The First 90 Days

How do you maximize your impact when you enter a new leadership role? Michael Watkins’s The First 90 Days argues that your initial three months are your biggest opportunity—and greatest risk window—for success or derailment. The central claim is that transitions are not improvisations; they are disciplines that can be learned, structured, and managed through eight interlocking actions. Watkins’s framework provides leaders with a rigorous way to shorten their learning curve, align expectations, secure early wins, and build credibility that sustains success long term.

The book is practical and diagnostic, connecting real-world cases (like Bert Vandervliet’s move from functional to general management, Julia Martinez’s challenge leading former peers, and David Jones’s onboarding failure at Energix) to a repeatable framework. Watkins combines psychological insight with managerial tools, arguing that the best leaders treat their first 90 days as a deliberate campaign to learn, align, and deliver tangible value early.

The Eight Actions of Transition Leadership

Watkins’s model revolves around eight mutually reinforcing actions: accelerate your learning, match strategy to situation, negotiate success with your boss, achieve alignment, build your team, secure early wins, create alliances, and manage yourself. Each action strengthens the others. Fail to align expectations and your early wins lose resonance; neglect alliances and even good ideas get blocked by political antibodies.

Every transition begins with diagnosis. Watkins insists that you cannot plan what you have not first understood. His STARS model—Start-up, Turnaround, Accelerated growth, Realignment, and Sustaining success—offers a diagnostic lens for tailoring your behavior. For instance, in a turnaround you act urgently and visibly to stabilize; in a realignment you move more slowly, building awareness of hidden decline. Bert’s challenge at BSC Chemicals—a move into a sustaining-success business—demanded patience and subtle calibration, not the heroics typical in start-ups or crisis turnarounds.

Learning Faster Than the Context Changes

The first challenge in any transition is the learning curve. Watkins urges you to accumulate actionable insights—not just data—faster than the environment evolves. Plan early learning goals: what to learn, from whom, and by when. Ask structured questions about strategy, culture, and political wiring. Many derailments, like David Jones’s failure at Energix, begin when leaders project old assumptions onto new contexts instead of learning before acting.

By front-loading your learning, you move beyond surface impressions and earn credibility. Watkins likens this to shifting from opinion-driven experimentation to evidence-based intervention—akin to a doctor diagnosing before prescribing.

Negotiating Success with Your Boss

Transitions fail as often from misaligned expectations as from technical missteps. Watkins’s Five Conversations framework gives you a practical playbook for building alignment early: you discuss style (how to communicate), situation (shared diagnosis using STARS), expectations (what success looks like), resources (what support you’ll have), and course corrections (how to adjust midstream). This systematic approach prevents the creeping assumption gap that derails even skilled executives.

Building the Team and Creating Alliances

Team dynamics make or break transition outcomes. Watkins distinguishes between managing a team and restructuring one under transition conditions. Julia Martinez’s story of leading former peers illustrates why relationships must be consciously reengineered. She needed to create “rites of passage” to mark the change and reestablish fairness. Similarly, Irina Petrenko’s missteps at Van Lear Foods highlight the political dimension—alliances are deliberate pacts to pursue shared goals, not just friendly relationships. Building both a complementary team and a web of alliances turns your formal mandate into executable support.

The Power and Risk of Early Wins

Watkins argues that early wins are social symbols. They prove competence and give the organization a visible reason to follow. Yet not all wins are equal—you must select them strategically. Choose fulcrum issues that unblock systemic constraints, as Julia did when rationalizing product-development projects. Wins aligned with your boss’s priorities and organizational needs multiply trust; unrelated victories consume credibility.

Managing Yourself Under Transition Pressure

Finally, self-management anchors everything else. New leaders face ambiguity, hyper-visibility, and emotional fatigue. Watkins advises deliberate boundary setting: decide what you’ll do, what you’ll delegate, and where you’ll seek counsel. Promotion cases like Bert’s reveal that success depends as much on mindset shifts—moving from specialist to generalist, tactician to strategist—as on technical ability. Managing your own learning curve, energy, and visibility is essential to signaling that you are in control.

Core takeaway

Transition success is not about charisma or luck but disciplined acceleration. By diagnosing your situation, aligning expectations, building coalitions, scoring credible early wins, and managing both your team and yourself, you convert uncertainty into strategic momentum.

In short, The First 90 Days teaches you to replace reactive adjustment with structured adaptation. The moment you enter a new role, the clock starts—but with the right framework, that countdown becomes a launch sequence for sustained leadership impact.

When promoted, your old success formulas become liabilities. Watkins explores how leaders like Bert Vandervliet at BSC Chemicals had to shift from operating as functional experts to thinking like general managers. This shift demands new mental models—balancing breadth with depth, delegating by scale rather than by task, and influencing through coalitions instead of authority.

Shifting Cognitive Gears

The movement from specialist to generalist resembles switching from being a virtuoso musician to a conductor. You now integrate multiple instruments rather than play one flawlessly. Bert struggled with this: he dove too deep into marketing details when he needed to orchestrate across functions. The lesson is to identify fulcrum issues—the few cross-functional challenges that deserve your personal attention—and actively avoid doing what now belongs lower in the hierarchy.

