Your First 100 Days of Leadership

On Inaguration Day, the U.S. anoints a new President and Vice President. Given the unprecedented level of challenges Joe Biden and Kamala Harris face, this could be the most consequential onboarding of a new leader in modern history.

If you've ever started a new role, you know the first 100 days are a critical evaluation period.

And though the playbook for success is pretty clear:

assess the situation
align with stakeholders on goals
devise a game plan
cultivate key alliances
establish early wins
build trust & momentum for larger initiatives

it's common for leaders to be overwhelmed. After all, the stakes couldn't be higher. Depending on the trust established in the first 3 months stakeholders either grant you grace to experiment, fail and innovate or relegate you to irrelevance or worse, dismiss you.

So while the above steps may generally work, there's still plenty of blanks to fill in: Which goals? Which stakeholders? What's the right game plan? All these hinge on what happens in the first 30 days... assessing the situation. Mercifully, in the year of our Lord, two thousand and twenty, no matter what we face, no matter how unprecedented, there's wisdom from those who've come before.

Enter The First 90 Days. In what is perhaps one of the best regarded books on onboarding, Harvard Business School professor, Michael D. Watkins shares the STARS model, a framework by which to assess situations to then evaluate responses.

Taking the United States' economy and government apparatus as an example, Joe and Kamala are walking into a Turnaround situation with, depending on your level of optimism a tinge of Realignment.

The challenges which Biden & Harris must be overcome:

* Reenergizing demoralized employees and other stakeholders

* Making effective decisions under time pressure

* Going deep enough with painful cuts and difficult personnel choices

are entirely different than what, say the Founding Dads would have dealt with in the Start-Up scenario known as the first thirteen colonies. Here they needed to:

* Build the strategy, structures and systems from scratch without a clear framework or boundaries

* Recruit and weld together a high-performing team

* Make do with limited resources

But that's on a holistic federal level. Right now, within each government agency, a version of this assessment is taking place. It's here where things may look more like the assessment you as an incoming internal or external leader of a department, org or key initiative may need to make. When managing a more opaque scenario not illuminated by months of deep reporting by a free press, this framework may help.

Taking the time in those first 30 days to assess which scenario you're in and setting goals based on that may be the first seal of trust for all stakeholders and the most important domino to fall as you build momentum in your org.

Here's hoping our leaders avail themselves of every possible tool to fully understand the situation they are inheriting. There's much work to do to get to a place where America gets back to a sustaining success model. 🇺🇸