New chiefs are handed a story about urgency. The board is tired, the last regime is blamed, and the organisation is braced for a symbolic change — a reorganisation, a slogan, a departure. Symbols are cheap. They are also how a new leader spends the only period in which people will still tell the truth.
What a new chief should not touch
The first hundred days are not a mandate to rearrange the furniture. They are a mandate to learn which walls are load-bearing.
There are things that can wait, and should.
- 01
Do not redraw the organisation chart until you have watched a real decision travel.
The chart is a hypothesis about how work happens. If you edit it in month one, you are editing the hypothesis you were given, not the one you observed. You will then spend a year managing the exceptions your new chart created.
- 02
Do not rename the strategy.
If the strategy is wrong, say what is wrong in specifics: a customer you should leave, a cost you have misclassified, a bet that has expired. A new sentence on the website is not a change of strategy. It tells the building that language is the work.
- 03
Do not clear the room to prove you are serious.
A few roles may be wrong. A purge is a way to avoid learning which ones. The people who know where the numbers bend will leave first, because they can.
What does not wait
A new chief becomes credible by finishing things, not by announcing a programme.
What does not wait is narrower. Learn the cash, not the narrative about the cash. Sit with the forecast and the last four misses, and ask what was knowable at the time.
Choose two or three decisions that are actually open — not twenty initiatives inherited from a process — and close them in writing. Tell the organisation what you will not change. Protection is a management tool. People cannot help you look if they are busy hiding the work they think you are about to abolish.
The job in the first year is sequence. Sequence is less exciting than a vision speech. It is also the difference between a transition and a restart no one consented to.
Engage
Tell us the decision in front of you.
We do not need a deck. We need enough to know whether we are the right practice.