Delegating by Scope

Delegation evolves in tandem with scale. At smaller levels you delegate tasks; mid-level, you delegate projects; at higher levels, whole product lines or P&Ls. Bert needed to trust vice presidents with full commercial responsibility. Effective delegation depends on designing systems (metrics, cadences, and feedback loops) that let you monitor without micromanaging. This builds both capacity and trust.

Influence and Visibility

As hierarchy increases, command power diminishes and political skill becomes decisive. Watkins calls this the “paradox of authority”: the higher you go, the less formal power moves outcomes. You must learn coalition-building, diplomatic influence, and how to signal intent through carefully managed visibility. Every statement and gesture carries amplified meaning—especially in the early months of a promotion.

By rethinking delegation, influence, and presence, you evolve from capable contributor to enterprise integrator. Promotion success depends less on mastering the new technical domain than on shaping the organizational system and narrative around it.

Leaders rarely fail because of poor strategy; they fail because of relationship mismanagement. Watkins demonstrates this through Julia Martinez’s experience at Alpha Collaboration, where she had to lead former peers after a promotion. The emotional landscape—jealousy, disappointment, and changing dynamics—makes success dependent on social awareness and fairness.

Redesigning Relationships

Watkins calls the process “relationship reengineering.” You cannot preserve old peer bonds and still evaluate performance objectively. Julia’s tension with Amanda—her longtime collaborator—shows why mixing friendship and hierarchy undermines credibility. Clear communication about fairness and consistency allows you to reset the terms of engagement.

Creating Rites of Passage

Leadership transitions are social events that need symbolism. When formal announcements fail, you can invent informal rites—like short team meetings acknowledging the change and setting new expectations. This signals continuity with change and reduces confusion.

Balanced Authority

Avoid swinging between autocracy and “superpeer” behavior. Watkins recommends early consultative decision-making—soliciting input, then making clear calls—to show both inclusion and leadership. Use structured assimilation sessions if available; they compress months of uncertainty into days of clarity by surfacing assumptions openly.

The core message: transitions are human before they are technical. When you legitimize your new authority through transparency and process fairness, you reduce resistance and accelerate team cohesion.

In most transitions, you lack formal authority to make the changes you envision. Watkins reframes politics as corporate diplomacy—the art of orchestrating alliances. Irina Petrenko’s story at Van Lear Foods underscores that even brilliant technical solutions fail without political groundwork. You must map stakeholders, understand their motives, and sequence your influence campaign like a diplomat planning negotiations.

From Relationships to Alliances

Relationships offer goodwill; alliances provide commitment. An alliance is an explicit or tacit agreement to pursue shared goals. Identify who can support you, who can be converted, and who may block progress. Watkins suggests visual influence maps to trace formal and informal networks. With these insights, you can time your proposals so that supporters are ready before public debate begins.

Sequencing and Incrementalism

Effective influencers move opinion step by step. They practice “shuttle diplomacy”: private one-on-one discussions that prepare the ground for collective decisions. They also use incremental wins—small agreements that accumulate into a major shift (akin to salami-slicing change). Irina failed partly because she announced her full plan early, triggering resistance before allies were primed.

Understanding Interests

Each stakeholder has fears, ambitions, and alternatives. Influence requires empathy: what does this person value, and what trade can satisfy them without betraying core goals? By reframing issues around shared interests, you transform politics from manipulation into coalition-building.

Watkins’s insight is liberating: politics only feel dirty when done covertly. Treating influence as transparent diplomacy allows you to build high-trust coalitions that make strategy executable.

Watkins calls early wins the leadership currency of transitions. Done well, they build credibility, energize teams, and establish your legitimacy. Done poorly, they waste capital and provoke backlash. Both Bert Vandervliet and Julia Martinez learned the difference the hard way.

Why Early Wins Matter

Early wins anchor performance narratives. Stakeholders judge competence through visible results within months. But smart early wins are not random victories; they align with strategic priorities and the expectations negotiated with your boss. These wins signal mastery of the context and demonstrate that your plans are credible.

Finding Fulcrum Issues

Watkins introduces the idea of “fulcrum issues”—small but high-leverage problems that unlock system-wide improvement. Julia’s portfolio review exemplified this: by using fair process and tangible results, she gained both performance improvements and trust. Early wins must be technical and social, delivering visible change and fostering belief.

Delegation Architecture

To sustain momentum, leaders must design delegation structures that free attention for integrative work. Watkins’s scale model—delegate tasks, then projects, then processes, and eventually P&Ls—ensures that growing organizations don’t bottleneck at the leader. Bert succeeded once he learned to design monitoring systems and trust divisional heads instead of rechecking their every move.

Momentum compounds when early wins and smart delegation reinforce each other: credibility earns resources, which enable broader action. The challenge is knowing when to shift from quick wins to long-term transformation.

Every leadership situation belongs to one or more STARS categories: Start-up, Turnaround, Accelerated growth, Realignment, or Sustaining success. Watkins’s signature insight is that strategic context dictates the right leadership playbook. Success in one setting can become toxic in another, as Stefan Eisenberg discovered when his crisis-driven style in Europe failed in a slower realignment in North America.

