Case Study: The first 90 days

There's a book about it, but what does it actually look like? A case study from my recent experience.

I recently took a new role at a mature company. It was the least senior out of the three I’d been offered, but I had excellent chemistry with the CEO and senior leaders, and their need was desperate. The business was challenged. It wasn’t growing and sat in an awkward part of the value chain in its industry. A couple of years ago it had lost crucial resources in a restructure and that part of the business had been untouched & running on life support ever since.

They didn’t know what they needed but knew they needed something, and they wanted a generalist with leadership experience to come in and “make it work” with a view to building out into a proper team over time.

Getting started

When you start a new role, the very first thing is to assess where you’re at and what you’ve been hired to do.  Yeah you’re a marketing person or a bricklayer or whatever but what is the scope of your role?  Were you hired to lay bricks, or to teach junior bricklayers, or to project manage a team of bricklayers?   Does management simply need someone reliable & trustworthy who will show up on time and not leave for the pub at lunch? 

Is the role more subtle, for example are you being hired to re-moralise a demoralised team and role-model good practices and positive behaviours to get the group back on track?

Before I started, I caught up with my now-boss to touch base & get more of an understanding of where he’s at. Leadership had sold me heavily on the idea that I was going to be an “agent of change”, but I was sceptical** as the business was stagnant and I thought it more likely that when I arrived it would be stuck in its ways.

My new boss asked how I was thinking about approaching the role. Laying some groundwork to defuse any defensiveness the organisation might have, I said I’d like to come in and understand how things worked and see where the opportunities were, when he cut me off halfway.

“No.” he interjected. “We know what we have, and we hate it. We need someone to change it and that’s what we’ve hired you to do. I want you to destroy it - respectfully, of course. We’d be very disappointed if it was business as usual.”

Well!  That was about as clear a set of marching orders as you can expect, I think. We don’t know where we need to be, but we sure as hell don’t want to stay here.

When you’re taking a role in this capacity there are a few things you really want to check, but there is an even more important question, which is the one question I didn’t ask.

Does the hiring manager reflect the overall needs of the organisation or are they pushing their own agenda?

In this case, the hiring manager mostly reflected the views of the organisation, but not necessarily the view of all of the managers. It was a mix of both - pushing his agenda but also reflecting the organisation’s (confused, muddled) vague awareness that what it was doing wasn’t working.

This made it clear that at least part of my work would be in building consensus and alignment around the need to change and the path for delivering that change.

So - ask that question FIRST. Once you’ve figured out if your hiring manager is aligned with the organisation or pushing their own agenda, start working your way through the checklist below:

Checklist

• How open is the organisation to change?

• Is the organisation running smoothly or is it full of friction?  Organised or chaotic?

  • Is it run for cashflow/shareholders or is it run for the benefit of staff. How tight are the purse strings?

• Are people happy and do they feel like they’re winning?

• What type of organisation is it?  Is it open and collaborative or siloed and hierarchical?

• Do people welcome change or are they closed-minded and defensive?

• How much latitude do you have to actually change things?

• Are you able to “order” change or do you have to persuade? (you always have to persuade, but when you are a boss of some sorts, your “suggestions” carry a lot more weight)

• How good is communication in the organisation?

  • Is the strategy clear to everyone?  

  • What are the goals and how they are measured & shared?

  • Do teams get together and collaborate or do they just punt emails back and forth?

  • Do people re-communicate as goals and priorities shift, or are parts of the organisation regularly caught wrong-footed by shifting goalposts?

• How is the organisation doing financially?

  • Is there money and time available for new initiatives?

  • If there isn’t, what are the levers to pull to get money & time available for your initiatives?

  • How will the financial constraints on resources affect your strategy? 

    • NB:  Except in the direst of situations, there is always money and time available for small expenditures that will reduce cost and make more money  (the art is finding it)

The first 90 days:  The good, the bad, and the opportunity

Armed with these questions I went on a tour of the organisation. I was really surprised and impressed with how well aligned the business was around its value prop. Everyone really “got” the product and the company, and the most senior team member would tell roughly the same story as the most junior.

Most people, surprisingly, also said some variant of “I’m really glad you’re here” or “we need some fresh eyes” or, memorably, “don’t let anyone at this place, including me, poison you with their views… keep your outsider’s perspective”.

This was really good because it suggested pretty clearly the organisation knew what it was about, and recognised that it needed to change.

Offsetting this, I noticed a few things. When I approached a discussion, I would often use the open question “how does this work” or a “throwaway” observation like “that seems hard” to prompt further discussion.

