foundation to building the first hundred days pyramid - and your future success.

Therefore it should come as no surprise that these questions also form the backbone of how you introduce yourself when you start a new top job:

• Who am I?

• Where do I come from?

• Why am I here?

• What do I plan to accomplish?

• How do I hope to do it?

Eckert adds, “As the new guy, I realized that every first encounter with a Mattel employee had the potential to be fraught with tension, and I felt it was my responsibility to do everything possible to reduce it. Surprisingly, I found that in each situation, recognizing my own lack of knowledge about the company’s people and culture - in effect, allowing the employees to be the ‘boss’ in certain situations - actually helped me lead.

I’m a growth person. I’ve touched every element of growth, from product development to customers, managing sales forces, globalization, business development… I’ve had the chance to work in two of GE’s most global businesses, GE Plastics and GE Medical Systems. It’s given me some real attitudes about globalization, some contacts and real beliefs in the future…

And my experience in GE Medical really taught me that the world is about more than just making money, that the products we make do change people’s lives. And lastly, I’ve had the chance to work with tremendous people throughout, and they’ve really helped shape my life.” - Jeff Immelt.

So while you find a way to cover the five key questions, remember several guidelines to make the very best first impression.

1. You Don’t Have to Have All the Answers

No one expects you to know everything; in fact, people will be suspicious if you imply that you do. Avoid the temptation to think you have to be the savior and have immediate answers.

Given the magnetic pull that many leaders feel of having to have the solution to every problem, this point is worth reiterating, especially if the situation you are moving into is a sensitive one…

2. Addressing Doubts and Fears

Whether you are a new CEO coming into a company or a manager coming into a new department, your arrival is bound to create anxiety. Being sensitive to this and having a process to address it will help you minimize the upheaval. Recognize that your reputation will be preceding you as you walk into the room. By the time of your arrival, you can be sure that you’ve been researched on the Web and that your former colleagues have been called. It’s not just your individual reputation; if you are an outside hire, it extends to your previous company as well…

Libby Sartain, senior vice president of human resources at Yahoo!., describes the essential elements of a new leader assimilation process:

• When a new leader is hired, convene a meeting with that person’s new team members during the first week. With the leader in the room, give all the team members the chance to introduce themselves and say a little bit about who they are and what they do.

• Then, with the leader out the room, have the team answer these questions:

• What do we expect of this new person?

• What do we want the new leader to know about us? What do we do well? Where do we need improvements?

• What do we want to know about the new leader? What are our concerns about him or her?

• What are the burning issues in our department?

• What are the major obstacles that the new leader will face?

• Put the answers on the flip chart - but make sure they’re anonymous so that the leader won’t later be able to connect the comments to any one specific team member.

• After a break, reconvene the team with the leader and go over the items on the flip chart. Give the new leader a chance to ask questions about the comments and explore the ways in which he or she can take quick action on some of the issues.

• This discussion is a great way for the entire team to discover with the leader some of the unspoken issues, misunderstandings, and disconnects. The anonymity of this exercise can bring to the surface more issues in one day than weeks of one-on-one meetings. Dirty laundry is aired. And in this open atmosphere, the team begins to gel. The new leader can now formulate an agenda for the first few months…

3. Neutralize Lingering Resentment

…

• What should I be thinking about that I wasn’t thinking about when I was head of XYZ division?

• What should I know that I might not have known before?

• What’s on your mind?

• What would you like the new CEO to be doing?...

4. Don’t Disrespect Your Predecessor

…

Jeff Killeen had prior CEO/COO experience at Forbes and Barnes & Noble, both of which were “founder-intensive” companies, when he took over as CEO of GlobalSpec, the world’s largest search engine and online information resources for engineers. He succeeded John Schneiter, one of the company’s four founders, who was staying on as president. “There are some who look at an entrepreneurial situation and without even meeting a founder thinks a founder needs to be moved out,” Killeen says. “But unless founders become unmanageable or otherwise destructive, I believe you’re generally better served to build off their vision and make them feel like a million bucks than you are to get rid of them.

In fact, how you treat your predecessor is so important and so easy to mishandle, we have determined that it is one of the top traps for new leaders and have therefore elaborated on the dynamic in Chapter 8.

But is the new reality something they can wholeheartedly buy into? It is surprising how often the top people don’t agree on where the company is, what its challenges are, and what its strengths and weaknesses legitimately are. The leader who starts to make decisions based on the premature assumption that her reality is the one that everybody else has may be in for a rude reality check.

That’s why the process of defining the new reality should actually be a process of constructing a shared reality. If you don’t do this, it become exceedingly difficult to get agreement on the most important things to do, how you’re going to do them, who is responsible for what, and when those things will be accomplished.

That’s why when Bob Nardelli succeeded the beloved cofounder of The Home Depot, Bernie Marcus, in December 2000, he set up a schedule similar to a candidate in the final weeks of a hard-fought presidential campaign: seven cities in seven days, with visits to seven stores at each stop. “There’s a broad range of constituents - maybe even more than usual in this business - so I really need to move from an unknown community to someone who was seen as approachable, willing to listen, to learn and then respond,” he recalls.

The first thing you ought to do if you’re the new person in charge is nothing,” says Schacht. “I have learned this over and over again. Resist the temptation to ‘hit the ground running.’ It is absolutely almost certain to be wrong.” He stresses this is even true in a crisis situation.

