As a leader on a new team, you have new challenges ahead that not only pertain to business results but also with building trust and establishing credibility. Your first few months are a great opportunity to make your mark, set yourself up to influence your team, and command respect of other managers in the organization. Using a 30-60-90 day plan breaks up your numerous goals into smaller, actionable, items to be sure your first months as a manager lay the groundwork to make the most impact as a leader.
First 30 Days: Discovery & Ramp up
Focus on: people, culture, and getting up to speed on the job at hand.
During this time you should try to connect with as many people as you can, especially those on your team. Find out what their professional strengths are, their goals, and a little about their personal life. In conjunction, you should immerse yourself into the company culture. Have a full understanding of any company strategic plans, while living and breathing their core values. You should be promoting the culture and re-establishing everyone’s belief in the direction the organization is going.
In addition, the leadership team will expect you to become productive quickly.
Ramp up Checklist
-Join as many meetings as possible; absorb everything
- Get an understanding of your budget and conduct a comprehensive review
- Set up introductions with significant customers and vendors
- Meet with strategic partners that work with your department
- Take note of your team’s individual assignments and performance
Second 30 Days: Build your Brand & Implement Process
Focus on: taking your discovery data, analyzing it, and putting action behind it.
As you are absorbing information and laying the culture foundation among your team, you should start to understand how things operate and begin to form a plan on how to improve. Take this time to focus on training, simplifying procedures, improving process, and finding other efficiencies that will establish yourself as a consistent and reliable source.
Your success as a manager will often be measured by your impact on the team, both developmentally and productively.
Implementation Checklist
- Dig into the issues you hear about and ask the hard questions
- Conduct a weekly team meeting, run by a consistent agenda
- Create both team and individual production goals for each month or quarter
- Hold your team members accountable with weekly check-ins on their goal progress
- Document all best practices and processes for key team activities
- Replace any existing tools your team has deemed as unusable
Final 30 Days: Find Profitability & Sustain Growth
Focus on: keeping your established groundwork and pursuing strategic growth opportunities.
You have a firm grasp on your team dynamics and established processes in place. Once you’ve identified success at the base-level, it’s time to find areas of growth. Start with the work that’s been done thus far and build out from there. That doesn’t mean you should forget about continuing to enforce culture and process, it means you’re building up more value to bring to the company.
Your CEO will expect you to have your team fully productive and understand your future growth plan.
Growth & Sustainability Checklist
- Develop a team hiring plan (based on your budget recommendation)
- Present clear goals and results to upper management on a consistent basis (monthly, quarterly, etc.
- Contribute to the broader company strategy in executive team meetings
- Explore leveraging marketing in unique ways to grow your sector of business
- Collaborate with key stakeholders in other departments on a new growth project Have a clear vision and plan for your team moving forward
After 90 days the “training wheels” are off and you should be operating at a normal capacity of your role. Using this 30-60-90 day will help you get there and position yourself for success with others in the organization.