90 Days to Impact - Hit the Ground Running

At Protagion, we regularly work with executives who are taking on new roles, and are eager to add value quickly - which is why they approach our professional mentors and coaches for external guidance. Stepping up involves stretching ourselves, so support as we do this is invaluable. In this article, we share suggestions for those of you taking on new roles, including areas to focus on during the first three months as you get to know the environment, build relationships, set a vision, and develop your roadmap. We also discuss shifting into execution for the rest of your first year, plus iterating and evolving thereafter. 

This article has a financial and/or risk slant, but the lessons generalise to other functions too, whether you’re stepping up into the C-Suite, leading a function, managing a team, or have ambitions to broaden your organisational influence in future. A lot is about mindset i.e. seeing yourself as a strategist who helps craft the future direction of your team, function and/or organisation, and focusing on sustained impact through your collaborative performance. 

Read more to dive into detail on the key aspects to concentrate on when taking on a new role, so that you can hit the ground running and have a meaningful impact in your first 90 days and beyond… 

​Getting to know the organisation and your function
While many of us might want to be taking action straight away, it’s important to listen, learn, reflect and plan. Active planning is more important than speed of execution initially – that will come later. First you need to get to know the organisation and your function well – if you’re an internal hire, you may have a lot of knowledge about this already. But, your role has changed, and translating your ideas into tangible results requires deliberate planning and prioritisation. So, begin by strengthening your knowledge of the organisation’s strategic priorities and current performance, and form relationships to help you improve your understanding of the realities. 

If you have time before taking on a new role (e.g. gardening leave or a sabbatical), you may want to begin research before you even officially start your new role. Unpaid, yes, but advance preparation can help set you up for longer term success. 

Zooming in to a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) role specifically, BCG (the global management consulting firm) describes a CFO’s responsibilities like this:
“CFOs must:

• help to shape the company’s agenda,
• engage with investors and capital markets, 
• ensure strong financial performance, and 
• partner with business colleagues to support operations. 

CFOs also must oversee the finance function’s core audit, regulatory, and risk-management responsibilities”. With this backdrop, the initial step for a new CFO is to assess the company’s financial health. This includes its cashflow / liquidity, its accounting practices and audit issues (working with the firm’s auditors, identifying any regulatory issues and reviewing the company’s practices related to auditing, internal controls, cybersecurity etc). 

Similarly, other new senior executives should perform health checks of their areas, so that you can address any identified issues upfront and sweep them clean, so that these don’t derail other priorities later.

​Building relationships
Early on, you should also meet the key stakeholders. This includes one-on-one meetings with all your direct reports within the first fortnight, and all peers and key external stakeholders within a month. Important external stakeholders for a CFO, for example, include investors and the lead partners at your auditing firm and tax advisors; a COO or CEO would like meet key customers, suppliers and business partners too. 

The aim in these meetings is to identify and understand each stakeholder’s most pressing concerns, what change they want to see, and what they want to remain as it is. But, it is not simply a fact-finding interaction – you want to build a fruitful long-term business relationship where there is mutual respect. The stakeholders will be judging your fit in these interactions, so preparation and an open-mind are important too i.e. can they see themselves working well with (or for) you? 

You can build credibility by quickly demonstrating that you understand the business and have an informed view on industry trends – your advance preparation can help you here. Your initial collaboration with your peers will set the tone for future collaborations, so be deliberate about showing what you can bring that makes you invaluable. For example, if you’re an external hire, you could bring a fresh perspective and suggest solutions the organisation hasn’t encountered before. Alternatively, if you’re internal (a promotion or a lateral move), your existing insight into the organisation’s realities can help refine and enhance strategic decision-making. One way to build credibility is to support the organisation’s existing strategic priorities and growth efforts. 

In these early days, building good relationships is worth more than delivering value – you’ll need buy-in from other leaders in order to run your function or team successfully over the longer term. 

BCG highlights that we can benefit from having a mentor to help us transition into our role, especially as it can be lonely at the top, with lots of the role new to us. 