Two, take the time to listen before you do anything else. You will set the tone; it will be very difficult to reset it. If you start off by imposing your views on people, you’re not going to have what you most need when you most need it - namely, the commitment of the people you need to get the work done. Even if you’re right and you end up in exactly the same place as you thought you were going to end up, the experience of stopping and doing nothing but being a very good listener for as long as you can stand it is the most important thing to do. The whole act of talking to the top people is the first step towards gaining their commitment and understanding, which you must have if you don’t get it the first time. Until you get a consensus, that everyone agrees on - these are our priorities, and here’s who’s going to work on them, and here’s how our midcourse correction is going to be if we’re not right, and here are the things we can’t put off - take as long as you can stand to get that front end clear, committed, understood, communicated, massaged, and changed.” - Henry Schacht

Then I made two other mistakes. One was that I didn’t fully appreciate the importance of simply provisioning traditional institutional reassurance. By asking and challenging everything, you create a lot of uncertainty, and that uncertainty can be debilitating to the ongoing functioning of the organization. I failed to appreciate that if you’re going to be questioning everybody and challenging everybody, you have to do a lot of reassuring in return. I didn’t say, ‘Isn’t Harvard great?’ If I had said that, it would have been much more reassuring.” - Lawrence Summers.

I also didn’t appreciate that if you ask ten questions and make ten suggestions, people may take them less seriously, even if they’re all equally good. If you have only two issues or questions, people will take your two more seriously than they may take any of your ten. During my first hundred days in the Harvard presidency, I could have had things I identified as success and could have signaled that it was a new day without dissipating as much goodwill capital, if I had been smarter.” - Lawrence Summers.

This discussions will be framed around the following questions:

• What are the five most important things about Amgen we should be sure to preserve and why?

• What are the top three things we need to change and why?

• What do you most hope I do?

• What are you most concerned I might do?

• What advice do you have for me?

• Anything else you would like to discuss or ask me?

Schacht’s advice is especially pertinent during a crisis. In troubled times you need to have as many brains as possible working on the issues, but those brains have to agree on what they are doing and why. “You have to have agreement on definition of duties,” he says. “You’ve got to have roles and responsibilities and none of that is easily apparent, particularly in a crisis and particularly when you have to make changes.” Listening and talking to people takes time, a precious commodity when everyone is breathing down your neck and demanding answers, direction, and a strategy for salvation. Nonetheless, Schacht declares, “This is not a luxury, it’s critically important. It’s the most important thing you can do.

In his first few weeks, he made appointments to talk with the top 20 percent of management - fifty people in all - for an hour each. “I’d start at seven in the morning and finish at eight, nine, ten o’clock at night,” he recalls. “I asked everyone the same question: ‘What do I need to know?’ Then I didn’t say a word the whole time, except to encourage them to keep going.

Chief among these winning conditions are:

• Correct diagnosis of the change challenge - its nature, depth, breadth, and the forces at play;

• Early establishment of a shared understanding of the change challenge among the leadership team - a sense of vision, success measures, and key programs and projects, and of the change process itself;

• Multiple and ongoing opportunities to enrich this shared understanding through frequent progress reviews and action plan updates;

• A sense of urgency, emphasizing speed when building an awareness and understanding of the need for change, and an insistence on early tangible deliverables;

• A limited and focused agenda for change, identifying two, three, or four major priorities, at a maximum, and driving them hard and fast;

• A human flywheel of commitment, engaging the early adopters very rapidly and bringing along the “fence-sitters” in a timely manner;

• Identifying the sources of resistance and dealing with them ruthlessly, eliminating the “drag” in the process that can prevent the buildup of momentum and waste a leader’s valuable time.

The team you construct will magnify your management methods and your message. Who you are and how well you recognize the strengths and weaknesses in your skills will directly affect how effective your team is. In fact, everything about your team is a reflection of you - for better or for worse.

As astonishing number of managers surround themselves with people of similar backgrounds. But Jeff Immelt explains that he looks for team members who can complement, rather than supplement, his strengths and weaknesses.

Let’s face it, no one, regardless of how experienced or talented, is equally adept at every aspect of a job. In any case, as Immelt points out, even if you are above average across the board, no leader has the time to concentrate on every aspect of the job, especially in the earliest days of a new position. Think about where your personal involvement will yield the most leverage and where someone else might do an even better job.

If time is tight, as in the case of a turnaround, you can save a little time by focusing on gaining the buy-in of key influencers. Not all of those key influencers may be a part of your immediate management team; there may be other people within the organization who act as gatekeepers or sounding boards or who perform other roles that affect the way the team operates. Ask others who the key influencers are within the company; patterns will emerge after as few as five conversations. Then concentrate your efforts on them for maximum gain on your own time and energy.

Larry Johnston asked for presentations on projects, such as new promotional strategies, new merchandising approaches, and new human resources tactics, when he became the CEO of Albertson’s, the $35 billion supermarket retailer. “Then I’d spend time in the stores to see whether the strategy was connecting down on the retail floor.

Bringing people in says so much about you as a leader,” says Stone. “That’s probably more important than anything. You’ve got to be really, really thoughtful.”

Whom you choose and the process you use to make those choices send substantive signals about your standards, expectations, and management style. The signals are especially strong when you look outside the company for candidates.