More than a few times this led to an outburst like “oh yeah that’s atrocious, every knows it but the tech team has the business to ransom so it’s never going to change”  or  “yeah it’s completely fucked, I’ve been trying to tell them for 3 years that it’s too hard for customers to use but we FINALLY managed to make some small changes to it last month”.  

As a result, there were situations where people were not taking action to help themselves. Key changes were made without input from the appropriate people, and important things didn’t get done because people didn’t feel able to proceed.  When I asked one of the sales team why it’d taken three years to get started on an important project that was maybe half a day’s worth of work with no associated spend required, he said “ah well I guess we mostly sat around and complained about it, and nobody put their hands up to drive it forwards.” Bless him for his honesty.

The business was very labour-intensive and had heavily manual processes. I’ll give you an example – the “unsubscribe now” link at the bottom of marketing communications?  It opened a prepopulated email that a customer had to send to the customer support team, who had to manually action the change in customer preferences in the database.  The whole business ran like that.

I observed that there was a disconnect between the business unit’s perception of itself as a “growth” avenue within the conglomerate, and the actuality, which was a shrinking marketing budget, shrinking sales team, badly outdated technology. >90% of staff were employed in BAU, not growth.

At the end of the day, this was the 30,000-foot view:

• The business and its people feel stuck

• Most of the team is tied up in BAU instead of moving the business forwards

• It’s a slow-moving organisation and would benefit from faster cycle times or more urgency

• It recognises that it needs to change but the heavily manual processes will make it difficult to spend more time on growth

• I will have limited scope to unilaterally change things

  • The business has given me an enormous amount of trust

  • The head of the business unit hired me personally and I work for the 2IC of the business which gives some clout

  • However, the vast majority of my work will likely be evangelising and persuading of the need to change

• Communication within the organisation is poor

  • It is siloed and hierarchical. People are not used to asking questions

    • When management presents a biannual business update to the staff there are literally zero questions from the staff

  • For most teams / people there is limited clarity around goals & measuring them.  Some parts of the business work better than others.

  • There’s a tendency to punt emails back and forth instead of getting in the same room & on the same page.

  • I’ve been here 9 months at the time of writing, and I have not once (!!!) seen the business share its strategy, goals, or its progress towards them

• As a result of the communications and siloing issues, many of the conversations around what we’re trying to achieve are woolly and vague

  • there’s no real practice of measurement outside the headline revenue and profit numbers

• Fortunately, the organisation is extremely profitable.

  • However, it is a no-growth business and has had the same customer base for 10+ years. 

  • The corporate parent is (probably correctly) steadily starving it of resources to reallocate elsewhere

  • There’s a disconnect between how the business perceives itself & how it’s perceived by the corporate parent. This probably hasn’t helped some of its difficulties.

The strategy

Now, you can’t make a list of observations like that without also coming up with a plan for solving them – at least within the constraints of your current sphere of influence. If you haven’t read “The work that we do vs The way we do it” the following section won’t make a lot of sense.

My day to day work is to set a strategy and start executing on the work we need to do to improve my part of the business. That work is in progress, but the business needs more than that.  A mature business starved of funding with none of the usual levers for growth needs to get better at what it is doing day to day.  It also needs to generate growth and start to reverse the perception of itself as an ex-growth business, so that resources can start flowing more freely.

This is the strategy I have for that:

1. People need to start winning

Staff feel stuck and they are not stretching themselves.

I need them to have small wins so they see that the organisation can actually change.

Having a good experience here will encourage them to stretch themselves & start driving their parts of the business forwards.

2.       Communication, alignment, & goal setting needs to improve

People need a single direction and they need a target for their energy.

Communication across the organisation will improve alignment and fix a lot of the “people getting stuck” type problems.  This will especially be the case once people have had a few small wins and are looking for more

3.       We need to make progress

Once we are more open to change, looking to stretch ourselves, and are aligned on the direction, we need to generate actual progress

• A 1% increase in the rate of growth would be notable for this business

• If we can do that, that would be a good win and will open the door to more resources and funding

• This will open the door to slightly larger wins, which will free people up slightly more, & lead to slightly more stretching & progress

• This will ideally become a virtuous cycle

If the above can happen, the whole business will start to run better & get better results, not just my small part of it.

That’s how I navigated the first 90 days and came up with a strategy for improving the organisation.

**(The agent of change shtick is overrated and usually a terrible idea that ends with the change agent leaving in frustration after a year or two as the organisation chews them up and spits them out. Change needs to be implemented organisation-wide, one person can’t change a behemoth.)

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If you’ve worked in a similar situation, I’d love to hear your story. Share it down below, so we can all benefit from your experience.