The ideal mentor is external to the company but knowledgeable about the company or its industry. He or she should be people oriented and have a wealth of experience that [you] can tap into”
BCG in “Your First 90 Days as CFO”

Perceptions
Early on, you should be aiming to understand (and shape) how your function or team is perceived across your broader organisation. Relevant aspects are: 

• The extent of interaction and partnering with other functions/teams 
• The value your area already delivers 
• Whether other leaders consult with your leaders before making decisions, or whether they inform them afterwards, or whether they aren’t told at all 
• Whether your area is seen as obstructive, inefficient, bureaucratic, untrustworthy… 

In some ways, you’re performing a 360 degree feedback exercise on your overall function/team with its various stakeholders, gathering views on what you should stop, start and/or continue. 

People
You’re also forming a holistic view of the talent in your function or team as you have your conversations, including their capabilities, attitudes and skills (current and potential). You could use competency frameworks or capability models to assess this more formally, and your HR team will be able to help with this. Professions are also increasingly using such frameworks to structure the lifelong development of their members. Informal feedback is also helpful e.g. understanding who people see as the leaders in the function i.e. those they go to when things get tough and whose advice they respect and listen to, even those not formally in leadership positions. 

You should spend significant time interacting with people at all levels of your function. Through these one-on-one, small group or townhall interactions, you’ll get to know each other better. You’ll pick up how people prefer to work, their top-of-mind concerns, what’s important to them, and their career paths and aspirations, all of which will help you to lead them better. 

Your collected conversations and research should help you develop an objective picture of your function and organisation, and its strengths and weaknesses. This will help you to set your agenda for the remainder of your first year, and prioritise areas where your team can demonstrate additional value and credibility. We discuss setting a vision for your function next. ​

Setting a vision
Knowledge is useful, but you must do something with it - armed with insights about your organisation and function, you can now help to shape the company’s agenda. Some questions you can ask yourself - and others - to help you craft a vision for the future (perhaps collaboratively) include: 

• What role should your function/team have within your wider organisation and the industry?
• What is collaboration like within your function? What is the team relied upon and recognised for? 
• Where is change most needed? And, what factors are necessitating that change? 
• Where are new ideas coming from? And, which ideas are implemented, which aren’t and why? 
• Where might technology or digitalisation help your function add more value? 
• Which people are key to the future you see, and who should be part of your leadership team? 

Your aim by now is to form a view of the high-level objectives you wish to achieve and the nature of function you want to build under your leadership i.e. what are you aiming for? Your vision should guide the execution to come / steer your improvement efforts i.e. it should not only be aspirational but also achievable over a defined time frame. It sets out your ambition for the value you want to add, and also helps establish your function’s ways of working, the extent of delegation, empowerment and collaboration, and the career paths for your people. It should also reflect your aspiration for the kind of leader you want to be. Importantly, the vision should inspire and unite your function or team to achieve your strategic aims. 

And, as you refine your vision, also work with your peers (such as other C-Suite executives) and seniors (such as your boss or the board of directors) to agree on their expectations and what outcomes they want - this will help you align your vision with the overall direction of the company.

​Prioritisation 
Be careful to avoid the trap of trying to tackle everything simultaneously. Being overambitious can stretch you too thin, and weaken your impact. Think of the equation from physics: force equals pressure times area i.e. apply your effort/pressure to targeted areas to move things meaningfully. 

Force (F) = Pressure (P) x Area (A)

Your agenda should be shaped by your organisation and function’s strategic priorities, including any existing commitments made externally – be mindful of not committing to too much in your early interactions with stakeholders though (while you learn, form your plan and test it) as this could dilute your longer term impact. Your area’s current performance and the business environment play meaningful roles in determining your new priorities too e.g. is a turnaround or restructuring required, or are things stable but stagnating, or is there high growth? ​

BCG suggests these example priorities for CFOs in these different circumstances: 

• Turnaround or restructuring: focus on investment management, sustainable cost reduction and efficiency 
  
• Stable but stagnating: support the search for and pursuit of new growth opportunities 
  
• High growth: arrange for new financing, optimise the capital structure, manage investor relations and enter into partnerships with financiers 

BCG further explains the CFO’s critical role in investor relations, which requires deep understanding of the company’s investors, their expectations and how they perceive the company. The fundamentals driving performance should be understood, so that you can communicate the investment story, the dividend strategy and your social impact in an appealing and reassuring way. Relationships with banking partners and financial institutions are also key for a CFO, so that you can optimise the capital structure while managing your credit rating too. 