Leadership can be a tough and lonely position, even in the best of times, but it’s especially isolated when you want to make changes. You can’t and shouldn’t try to do it all yourself.

You need someone trustworthy with whom you can brainstorm, discuss sensitive personnel decisions, test the waters, and gather opinions in situations when people might not be completely honest and forthcoming with the CEO. You need someone discreet whom you can turn to during the “what do I do now?” moments that hit everyone at some point. Call it partner or confidant, the position can be second in importance only to you.

Our view is that in most cases reaching out to and embracing the predecessor is the better approach. That way you can sustain a sense of continuity within the organization, instill a sense of connectivity, and learn the critical unwritten information that the previous CEO has amassed over the years.

That’s especially important when you’re succeeding a legendary leader who has built up tremendous loyalty. Having your predecessor confer his or her official blessing on you can help transfer that loyalty - or at least prevent it from turning into resentment.

At the same time, Kusin turned to George Tamke, the interim CEO who had led the search for Kusin and became nonexecutive chairman when Kusin came on board. Even though Kusin brought in Connors as an outside confidant, Tamke quickly turned into an inside one.

“Every single Friday night or Saturday morning - and I don’t believe I missed a week until we sold the company - I sent George a three- to six-page, single-spaced update of what I was doing, what I was thinking about, what had been going on in the company. We then spent one to two hours late Saturday afternoon going over it. He thought about what I said, and he offered his advice…

At 3M Jim McNerney inherited a team that had overseen the slump in the business that had led to the company’s hiring the first outside CEO in its history. Many people assumed that McNerney would bring in a group of people from GE, where he had most recently been CEO of the aircraft engines unit. He surprised them all by deciding to play the game with the hand he was dealt. In interview after interview, he reiterated the same message: “I’m trying to reset the performance standards here,” he said. “I think the story of 3M is rejuvenation of a talented group of people rather than replacement of a mediocre group of people. This is taking a good company and making it better.

With his approach, there was a constructive, always-moving-forward element to this discussion, with no looking back. So the headset was, we had to figure this out, we had to go forward, and it didn’t matter who had put the plan before.” - Jim McNerney.

As you take over your new leadership assignment and forge your team, you need to be sensitive to how each individual will be motivated. Great leaders tailor their management styles to the recipient rather than approaching the top team from a one-size-fits-all perspective.

The difference between moderate success and enduring great performance is how you exercise your leadership to shape your management team in your early days, then motivate and develop the team over time.

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.

One of the key talents of any leader is the ability to identify the truly critical issues and establish a short list of top priorities to keep people focused. It is important to make the complex simple. We don’t mean simplistic, but easy to comprehend and take action on.

An identity crisis knocks a company’s compass off kilter. It clouds its people’s ability to make clear decisions, to choose which route to take, and to allocate the proper resources. How can you hire the right people if you don’t know what you’re hiring them to do? How do you know which projects and products to support if you don’t know how they will ultimately fit into the whole?

Almost every leader will say that their lodestar is defining their business focus, which comes down to what you can do to build long-term value. “If anything, what the last few years have taught us is that building long-term value is critical for any company,” says Dave Peterschmidt. “If the company is going to be in there for the long haul, it has to understand the core value it brings to the market and the reason for its existence in a crowded marketplace. Then you can do an assessment to get the company tracking toward long-term values.”

Think of that assessment as conducting a reality check of the operating environment. If you want to get the company tracking toward long-term value, consider what conditions pertain that will help or hinder you. The answers will shape your short-term agenda.

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.

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.

You can’t have twenty-five things on your list. It doesn’t work.” says Richard Notebeart, who became CEO of Qwest Communications in June 2002, at a time when Qwest was plagued with dismal financials, a sinking stock price, and a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into its accounting practices.

“You’ve got to triage. You constantly have three or hour or five things that you pound home and repeat, repeat, repeat, ‘Look, we can’t win if we don’t do this.’ First, fix the balance sheet. Next, get that flywheel of revenue going. Take care of legal and regulatory issues. Then, as you start to get the big things done, you can get more granular. For example, why do we have broadband in only forty locations instead of sixty-three? How are we benchmarking against other companies?

A small number of themes actually liberates rather than hamstrings an organization. A good theme is specific enough to provide focus but general enough for different parts of the organization to be able to adapt and interpret.

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.

Lafley refocused the company of its top ten brands, the bestsellers that each generated over $1 billion in sales combined to make up more than half of P&G’s total revenues. “It’s a basic strategy that worked for me in the navy,” said Lafley, who, as a supply officer, ran a department store for servicemen. “I learned that even when you’ve got a complex business, there’s a core, and the core is what generates most of the cash, most of the profits. The trick was to find the few things that were really going to sell, and to sell as many of them as you could.

And in a decentralized membership organization such as ours, this is a job with limited authority. So it’s a job where you marshal the data, hold the mirror up, use a bully pulpit to articulate what needs to be done, and provide the supporting data to prove the point.” - John Read.

Short-term agenda, long-term agenda - the time frame doesn’t much matter if the organization is not operating smoothly enough. “One of the biggest contributions a leader can make, although it’s often underrated, is defining the operating mechanisms - the meetings, the information flows, and the decision-making process used to conduct day-to-day business,” says Dan Kerpelman, president of Kodak’s Health Imaging Group. Sometimes you need to be directive.

