What Effective CEOs Do After Their First 90 Days

The first 90 days of your new CEO role have come to an end. You’ve identified the strategic issues, delivered quick wins, and put out fires. The focus of the next period is on exploring growth opportunities and building the new organization. What could possibly go wrong?

A lot. This is often the period when obstacles emerge. Employees resist proposed changes to organizational structures and culture. Disagreements in the top team leak out into the open, causing confusion and unease. Growth looks more difficult to achieve than you first imagined while investors become restless awaiting the promised uptick in performance.

The fact that the honeymoon period is well and truly over shouldn’t come as a surprise. Research shows that it takes more than six months for CEOs make an impact, build the leadership team, strengthen culture, and transform the value of an organization.

I’ve observed four common reasons why CEOs struggle after their first 90 days:

• Hubris: Fueled by overconfidence and personal pride, they believe they’ve figured it all out. They head off in the wrong direction based on misinformed assumptions.

• Overwhelm: The reality of the challenge ahead dawns on them, resulting in a feeling of overwhelm. Everything slows down, from thinking to decisions.

• Exhaustion: They work long hours at high intensity to show their commitment and create some momentum. As they recover and try smarter working habits, they’re less visible just when people expect to see them.

• Boredom: The novelty of the new role soon wears off, leaving them feeling bored and more prone to distractions.

By contrast, the most effective CEOs reach the end of their first 90 days in good mental and physical shape. They recognize it’s the end of the beginning as they open the next chapter in the organization’s transformation. They continue practicing the mindsets and skills from the first 90 days: showing curiosity about what’s possible, focusing on building relationships, being determined to deliver impact, expressing themselves clearly, and making time for reflection.

They also take six actions I’ve identified from my work with dozens of CEOs and C-suite executives during and after their first 90 days, supplemented with interviews. Together these actions become a leadership system you can use in the months and years to come, turning the dial up or down on each practice according to the context and challenge you face.

Signal: Communicate what you value and want to change.

“What have you learned in the first 90 days?” It’s a seemingly obvious question, but CEOs can often only half-answer it in their rush to action. They also internalize what they’ve learned about the organization and external landscape, mistakenly assuming it will be obvious to others through the actions they take or the words they use.

Don’t miss this opportunity to communicate important signals to the organization, especially your views on:

• What the organization does at its best and worst

• Where there are potential opportunities to create more value for customers

• What surprised you the most and why

• Whom you have appreciated, calling out behaviors you want to see more of

• What you need people to continue doing and what you need them to change (and why)

• What you need to learn more about in the coming days and months

Being able to answer these questions and communicate them to stakeholders reduces the time they spend second-guessing what’s on your mind. It also increases trust in you at a time when you’re asking people to take on more responsibility, develop new capabilities, and take risks. You might say:

I’m grateful for the time you’ve spent with me to share your perspectives on […]. You know that I’ve been doing a good deal of talking with people outside and inside the organization. I’d like to share what I’ve learned so you can get a good sense of my thinking, what I want to focus on next, and where I’d like you to focus.

Take the time to share this learning systematically, tailoring your messages to the audience you’re in front of. You can’t address every single issue people raise, but you can demonstrate your commitment to learning and action, role-modeling the mindset and behavior you expect from them.

Commit: Show how much the work matters.

It’s easy to lose sight of why you’re doing the work as you drive change with vigor, especially when you’re dealing with organizations in distress or facing a crisis. You’re so focused on building relationships and solving problems that you assume everyone shares your motivations and ambition. Many won’t, at least not until they understand why it matters. Their anxiety about potential changes — and their job security — can soon turn into to a lack of engagement. Frustrated, CEOs drive change faster, and some resort to coercion. However, this is the least-effective leadership style in most situations, as it quickly creates resentment and feelings of rejection.

To avoid this scenario, when communicating with employees, share your motivations for doing the role and what you want to achieve. You might say:

I’m particularly excited by the opportunity to work with you to build an even better, stronger, and more impactful organization. What we’re trying to achieve has a particular resonance for me because of my interest in […] and my background in […].

Go further by anchoring the organization on outcomes that matter for customers, communities, or causes you serve. Open up the strategy process to perspectives from outside and inside the organization to enhance the quality of thinking and commitment to its design and delivery. Encourage people to craft their roles in a way that aligns with the strategy and reflects their strengths, clarifying what’s expected of them in terms of impact and behaviors through role-modeling, communications, and incentives.

One of my clients, Chris, systematically asked the following questions in his one-on-conversations (including with partner organizations), team sessions, and organization-wide events:

• What are we missing in our strategy?

• What would it take for you to fully commit to the strategy we’ve developed?

• What are the obstacles to you doing this?

• What do you most need from me?

Not only did he benefit from the insights, but he also found people using their own versions of these questions in their own discussions (without prompting) — a signal of increased engagement and alignment.

Discover: Anchor the growth strategy on customer lives.

Many strategies focus on creating, distributing, and selling products and services but lack sufficient focus on how they address customer jobs to be done (and paid for). At worst, this results in products customers don’t want, limiting the organization’s growth potential and resilience. It’s as if the executives have forgotten that business is all about how to create and keep a customer, to paraphrase Peter Drucker.

Embed a customer lens throughout the organization — from board and executive meetings to the front line. This requires answering some simple (and often forgotten) questions:

• Who are our customers now?

• Which ones do we want to keep, and how will we best do it?

• Who are the customers of the future, particularly those who are underserved, neglected, or ignored?

• What will it take to delight them and remove their frustrations?