Developing a roadmap
An effective 90-day plan culminates in developing a roadmap for realising the vision. At this stage, you’re filling in the details of how you’re looking to achieve your vision, including the team structure and technology needed and the measures and metrics you’ll use. Your roadmap should set out your priorities for the first year of executing your vision, including any transformative activity, as well as the next two to four years. Implementation will be a team effort, so ensure that you collaborate with your leadership team to develop the roadmap. 

Your roadmap should include some initiatives that are quicker to implement so that you can demonstrate positive impact in the first year – you’ll be expected to show progress, so choose the right talent to implement each project. Also consider potential roadblocks and risks, and develop plans to address them. 

Next comes execution
With a plan in place, your team’s attention should turn to execution. Transitioning from planning to execution will take you beyond 90 days – it is important to deliver on your promises over the planning cycle. To do this, monitor the delivery of value (against your metrics) across your planned timeline, and keep your stakeholders up to date on your progress. You should also align career paths and incentives like bonuses within your function with your roadmap’s milestones. Ongoing communication of the vision and progress, with frequent repetition of the messages and celebration of achievements, is essential to winning hearts and minds. 

You’re aiming to deliver tangible value in your first year for your internal business partners, for your company and its stakeholders, and for society. While collaboration and supporting other areas in achieving their own value-creation objectives is helpful (including to strengthen relationships), you should have initiatives you’re driving too i.e. lead in addition to supporting other areas. ​

Focus areas for Year One 
Speaking specifically about CFOs, BCG points out that "delivering results early sends the right message to the investor community and the board of directors, as well as across the company. It facilitates [your] longer term strategy and transformation efforts, paving the way for growth in future years."

Examples of general high-priority elements you could include in your agenda, especially where you are financially-minded and/or responsible for risk functions, are: 

• Strategy development, value creation and growth including resource allocation, initiative prioritisation across the business, due diligence, and assisting in business case development 
• Business partnering like identifying and sharing best practices widely and fostering collaborative relationships 
• Risk management, including the balance between risk taking (upside potential) and risk mitigation 
• Internal efficiency and flexibility, such as streamlining where possible, improving processes, ensuring appropriate levels of delegation and accountability, encouraging a culture of continuous improvement, and solving pain points 
• Data, analytics and automation, so that you can free people up to develop insights and make decisions 
• Talent management like assessing the skills your function/team needs to build or add to achieve the vision – through training, upskilling, or hiring – plus developing future leaders and succession planning 
• Innovation and collaboration, fostered through an environment where different people with diverse backgrounds can work together and complement each other.

As you and your team deliver the vision over the months and years ahead, remember to keep building support for it – within your team and across your wider organisation, and perhaps externally too if needed. As you and your leadership team champion it, demonstrate and communicate your successes to build further credibility. Take your team along with you, so that they too become champions of the strategy. 

Adapting and evolving 
The business environment will keep evolving, and your role is also likely to. CFO roles, for example, have expanded beyond bookkeeping to include strategic steering, financial governance, and performance insights, argues BCG. As leaders, we need to adapt to changing market circumstances and cultural contexts, taking feedback on our approach and style into account so that we continue learning and growing. In other words, keep iterating and evolving, so that you’re ready to take on bigger challenges when you next step up again! 

Thank you to BCG for their reports “Your First 90 Days as CFO” and “Your First Year as CFO” which inspired this article. What did you find helpful for your own step up?