Streamlining the operating process yields immediate benefits. Similarly, the sale of a nonperforming division or hiring a crucial member of your team also sends a signal that progress is being made. Look for these quick wins and leverage them. “If you can find a few things that were serious flaws in the organization and fix them quickly, you can establish your credibility as a leader very fast,” says Lew Platt, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard.

Plan your promises, and promise only what you can deliver. Once those goals are part of the public record, keep an inventory of evidence that supports your claim to have accomplished them. Without blowing your own horn, it can be helpful in those early months to call attention to the early successes that align with what you have already identified as priorities for the company’s success and growth.

Not all early actions may be happy ones, but they are worth emphasizing if they help the organization move in the direction you want. An example is the September issue of Bob Eckert’s company-wide intranet column “What’s On My Mind?” written five months after he arrived at Mattel.

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.

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.

That’s what turned the strategic agenda into the strategic plan that got presented to the board about a hundred fifty days after he started. I use the term plan a little loosely,” Tamke editorializes, “because that strategic plan was kind of heavy on tactical things that we were going to get done in the next year and a bit lighter on the strategic direction, with more of the blanks yet to be filled in. But they did get filled in during the course of the next year, through updates that Gary did with the organization.

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.

Culture isn’t just one aspect of the game - it is the game,” Gerstner says. “In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value. Vision, strategy, marketing, financial management - any management system, in fact - can set you on the right path and can carry you for a while. But no enterprise - whether in business, government, education, health care, or any area of human endeavor - will succeed over the long haul if those elements aren’t parts of its DNA.”

Chris Lofgren, chief executive of Schneider National, the large transportation and logistics company believes that “culture is a foundation upon which you build your long-term strategy. If you build a strategy that isn’t consistent with the culture, it isn’t going to work.

Blake’s experience running and turning around Promus Hotels and insurance giant USF&G, both multibillion-dollar corporations, gave him the edge over five other finalists. His mandate was to shepherd the USOC through a restructuring approved by the organization's 113 member board of directors. Blake’s reputation as a hard-driving, up-front turnaround expert was considered exactly what was needed to institute in the USOC many of the management disciplines common to efficiently managed corporations. The rationale behind Blake’s selection is not atypical - bringing in a change agent to lead a cultural transformation.

Even to the survivors of Blake’s staff reduction, his full-steam-ahead approach made many within the USOC administration feel disenfranchised. It is important to remember that Blake was following an action plan for which he was hired and mandated by the board. Despite this, his failure to marshal support, among the athletes, their parents, and their coaches chafed deeply. Feelings erupted six weeks later, at a mid-March meeting to approach Blake’s overall plan for restructuring the USOC.

... Blake failed to appreciate the true balance of power and the deep cultural influence of the Athlete’s Advisory Council. He felt that he had his ducks in order, with a board mandate and plan approval to carry out the change that he - and many others - believed was essential. In a corporate setting this may have been relatively straightforward, given the generally clear scorecards of financial and organizational performance. Then again, it may very well have been just as difficult and ultimately unsuccessful. Why? Because whether it’s a powerful group of employees, retirees, restive shareholders, or even customers, a failure to assess the culture and the readiness for change among different interest groups can be lethal.

How people actually go about their works, how decisions are made, who gets promoted, how employees interact with one another, what motivates them - these are the things that really count. What makes things especially tricky, especially for an outsider, is that as with real cultures of any type - from corporations to schools, towns, and even nations - most of the really important rules are not written down.

The place to start assessing a culture is to listen, really listen, to how employees describe a place. We believe that within most generalizations there lies an inner core of truth.

One of the important points regarding assessing the culture is to think through the implications of trying to change it. When Merrill Lynch appointed Stanley O’Neal as CEO, his lack of history on the retail brokerage side of the business was an important signal that the firm was ripe for change. Amid a chaotic financial services industry environment buffeted by the bursting of the tech bubble, the shutdown of the IPO market, the recession, and 9/11, O’Neal’s relative outsider status from the cultural and historical core of the operation freed him up to lead an aggressive and ultimately highly successful restructuring. He unapologetically cut billions in costs, shaped the management team to his preferences, streamlined decision making, and ultimately repositioned the firm to come out of the recession a leaner, meaner fighting machine.

New leaders have to tune their antenna to the covert signals and the invisible knowledge networks that are the nervous system of an organization. These unwritten protocols - as well as the people who maintain them - and the unspoken taboos and conventions are wrapped up in the question everyone asks: “How do things really work around here?

... Jim Kilts realized that the culture of Gillette needed to be changed even before he walked in the door. From his external competitive review, detailed financial analysis, board interviews, and meetings with company executives, he saw that the company was underperforming. “When I asked the HR chief to take me through an overview of how we were rating our people,” he says, “I was told that seventy-three percent were rated as ‘exceeds expectations.’ I asked him how we could be exceeding expectations when we hadn’t grown the business for the past five years on either the top or the bottom line.

• What is the essence of what the company stands for?

• How is it really different from its competitors?

• What do the people who are most successful share in common?

• What are the common traits among those who have failed?

• Who are the five most respected people in the organization and why?

• What are the characteristics of the organization’s failures or missed opportunities?