• What insight can we collate, interpret, and use in a dynamic way?

Keep asking questions, exploring opportunities, and interrogating problems that prevent your organization from delivering what customers value. Focus on the forces that shape customers’ lives and the everyday decisions they enable.

Within the organization, put in place metrics to help establish where and how much value is created — for example, the number of new and existing customers and the revenue from each group. This sets the foundation for setting strategic priorities. As Roger Martin reminds us, strategy is about producing “an offering that compels customers to choose your offering over those of competitors.”

Design: Create the organization of the future.

In the first 90 days you concentrated on listening, investigating, and fixing. The next period involves designing and delivering what you want to become.

Building a new organization and transitioning from the old is difficult work, making it tempting to refine the strategy and organizational model you already have. While slimming down layers of management and removing redundancy is important and can reduce costs (more on that in the next section), it’s not enough on its own to strengthen the organization and extend into new markets. To do that, you need to think more expansively, focusing on these four actions:

• Redesign the corporate center. At its worst, the corporate center acts as a process-driven, risk-averse bureaucrat that puts the brakes on progress. If this sounds familiar, focus it instead on surfacing new ideas, making critical decisions, and shifting resources to where they’re most needed.

• Distribute ownership to employees. Pilot self-managed teams that are close to your customers and have responsibility to drive entrepreneurial outcomes using transparent, outcome-driven metrics.

• Embed AI as a central capability. Position gen AI as a new teammate that can improve efficiency, enhance decision-making through surfacing new insights, and create new sources of value by giving customer-facing employees better tools.

• Collaborate with ecosystem partners. Michael Jabobides argues that, thanks to structural changes in the economy, including new technologies that are changing the ways companies can serve customers, it’s increasingly less likely that one company can offer everything a customer needs. The solution? Work with ecosystem partners to harness each other’s complementary capabilities. For example, consider the Nest thermostat, which can communicate with certain cars and fitness wearables to determine the right time to heat or cool a user’s home.

Pilot and test changes in specific teams, then scale them across the organization accordingly. David Conway, CEO of Pinewood Studios, said to me as he reflected on his first year in his role: “If you want a culture change, then take incremental steps to get there. Going in too strongly will provoke an allergic reaction from people across the company.”

Discard: Remove legacy and bureaucracy.

Despite your efforts, you’ll find that old structures, processes, and habits die hard. Employees revert to what they know and feel comfortable with, especially when they’re under pressure to perform better or feel anxious about their futures. It undermines performance and creates a drag on progress at a time when the emerging strategy requires new mindsets and practices.

Some elements of the “old” organization — services, processes, practices, brands, and subsidiaries, for example — must be left behind when they’re found to be redundant and misaligned with your new strategy and organizational model; costly and inefficient compared with newer alternatives, particularly those powered by new technologies and working styles; or unprofitable, losing money because customer demand isn’t sufficient.

Make tackling legacy and bureaucracy as high a priority as innovation, even if it feels like a less-attractive activity. Recognize its power in creating space for the new organization to emerge through new voices, perspectives, and activities that may have been otherwise shut down, ignored, or busy elsewhere.

Doing this requires clarity of thought, decisiveness, and plenty of courage. Show appreciation for the past while avoiding emotional pleas to retain the status quo. Instead of putting your best, most influential people on innovation projects, assign and sponsor them to address legacy systems and bureaucracy.

Empower: Encourage people to speak up and take responsibility.

At this point, you’re piloting new ways of working and encouraging people to commit to the cause. The question now is whether they will speak up and take on responsibility to their fullest ability. Many won’t because they feel no one is listening to them or they fear reprisal if they say something out of turn in the eyes of their peers and bosses.

Your role is to make it as easy as possible for everyone to contribute their best, regardless of their role, expertise, or background. This involves:

• Mitigating systemic biases. Examine how policies and practices in organizational activities, such as recruitment, resource allocation, performance management, and decision-making, lead to unfair or unequal treatment of individuals or groups, then identify the most effective ways to mitigate or remove them. These systemic biases are “even more pervasive, impactful, and misunderstood than implicit or interpersonal bias” according to Gena Cox, Author of Leading Inclusion.

• Asking good questions. Topaz Adizes, the curator of the Skin Deep series of conversations, uses mission questions: simple, incisive, open questions that focus on what truly matters. For example, rather than asking “Why did the campaign not hit its goals?” try “What are we learning from this campaign that will carry to the next one to be more successful?” The latter question is more likely to encourage the recipient to think of it as a learning exercise than an interrogation.

• Listening attentively to the answers. Nancy Kline, author of More Time To Think, says that “The quality of your attention determines the quality of other people’s thinking,” which in practice means making eye contact, being silent, avoiding interrupting, and showing you’re listening through your body language.

• Giving people responsibility. Empower employees to make decisions, showing belief in their abilities, expressing clarity of their role, and offering coaching and resources to help them develop.

While this may sound intuitive, it requires a fundamental mindset shift for many executives. Try saying this to yourself as you do this work:

I believe that the people who work for me are capable of incredible things. My role is to create the conditions for them to flourish. What can I put in place and get rid of to do this? What do they most need from me personally? What is my most valuable contribution to this endeavor?

. . .

We often focus our attention on the first 90 days of a CEO’s tenure — and for good reason, as a successful first 90 days establishes a strong foundation for the months and years to come. But it’s often the period afterwards that can make or break a CEO’s impact on the transformation of an organization. Together, these six actions become a system of thinking and doing that sustains progress, creates profitable growth opportunities, and builds a more capable organization.

Copyright 2025 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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