What New Small Team Leaders Should Do in Their First 90 Days!

Have you taken over a small team? Perhaps you’ve read the book The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins and want to avoid the pitfalls of your first 90 days as a leader.

What new small team leaders should do in their first 90 days includes focusing on relationships with their team, implementing small changes a little at a time, and taking note of what they want to change later. New leaders must avoid removing their coworkers’ stability and implementing radical changes. 

In this article, I draw from interviews and polls with 19 team leaders, my experience as a military leader for 13 years, and the most stable scientific data I can find to give you a detailed and actionable outline of which obstacles you need to avoid. I then contrast this with the book The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins, in which you might notice a big discrepancy.

Leaders Aren’t Always Successful Because They Don’t Act Fast

Being a new leader, with or without formal training, is often scary. So many new leaders screw up their first months as leaders and struggle for years to regain the trust of their colleagues. 

We like to think the “be nice to the new guy” rule applies. However, to be honest, if you’re in a situation where people expect you to lead them to performance, nobody really cares if you are new or not. 

You need to deliver and do it fast to avoid the biggest mistakes. 

Racing is won by being faster than the competition. But if you hit every bump in the way while being fast, sooner or later, you’ll break the car and crash, which is guaranteed to get you nowhere. The key is to avoid the biggest mistakes.

Many people believe you need to make everything right as a new leader, but this is the wrong way to look at it. There are too many problems with this type of perspective. So what is the right way?

First Day: Don’t Remove Your New Coworkers’ Stability

You may have had a new boss come in, and after a month, they have already changed so many things that you can’t keep up. According to the respondents of our study, only one thing is worse: making all those changes on the first day.

As a new leader, you should focus all your efforts on getting to know your colleagues and giving them a great impression of you as a manager in the first days of your new role. You must avoid implementing changes and setting up your personal workspace.

A new leader’s biggest mistake during the first day is trying to implement change rather than getting to know their colleagues.

In other words, all you need to do on your first day is not be a douche. I see this type of leadership behavior quite often, as it’s often a by-product of new leaders wanting to make things better and being unable to stop their enthusiasm. 

The consequence of being too “aggressive” and implementing new ideas in your new role is that people will start worrying about their part in this new world. Humans like the status quo more than the uncertainty of the future. 

Consider the expression “the devil you know…” This emphasizes that we would rather live with a known pain than take the chance of lesser but unknown suffering.

But a much more long-term effective and healthy way of spending your first day as a leader is to “be an explorer.” An explorer isn’t telling the map what it should look like. Instead, they go into nature to understand where the valleys are and what dangerous animals exist. 

An explorer tries to see the world as it is, listening rather than talking, carefully examining, and going around large rocks rather than forcefully trying to push them out of their way.

The adventurer or leader who chooses to listen, watch, and understand quickly creates a highly detailed map of their surroundings that significantly benefits them when it is later time to make navigational decisions.

On the first day of the job as a new leader, we must be explorers building our map so that we set ourselves up for success when it’s time to make tough decisions. Decisions can now be made from intelligence instead of guesswork.

If this feels overwhelming, why not schedule a time to talk with me about this?

First Week: Focus on Social Relationships With Your Team

While the first day is mainly about creating a positive impression, according to our respondents, the following week should focus on avoiding the two major mistakes.

Your first week as a new leader must focus on social relationships with your team and management, which speeds up the trust-building process. Experts say time spent on logistics is wasted, and implementing change is too soon and will most likely fail.

The first mistake new leaders make is implementing change too soon. In the above study, 84% of the respondents indicated that implementing changes during the first week of being a new leader is a big mistake. 

Making big changes before fully understanding the situation is called taking a chance. In some situations, rolling the dice is useful, but since the first few changes you will implement will set the tone for your leadership, these are important to get correct.

Choosing what route to take before you have sufficiently discovered the map will surely set you on a sub-optimal and maybe even dangerous path. 

The second big mistake new leaders make in their first week in office is spending too much time on logistics, such as figuring out their desk setup and organizing themselves. Seventy percent said this is wasted time that should be focused on building social relationships and understanding the “social map” of the workplace instead.

Time spent on logistics and practicalities is the time taken away from your core task, getting in sync with your team and the organization. This shows the team that practicalities are more important than humans, whether you are right or wrong. 

You don’t want to give your team this feeling if you wish for them to follow with loyalty. 