But at least if a cultural gap is identified, it can be bridged or even closed over time.

You can learn a lot about a place by paying attention to its words. The way people in an organization speak to others inside and those outside says a lot about how it sees itself.

Words aren’t the only indicators of an organization’s culture. Superficial though it may sound, clothes also send some of the most obvious signals. For example, when Jim McNerney became CEO of 3M, starched shirts still prevailed at the top, while most of the employees dressed in workplace causal. For McNerney, the formal attire was a clue of the disconnection between management and the rest of the organization.

Even though it’s crucial for a new leader to show that he or she fits into the culture and “gets” it, the paradox is that you don’t want to settle in too comfortably if the culture needs modification. But of course, changing a culture is never as simple as ordering it to be so, especially if the organization is very proud of its traditions. And what organization isn’t?

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.

The issue of trying to transform a culture, especially a deeply embedded one from many years of the corporate equivalent of geological layering, extends well beyond your first hundred days. Sometimes it takes years. The critical point for the early days in a new role is to be highly sensitized to the issue, make an effective cultural assessment, and plant the seeds for the long-term change you are committed to achieving.

The positive energy that came out of my early days made some people - and me - think that we had that cultural issue fixed. The unfortunate fact, though, was that there was deep-seated resistance to change - a feeling of ‘This guy will be gone in three years and I’ve had my job for twenty, so why should I change?’ With three hundred thousand employees, the problem is inevitably in the middle. It was relatively easy to get to the top management in line - if not, I could fire them - but I couldn’t do that far into the organization. I couldn’t personally determine, for example, who in the tax or logistics department was obstructing progress.

When you go through that degree of structural change,” Lacy adds, “in hindsight it turned out to be more of an opportunity for cultural change than I thought. We disoriented people so much that we couldn’t go back; things were so different that people lost most of their reference points, so they couldn’t regress to the old ways because there was nothing remaining to regress to. In fact, we could accelerate the pace of change and make the change stick better.

The bottom line is that in order to minimize your risk, you need to really familiarize yourself with the subtleties and idiosyncrasies of the culture, understand the power bases, recognize that a mandate from above may not automatically ensure a mandate from below, and not try to change the world in your first hundred days. Patience is often an essential virtue when it comes to cultural transformation at a large scale.

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.

At Gap Inc., for example, Paul Pressler realized in his early days that the management team needed a common set of metrics to create more shared accountability for overall corporate performance and shareholder value. Existing metrics focused on performance within each brand, without creating a strong link to corporate financial goals.

I got a lot of resistance initially,” Pressler recalls. “People asked, ‘How am I to be held accountable for something I don’t control?’” Pressler’s response: “You do. We’re a team, sharing responsibility and accountability for what’s best for our brands and for our company. We will set our agenda and determine our priorities together.” The result: “We still had to learn how to work effectively as a team, but this helped us begin to change our thinking and our actions.

One of Gary Bridge’s first moves was focused on modifying the operating process at Cisco. He changed the hours of operation to break his group’s San Jose, California-centric view of the world. “It’s absolutely imperative that I not just say that we’re going to behave globally but that we behave globally,” he says. “Before I got here, senior staff meetings were being held at four P.M. because it was most convenient. I said, ‘Do you realize that you’re asking someone in Europe to be up at midnight or one o’clock, depending on whether it’s Daylight Savings Time, to talk about really critical things like personnel decisions and promotions?’

“I started holding meetings on a rotating basis. Seven A.M. is the new time in San Jose to have a meeting, because it’s already ten A.M. on the East Coast and they’re almost finished with their day in Europe. This single move was viewed by the Europeans as a huge vote of confidence, that they were important and that we cared what they did.”

Making a change in people’s daily work schedules is significant enough, but there are even bolder ways to make your first moves count - such as attacking one of the core cultural foundations of the organization.

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.

In fact, Lou Gerstner claims that his greatest ally in breaking free from the past was IBM’s own precipitous collapse. But he also knew that the task of shaking people out of their stupor and getting them “to think and act collaboratively, as hungry, curious self-starters,” would take at least five years - and even then, he confesses, he underestimated the time required.

At the other end of the spectrum, if you have an organization that’s generally working pretty well, you want to protect the part that’s working by going a little slow, as McNerney did.

Just remember that too much change can break the culture - or more likely destroy the change-maker. You have to pace yourself and continually assess the tolerance of the organization.

Ten Guidelines for Starting to Transform the Culture:

1. As a new leader, work to understand the culture of the organization, diagnose how great a change is required, and take the right steps to start making the transformation.

1. Recognize that many new leaders fail because they cannot make headway against an intransigent culture, pushing too hard in the wrong ways, resulting in the proverbial “body rejecting the organ.”

1. The way to start assessing a culture is to listen and observe. How do people really describe the place? Words are powerful clues - within most generalizations there lies an inner core of truth. Look for physical evidence - how people dress, how they communicate, how happy they look, and the kind of furniture and artwork that fill the offices.

1. Next, identify how “things work around here.” Hunt for the knowledge networks, key influencers, decision-making protocols, and unwritten and unspoken conventions that are the nervous system of any organization.

1. Be sensitive to the fact that even having a change mandate from your board or boss may not be enough. Understand where other sources of power lie, and make sure you gain the support from that power source.