Matching Strategy to Situation

In a turnaround, speed and clarity are everything. You stabilize, preserve a defendable core, and rebuild credibility through a few decisive actions—like Debra Silverman’s 3-D strategy at FemHealth: design the new business model, drive alignment, and dynamically adapt through rapid learning loops. Realignments, however, require patience and persuasion. You must raise awareness of decline, build shared diagnosis, and change metrics before culture will shift.

Portfolio Leadership

Most executives manage multiple STARS situations simultaneously. Andy Donovan at Zetacam had to balance start-ups, turnarounds, and sustaining-success units. Watkins advises mapping these as a STARS portfolio, allocating your “attention points” deliberately. He borrows a thermodynamics metaphor: convert organizational “fuel” (talent, time, sponsorship) into productive motion by building “engines” (focused project teams). Tools like FOGLAMP—Focus, Oversight, Goals, Leadership, Abilities, Means, Process—help design those engines efficiently.

The mastery of context comes from diagnosing accurately, aligning leadership style with the situation, and designing execution engines proportionate to each unit’s needs. In this sense, transitions are not generic sprints but adaptive strategy workouts.

Joining a new company or culture activates a hidden challenge: the organizational immune system. Like biological immunity, it protects the organization from perceived threats—including you. Watkins’s case of David Jones at Energix illustrates what happens when newcomers act before learning: initiatives get rejected, reputations erode, and trust evaporates.

Learn Before You Lead

Watkins likens effective onboarding to anthropological fieldwork. You observe rituals, decode symbols, and identify cultural interpreters. Outsiders who assume their methods are superior trigger antibodies. By first learning local language—literal and behavioral—you reduce the defensive response and earn relational capital.

Recover, Recalibrate, Rebuild

No one avoids missteps entirely. Watkins’s R3 method—Recognize, Recover, Recalibrate—helps you course-correct after cultural errors. Humility and visible learning are your antidotes. People forgive foreigners who adapt quickly, not those who double down on being “right.”

Stakeholder Sensitivity

Map formal and informal power players. David failed because he underestimated the founding team’s influence and bypassed the CEO’s informal controls. The stakeholder map, a recurring tool across Watkins’s framework, helps surface blind spots early. Cultural and political learning move together—ignore one and you fail both.

Watkins’s lesson transcends onboarding: adapt, connect, and align before trying to reform. Cultural intelligence turns potential resistance into partnership.

International moves multiply transition complexity by adding personal, family, and cultural dimensions. Oscar Barrow’s China experience embodies all three. Watkins distills his lessons into six principles for thriving abroad: stabilize the family, stage your arrival carefully, ensure compliance, build the team through business, set quick strategic priorities, and integrate culturally—not superficially.

Family and Personal Foundation

Performance abroad collapses when the family isn’t settled. Discuss logistics and emotional readiness early, plan around natural transition windows (like the school year), and maintain connection networks. The leader’s resilience tracks directly with family well-being.

Respect Local Systems

Compliance lapses or cultural faux pas can be career-ending. Oscar’s misjudgment with visas eroded trust fast. Leaders must balance local responsiveness with global standards. Build trusted local advisors and probe too-good-to-be-true performance numbers.

Earning Legitimacy Abroad

Avoid the savior complex. Listen first, diagnose quietly, and publish an entry plan that signals intention without arrogance. Learn local customs, language basics, and recognition preferences—Oscar’s well-intended public praise embarrassed a high performer in a collectivist culture. Respect, curiosity, and humility project commitment.

When you globalize yourself through disciplined curiosity, you expand not just your professional competence but your range of empathy and influence across cultures.

Watkins ends with a systems view: leaders succeed when organizations design Transition Architecture. Instead of improvising onboarding and promotions, companies should create repeatable systems that deliver the right resources, at the right moment, in the right way. This chapter reframes leadership transitions as a managed enterprise process, not individual heroics.

Designing Organizational Support

Effective transition systems provide just-in-time resources for each stage—diagnostic tools at entry, strategy frameworks during planning, and coaching as leaders execute early wins. This pacing avoids the overwhelm of front-loaded information dumps. Pre-entry preparation (briefings and access to internal data) accelerates new leaders’ learning before day one.

Action-Forcing Events and Toolkits

Because busy executives rarely pause to reflect, organizations can institutionalize “action-forcing events”—90-day reviews, cohort sessions, or assimilation workshops—to force periodic recalibration. Toolkits tailored to major transition types (onboarding, promotion, international move, turnaround) make learning scalable. Tiered delivery modes—coaching for executives, cohorts for mid-levels—maximize ROI.

Shared Language and Networks

Finally, all supporting actors—bosses, HR partners, mentors—must speak a shared transition language. Clarifying their roles multiplies collective support. When transition management becomes enterprise muscle memory, not a one-off training event, the organization compounds learning and resilience over time.

Watkins’s conclusion offers an implicit vision: an organization where every leader starts strong because every transition is designed, supported, and measured—a culture in which adaptation becomes a core capability.