The First Hundred Days Nobody Supports

The clearest description I have heard of a leadership transition came out of a conversation about salespeople. You move from selling to running the sales team, and the thing that catches people is that it is no longer about you. It is about everyone else.

That reads as obvious. It is not obvious at all while you are living it, and the reason is that nothing in the previous job prepared you for it.

The job you were promoted for is not the job you were promoted into

That sentence is the whole problem, and almost every difficulty in a first hundred days can be traced back to it.

A head of sales is promoted because she consistently delivers the numbers. A finance director becomes a general manager because the books have been clean for six years. An engineer takes over engineering because he is the best engineer in the building. In each case the organisation has looked at excellent performance in one job and used it as evidence of capability in a different one.

Then on the first Monday the work changes underneath them. The new job is mostly other people: their judgement, their pace, their disagreements, their development. None of that was on the scorecard that produced the promotion.

Most of what is written about the first hundred days treats this as a planning problem. Build a thirty-sixty-ninety. Do a listening tour. Find some early wins. That advice is not wrong, but it addresses the wrong part of the failure. By the time the leader is in the role, the decision that will determine how the next year goes has already been made, and it was made by somebody else.

Promoted on the wrong evidence

A pattern I see repeatedly, here and in other markets, is that people get promoted on their hard skills rather than their soft ones. Someone is technically excellent, delivers consistently, and is visibly the best performer in the team. So they get the job.

The trouble is that the best individual performer is often the wrong choice. In sales I have rarely found that the top producer makes a good manager. It tends to be the number two or number three, because they have had to work at it. They know what it took to get good, which means they can explain it to someone else. The person for whom it came easily has nothing to teach and little patience for people who need teaching.

Underneath the promotion decision there is usually an assumption nobody says out loud. Put them in the position first, and close the gap afterwards. I have heard versions of that in a lot of organisations. It sounds pragmatic. In practice it means the leader arrives already carrying a deficit that nobody has named, and the first hundred days become an attempt to prove the promotion was deserved rather than an attempt to take up the role.

My own view is that it should run the other way. Before I put somebody into a leadership position, I want to see they already have the fundamentals: how they deal with people, whether they have any soft power before they get the title, whether they could get people to do things before they had the authority to require it. If those are absent, a title will not create them.

I have done it myself

I should be honest about this, because it is easy to write that paragraph as though I have always applied it.

When I was building the team here, I promoted several people too early. I needed them in those jobs and I had nobody else. They were not ready, and I knew they were not ready, and I did it anyway because the business would not wait.

I had an expatriate colleague working for me at the time who watched this happening. One day he came in and asked me a question. Do you know how many years I worked before I was promoted into that job? Fourteen.

I did not have a good answer for him. He was not being difficult. He was pointing at something real, which is that the standard I was applying to the people around me was not the standard that had been applied to him, and both of us knew it.

That conversation has stayed with me because it names the cost. When you promote early you are not only taking a risk on the person you promote. You are also telling everybody else what the rules are.

Growth markets promote faster than they prepare

This happens everywhere, but it is sharper in a fast-growing market.

Compare a mid-level manager in Vietnam with a mid-level manager in the United States and there is a significant age difference. That gap is not about talent. It is about growth. When a business is expanding quickly the roles arrive before the people are ready for them, and somebody has to fill them.

There is a second version of the same problem. This region is often treated as a proving ground, so a good deal of young and relatively inexperienced leadership talent gets sent here to be tested. They are usually easy to spot next to a country manager who has had a long and varied career across functions, industries and cultures. That variety is what makes a leader durable when things go wrong. Someone on their first significant posting, in an unfamiliar market, with a regional office watching, does not have it yet.

Neither of these is an argument against promoting people early. Sometimes there is no alternative, as I know. It is an argument for being honest about what you have just done and supporting it accordingly.

Retreating into the old job

Watch a newly appointed leader closely in the first weeks and you will often see them doing more of what they were promoted for.

The engineer who now runs engineering starts reviewing designs again. The head of sales who now runs the business unit takes the largest client herself. The finance director promoted into the general manager's chair keeps a hand on the monthly close. It looks like diligence and it feels like diligence, and what it usually is is retreat. The old work is where they are competent, and competence is what they are trying to demonstrate.

Meanwhile the actual job of the first hundred days sits untouched. Nobody has asked what success looks like in this role, in this organisation, right now, as opposed to what it looked like for the previous incumbent. The relationships that will be needed in month eight are not being built in month one, when there is still time and no history. Decisions are either being made too quickly, to establish credibility, or postponed indefinitely, to avoid a visible mistake.

The leaders who come through this well are rarely the ones with the best plan. They are the ones who worked out early which job they were actually in.

What is actually at stake

Something else is happening underneath all of this, and it is stronger here than in the country I grew up in.

In this region a title and an identity are close to the same thing. With the title comes influence, comes position, comes standing outside of work as well as inside it. When somebody is given more, it lands directly on how they see themselves. When a title is taken away, through a restructure or a sideways move, the damage is not mainly financial. It goes at who the person believes they are.

That is worth understanding if you are running a transition, because it explains behaviour that otherwise looks irrational. A country manager who will not let go of the pricing decisions may not be a control problem. He may be holding on to the only part of the role where he still feels like himself.

It also explains something I see in nearly every senior person I work with, whatever their nationality. Underneath the new title is a fairly consistent question. Why am I here, why was I picked, why me and not somebody else. I have it too. Most leaders assume they are the only one in the room carrying it, which is precisely what stops them saying anything.

What would actually help

For the organisation, the useful work happens before the appointment. Ask whether this person has demonstrated the fundamentals of leading people. If they have not, either do not appoint them, or appoint them with your eyes open and put real support around them from the first week. Not an induction. Support: someone external they can be honest with, and a sponsor who will tell them the truth about how they are being perceived.

For the leader, the first hundred days are mostly about deciding what to stop. The work that earned the promotion now belongs to somebody else, and every hour spent on it is an hour not spent on the job you actually hold. Build the relationships before you need them. Move quickly on direction and carefully on the decisions that are hard to reverse.

There is one more thing that rarely gets said. Leadership is not for everybody, and the first hundred days is often where a person finds that out. Managing people is difficult, it is unpredictable, and it comes with a steady supply of disappointment. Some of the best individual performers I have known were happier and more valuable before they were promoted.

Nobody has designed a graceful way for someone to say that out loud three months into a job they were congratulated for getting. Until we do, some proportion of the confidence problem in newly appointed leaders is not a support gap at all. It is a person quietly working out that they were given a different job from the one they wanted, and having nowhere to raise it.