1. With a truly obstinate culture, you may need to make structural and people changes, but do so with the bought-in support of the key power center and also establish a concerted program to address the cultural legacies of the organization.

1. Create the conditions for cultural transformation: Adopt new measures of success; institute new operating processes; choose a new management team; set new expectations; identify change leaders; and lead by example.

1. Make your first moves count. In your early days, when people are most open to change, you can have a magnified impact by implementing carefully considered, concrete changes to long-established organizational and cultural structures.

1. Experiment with ways to convince employees to pledge their hearts and minds to change. Be aware of what is working and what is not and refine your approach.

1. Remember that too much change can break the culture - or more likely the change-maker. Pace yourself, continually assess the tolerance of the organization, get feedback, and adapt along the way.

Similarly, one of the keys to success in any new job is establishing a productive working relationship with your boss. Whether you are moving into a position of expanded responsibility as a new manager or as a new CEO, how you establish and sustain that relationship will help shape your first hundred days and will be a crucial element in your ongoing success.

Each party in this partnership needs to know when to be hands-on and when to be hands-off, when to push and when to pull back. Sometimes these divisions are clearly delineated. More often the roles need to be redefined when there’s a change of leadership, and often it is up to you to think through and surface that new definition. The process demands a diplomatic and deliberate touch to prevent the partnership from degenerating into a “you versus them” antagonism.

David D’Alessandro, CEO of insurance company John Hancock, wrote in Career Warfare that “more than anything else, bosses want three things from their managers: loyalty, good advice, and to have ‘their personal brands polished.

Bosses also want good advice, not yes-men or -women who offer insincere flattery, nor downers who only play the role of devil’s advocate. All intelligent bosses instinctively separate the people they manage into three distinct categories: the sycophants, the contrarians, and the small percentage who are the balanced players. You want to be seen as one in the third group.

Finally, since your boss cares as much about his or her career as you do about yours, what managers really want is for you to make them look smart and successful. “Understand that it’s your job to polish the boss’s reputation,” D’Alessandro states unequivocally. “Do not make yourself look good at the boss’s expense.

They are not compensated highly relative to most of their financial stakes. And they are invariably very busy with multiple commitments of running their own companies, serving on other boards, managing financial affairs, engaging in philanthropic interests, and often writing and speaking. All told, most directors care more about protecting the downside and their scarce time than about pursuing the upside. That’s why, in the current governance and shareholder-activist environment, directors are deeply focused on avoiding scandal and conflicts of interest and on the propriety of financial accounts. They will therefore take swift action against a CEO if they gather even a whiff of concern in any of these areas. Conversely, as long as a CEO gains the board’s confidence with a rock-solid picture of integrity and financial controls and puts this into the context of a sound strategic agenda, she will have the board’s support, especially in the early days of her new role.

Establishing your credibility takes a variety of skills, primarily: having a sound strategic agenda, being on top of the details of the business, listening and learning from your boss or board members, communicating clearly, building a strong and committed management team, and maintaining a certain amount of humility.

High-performing professional thrive on this kind of information and context so that they can understand how their own responsibilities fit into the border progress of the organization. It also creates a productive way to solicit feedback from your team.

We work hard at getting better,” adds Steve Freinemund. Feedback helped him and the PepsiCo board measure their joint performance on a variety of issues and identify their capabilities that were lacking. It provided a new - and refreshingly apolitical - method of looking for new board members. “As a result, we went out for our two new board members and had the perfect conditions met based on the needs we identified in the process.

At GE, Immelt relies on the board to take the pulse of the company, to gauge whether the business is humming along smoothly or there are glitches that need attention. “I asked each of our directors to visit the GE businesses twice a year,” he says. “You’re never going to know the intricacies of this company. There’s too much mass. But you can get a feel of the culture. So when they go to GE Aircraft Engines or GE Medical Systems, I want them by themselves [without corporate management], so they can make their own assessments - maybe we’re pushing too hard or maybe we’re not pushing hard enough.”

At The Home Depot, all directors were required to visit eighteen stores every year and spend two hours on each visit speaking with employees and customers. When he became CEO in 2000, Bob Nardelli continued that tradition and enhanced it: “I pair two board members with every division president and every functional leader for a full day. I look for their advice and counsel. These are CEOs and experienced men and women in their own right. I took advantage of their experience. Rather than being intimidated by it, I reached out and said, 'You go in and assess, give me your view of the individuals and their staffs.’ So the board is helpful.

Do not forget that your higher authority generally always wants things to work out just about as much as you do. If you keep at the forefront of your mind what your boss really wants from you - strong performance, loyalty, and good advice - and key off of his or her preferred work and communication style, you will maximize your chances of establishing a productive workplace relationship. If you are a CEO, the rules also apply for how you lay the groundwork for working with your board and building the relationship into a true partnership. Shaping a productive relationship with a new business partner, especially one who has the power to hire and fire you, is always a challenge.

If you are not a CEO, meet with your new boss and discuss how he or she really likes to work, establish priorities, and communicate. For example, is he more comfortable with formal written updates or more fluid progress reports. Does she prefer email or voicemail?

Establishing your credibility by having a sound strategic agenda, being on top of the details of the business, listening and learning from your boss or board members, building a strong and committed management team, establishing a sound management process, and maintaining humility.