I once had a new boss tell me that he didn’t care about us as individuals, but rather we were a part of the big system, and as long as we were valuable to the system, we were also valuable to him. 

You guessed it, he never fully gained our trust and loyalty; why would we?

In our study, 70% said social relations are the most important and that understanding the organization is the second-highest priority.

To start building a loyal following right from the first week of work, you need to focus on social relationships, showing the team and the workplace that you have both the organization and the people in mind when making decisions. 

And what is the best way to show someone you care? Listening. 

Active Listening is actually so important that I would recommend you practice it. You can book a call with me here when you want to make your team feel understood and listened to.

It’s worth trying to determine what drives the organization and the underlying values most seemingly adhere to. Read the official policy documents, and see if you can gain deep insights into the company’s mechanics.

All of this is meant to build a map of the company so you can start making great decisions. 

Here are nine actionable instructions you should follow during your first week as manager so you can set yourself up for long-term success without having to waste years building trust.

First 30 Days: Implement Small Changes

Now that we have spent our first week 100% focused on social relations and, to some extent, understanding the organization, we should shift our attention slightly. According to most experienced leaders in our study (90%), implementing change is still the biggest mistake you can make during the first 90 days of being a new leader.

The first 30 days of being a new leader should be spent cultivating a deeper connection with your team, implementing small changes, and bettering your understanding of the organization. 

You must avoid executing big changes until the company is mature.

It’s clear that the organization and its people aren’t fully ready for you to make the big changes you can’t wait to do. This is due to issues of trust, which take months or years to gain but can be earned much faster. 

It’s also because you most likely haven’t understood the company well enough to make good decisions. 

Although social relationships are still important and are rated the second highest priority in our study, understanding the organization is even more important during this stage. 

Implement small changes, watch for results and reactions carefully, and learn as much as possible, as this acts as a good feedback loop, ensuring that you can make more significant decisions later on. By doing this, you’ll eventually reach your desired outcomes.

Days 30-90: Develop Your Team Further

“Continue to understand and evaluate the organization and your team members and look at what changes can be done to improve it.“

Day 30 -90 of being a new leader is where things become interesting and where the opinions of experts start to differ. Implementing big change is still considered too early in the game for most experienced leaders (60%) and will expose the new leader to a loss of trust and credibility.

Focusing on the workplace’s physical and logistical setup is still considered to add the least value.

Instead, days 30-90 should be spent developing the team further and focusing on social relationships. (70% said social relations are still the highest priority.) This is the time to look at the organization holistically. 

One response said the following:

“Establish routines. Start to see the organization as a system and identify how resources can be optimized. See how you can further support the team. Figure out the logic in how things are organized and function.” 

Start seeing how humans interact with machines, rules, and culture, and take notes of changes you might want to implement later. You may want to write down hypotheses you try to falsify before you later put them into action.

An example might be, “Splitting up X team and rearranging them will reduce conflict and improve performance.” You’ll then try to find ways where this hypothesis breaks down (falsify). Maybe after getting to know the team, you’ll realize that rearrangement would actually create more conflict, not less.

Ensure that you don’t try to confirm your hypothesis since this is almost always possible and doesn’t tell you whether or not you are on to a good idea, which is also called confirmation bias.

Falsifying your hypothesis before implementing it will keep you away from screwing up your first big decisions with the team.

Further Tips To Help You During Your First 90 Days

Logistics, such as your own physical work environment, is lowest on the list of priorities, mainly because of the little to no impact it has on the people you are about to lead. 

This is not to say that a well-organized desk is wrong, but if you have to choose, you should turn your attention to people and organization rather than your own needs.

None of the participants in this study clearly defined when it is time to go all out with the big decisions, but clearly, it isn’t in the first 90 days. That begs the question, when is the company ready for you to fully step into a leadership role and implement the changes you know will benefit employees as well as the bottom line? 

To get the answer to that question, why not contact me for a free call to see how I can help you?

Conclusion

The experience of other leaders tells us that the focus should be on building relationships and understanding the organization during your first 90 days as a leader. This builds your map of the organization, allowing you to make better decisions when the time is right. 

It also gives you enough leadership capital to make big changes.

It’s worth noting that the book The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels differentiates vastly from what the respondents in our study said was important.

Good luck, and enjoy the ride; being a leader is the best job there is!