Establish an effective communication protocol with your boss or board, including formal information flows such as monthly management letters, as well as an informal communication protocol, such as phone calls before each meeting and informal meetings or meals with your boss or individual directors.

Shortly after the modern Starbucks was founded in 1987, this story was the heart of Schultz’s presentation to the Starbucks board of directors, along with his recommendation to establish full medical benefits and stock option ownership for all employees as long as they worked twenty hours a week. While the board initially dismissed the idea as unaffordable, especially for an early-stage company, Schultz’s ability to use both analytical and emotional reasoning won the day. He argued that such a program would pay for itself in three years if it reduced by half the high employee turnover common to the specialty retailing and food service industry. And he pulled on the heartstrings of the directors by talking about the kind of company that he wanted to build, one that he wished his father could have worked for. In the end the board approved the proposal, and the Starbucks Bean Stalk program was born. To this day the program (which incidentally was so successful in reducing employee turnover that it paid for itself in one year) is at the core of the company’s culture and organizational strategy.

If your people don’t know what the direction is, they won’t know where to go. The result: Energy dissipates, momentum slows, morale plummets, and the company drifts. It’s not a pretty picture. Making sure everyone sees the same picture and then understands what that picture means, Parson says, requires “more contact with people, more opportunities to meet them, and more communication.

Jim Kilts sets a different tone entirely in the interview posted on Gillette’s intranet after he took over in February 2001. Forget about finding out his taste in magazines or his favorite sports. A Kilts Q&A session is strictly business - in fact, the most personal exchange is a question of how Kilts got started in the consumer products industry.

In broad terms, my management philosophy is to keep things simple. I want rigorous analysis and thoughtful assessments, but I do not want complexity. If strategies and plans aren’t easily understood by everyone, they will be acted on by no one. So by keeping things simple, we will be able to act decisively… and communicate clearly… throughout the entire organization.” - Jim Kilts.

While it’s true that you cannot overcommunicate an important message, it is possible to spend too much of your scarce time engaged in communicating. (Remember, you only have 1,204 hours to invest in your first hundred days.) It’s a tough call.

I [Jeff Killeen] found I had to be precise and resist my natural temptation to use too many superlatives when describing the accomplishments in the business. John would say, ‘You spin things all the time. You make everything sound good.’ I’d say, ‘John, that was good.’ And he would say, ‘But you make it sound like it’s even better than it is. We’re engineers. We don’t use words like terrific and outstanding. We say, “You did your job.” When you say that the team did a terrific job, they don’t believe you.’ We finally agreed that whenever he thought I was spinning, he would tell me. And whenever I thought he was underwhelming, I would tell him.”

Killeen elaborates on how he learned to communicate in an engineering culture. “The perspective from which John comes to the business is obsessive in a wonderful way. He harks back to the philosophy that he’s building a bridge and that a bridge cannot fail. I said, ‘John, but we’re not building a bridge, and failure is okay if we fail fast and incorporate that learning so that we can grow as fast as possible. It’s preferable to me to get eight things done well and fail a two versus doing three or four things to perfection.’ John said, ‘We’re not trained to accept a lot of failure or welcome it into the process.’ I said, ‘That’s a management concept we have to work on.

When you’re in a crisis, you also have to show confidence. You have to be visible and absorb the uncertainty that people feel. Think of your job as being sort of a shock absorber between the events swirling around the company and your employees’ deep-seated desire for stability and security. This will help when people are constantly examining your every gesture and expression for hidden messages that imply that things might be worse than they already are.

Henry Schacht also knows the important of putting on a game face in a crisis. When the former CEO and chairman of Lucent returned in October 2000 after the forced departure of CEO Richard McGinn, the technology bust had vaporized many of its customers and slashed the spending budgets of the one that remained. The financial analysts that Schacht had completed showed that Lucent could well run out of money in ninety days. Schacht’s crisis communication plan and the way he communicated with his largest customers helped save the company.

A frenetic approach just makes the company even more unstable. One, you’re not likely to be right. Two, even if you are right, nobody knows what the heck you’re doing. Three, you haven’t bothered to listen to anybody, so you have strained relationships you want to cement. Now, if you’re going to run out of money in five or six days, you’ve got a bit of a different story than if you’re going to run out of money in ninety days. That’s what I call the ‘burning platform’ problem. If you’ve got a burning platform problem, you don’t have a lot of time, so you have to take things in two steps. You have to gather your team together and say, ‘Guys, before we do anything else, we had better put this fire out. Then we’ll take a deep breath.’” - Henry Schacht.

Lucent’s Schacht offers sound advice for the new CEO in a crisis:

“If I were a new CEO coming into a new company at a tough time. I’d have a deal with the board. I would tell them, ‘I’m going to keep you informed every step of the way. But you’re not my most important problem right now. You’re asked me to come in and you’ve given me a good briefing and I thank you; now please give me a little room. I’ll be back with a status report in two or three weeks, and if something else comes up, we’ll be on the phone together. But right now my most important constituent is the internal folks and our customers.

If you are in a leadership position in a visible company, especially in a time of crisis, stories will be written regardless of what you do. Reporters have a job to do, and they will do it whether you like it or not. Treating them forthrightly, consistently, and with facts is considered best practice in crisis situations.

THE MATHEMATICS OF FIRST IMPRESSIONS:

Harvard University president Lawrence Summers has come up with a mathematical metaphor to describe the impact of first impressions. His insight helps explain the science behind the timeless expression First impressions are lasting impressions. “People form their impressions as an average,” Summer says. “If they’ve had only two impressions of you and they get a third one, then it could move you as much as three halves. But if they’ve had ninety-six impressions so far and they get a ninety-seventh, it won’t have such a big impact.

[Carly] Fiorina, who in fact had done such an in-depth study of the company and the situation that she had many of the answers, probably meant to reassure people by her knowledge. But by not asking questions and by not failing to have some answers, she scared many of the employees. Fortunately, when this feedback was delivered and received, Fiorina adapted her active listening and allowed her natural gift for communication to flourish. This increased her credibility and at the same time deepened her insights into the company, its challenges, and its opportunities.

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.

Be conscious of the signals you are sending. In the early days, every move you make is being closely watched, and communication, both explicit messages and implicit signals such as your manner of dress, your allocation of time, your mode of communication, and even your organizational structure, play a direct role in the cultural transformation.

Having all the answers is usually the wrong answer. People need to see you listening and assimilating their information. If you don’t pause to ask questions and circle back when you have more data, you will lose credibility and trust.

Author and Dartmouth Tuck School of Business professor Sydney Finkelstein completed the largest research project ever on leadership failure, for his groundbreaking book, Why Smart Executives Fail. According to Finkelstein, true failure - “spectacular failure” - is the result of a series of destructive behaviors (seven, to be precise) that executives in failing companies exhibit:

1. They see themselves and their companies as dominating their competitive environments, even if this view is out of step with reality.

1. They identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their own self-image and interests and the company’s image and interests.

1. They think they have all the answers, often impressing others with the speed and decisiveness with which they deal with significant issues.

1. They make sure that everyone is 100 percent behind them, ruthlessly eliminating anyone who disagrees with their views.

1. They are the consummate company spokesperson, obsessed with managing the image of their company and themselves, often devoting the largest portion of their time to image management.

1. They underestimate fundamental major obstacles, treating them instead as temporarily impediments to be simply removed or circumvented.

1. They stubbornly rely on what worked for them in the past, clinging to the strategies and tactics that made them successful in the first place.

Leaders who settle issues too quickly limit their opportunity to grasp the ramifications. One of the most dangerous traps is failing to solicit the input of others on the team. Not only does this mean that you most likely won’t have all the information, but you will be absolutely certain to disenfranchise your colleagues. “It is close to fatal to decide or pronounce before you listen,” says Henry Schacht. “And in crisis situations, I think you exacerbate the problem as opposed to moving towards a sound situation. Even if at the end you come back to exactly the same decision you would have made, how you get there is as important as getting there.

The key takeaway: Spend a large portion of your first hundred days listening rather than talking, learning rather than preaching, observing rather than jumping to conclusions, and inviting input rather than promulgating the gospel according to you.

The failure to let go of a past identity manifests itself in a variety of ways, none of them positive. Some leaders bring all the accoutrements of their prior office to their new one, causing people to disdainfully view their new digs as a mausoleum.

Financial legacies are the most damaging, warns Jeff Killeen. “Don’t get trapped into adopting someone else’s budget,” he says, “even if the board puts pressure on you to lock down a plan. You need several months to assess assumptions, and budgets are products of assumptions, thoughtfully drafted. You need time to think about the right metrics and business drivers, and then you need time to think about the talent and resources necessary to pull it all off. By letting yourself compromise on this point,” he concludes, “you give up a slide of your credibility. God forbid you adopt someone else’s plan, knowing you want to revisit their assumptions. Six months later when you do that and you have to reforecast, the board won’t remember that that’s what you said you were going to do.

Even in the vast majority of cases when no malfeasance occurs, trying to do it all alone is still a serious trap. If you operate as a lone wolf who refuses to ask for help or involve others, you will cut yourself off from valuable input and feedback. Even if you are on the right track, you will invariably burn out, which will only further hurt the organization. Furthermore, you will only make your managers feel disenfranchised, alienated, and impotent. After all, as Jim Kilts of Gillette points out, “You can lead, but ultimately it is the people in the company who have to deliver.

One of the major traps for new leaders, however, is to select the wrong priorities - or, more colorfully stated, pick the wrong battles.

New leaders tend to want to focus on the problem areas and figure out how to solve them. That’s commendable, but not if it comes at the expense of sustaining your success in existing areas of strength. Dan Kelperman, who skillfully avoided that trap after joining Kodak, offers some helpful advice: “If you come in and discover that one of your growth businesses is struggling, give it big-time attention. But don’t ignore your cash cow, which may also be struggling. The key is to keep all the plates spinning simultaneously. In other words, devote ample time to all the key businesses to ensure greater success.”

The same warning applies to people. It’s natural to concentrate on getting your bottom people up or out, but you must remember to focus on retaining, motivating, and developing your top people, too. Spend as much time on your winners as on your problem children.

It’s ironic that our strongest performers, our most effective consultants, who most often reach out for help from their colleagues. In the process, the strong get even stronger.

We would like to thank Catherine Fredman, an exceptional writer who previously collaborated with Andrew Grove on his best-setting book, Only the Paranoid Survive, and who coauthored Direct from Dell with Michael Dell.