Now What? The First 90 Days
Every job in the military is unique. There is always something new to learn in the first 90 days as a new manager. However, as a senior leader you are selected for leadership positions because of the foundation of a decade or two of experience and your potential to lead well. Yet, the same advice is always given: Don't be so eager to change things when you arrive. That generally results in stepping into your new office, firing up the computer, and then saying to yourself, "Now what?"
I remember the moment well. It is easy to answer that question with, "Find problems and fix them!" That is part of the story. When I first took squadron command, one of my new subordinate leaders wanted to change a number of things within the first few days of my being in the seat. Despite my guidance that we would wait to identify the root cause of why the previous team established certain processes, my subordinate pushed, maneuvered, and attempted to take some of my decision space. It was an awkward first staff meeting. My subordinate leader felt they had more experience. The truth was we both had experience in different areas that complemented one another. However, I knew we didn't know why the previous processes and procedures were in place and the organizational dynamics that shaped them. I knew with high confidence it wasn't due to incompetence.
That gap — between what I thought I understood walking in and what I actually understood ninety days later — is the whole subject of this post. Every new supervisor gets some version of the standard advice: listen first, build relationships, don't make big changes right away. That advice isn't wrong. It's also not specific enough to actually use. Here's what I've learned about what to do with those first ninety days, broken into five things I wish someone had told me plainly the first time I took over a team.
1. You Don't Know What You Don't Know Yet
The hardest thing to accept in a new leadership role isn't that you have gaps. It's that you can't see the shape of them yet. You walk in competent — that's why you got the job — and competence has a way of disguising itself as understanding. The two are not the same.
This isn't just a confidence problem. Research on organizational socialization describes the first months in a new role as a period of genuine uncertainty, one that newcomers have to actively work to reduce — not by acting faster, but by gathering information before they act. The leaders who adjust well aren't the ones who arrive with the most answers. They're the ones who spend the early weeks finding out which of their assumptions are wrong.
I wrote about a version of this same blind spot in how easily logic and experience can mislead a leader who hasn't checked them against someone else's view. The fix there is the same fix here: bias your questions to "Why," especially for those you think you already know the answer to.
The most dangerous assumption a new leader makes isn't a wrong one. It's the one they don't know they're making.
2. You Don't Know Who You Don't Know
Closely related, and just as easy to miss: you don't yet know the full cast of people who matter to your success. Not just your direct reports — the peers, the cross-functional partners, the person two levels down who somehow has every department's phone number.
Neuroscientist Michael Platt, who directs the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative, has spent two decades studying what he calls the brain's "social brain network" — the collection of regions that let us read other people, track relationships, and navigate group dynamics. His research, detailed in The Leader's Brain, makes a point that matters here: that network can be actively exercised and strengthened, the same way you'd train any other skill. New supervisors who treat relationship-mapping as a discrete, deliberate exercise — not something that happens passively over time — adjust faster than those who wait for the map to draw itself.
So draw it on purpose. Who do you need to know that you haven't met yet? Who reports to your peers but actually drives the work? Who's been here fifteen years and remembers why things are the way they are? You can't build trust with people you haven't identified.
3. Find the Power Brokers — Especially If Change Is Already Underway
This is the angle most first-ninety-days advice skips entirely, and it's the one that matters most if you're stepping into an organization that's already mid-transformation.
Every team has an org chart, and every team has a second map laid on top of it — who people actually go to when something's wrong, whose opinion moves a room, who can kill an initiative without ever saying no to your face. Research on informal networks inside organizations has shown for decades that these unofficial structures often carry more real influence during periods of stress or crisis than the formal hierarchy does. If you're walking into a team that's navigating a reorg, a leadership change, or any kind of disruption, that informal network isn't a nice-to-know — it's the terrain you're actually operating on.
MIT Sloan Management Review's research on change leadership makes a related point: leaders consistently mistake "powerful" for "holds a senior title," when the people who actually move a change effort are often the ones with informal credibility — the technical expert everyone defers to, the person who can translate a decision into terms the rest of the team will accept. Find those people before you need them, not after.
4. Notice What Doesn't Make Sense. Don't Touch It Yet.
You will see things in your first ninety days that make no sense to you. A process with three extra steps. A meeting that seems to exist for no reason. A rule nobody can explain. The instinct — especially if you were promoted for being good at fixing things — is to fix it immediately.
Don't. Not yet.
This is the leadership version of Chesterton's Fence: don't tear down a fence until you understand why someone put it there. You don't yet have the context to know whether that extra step is bureaucratic waste or the reason a past failure never happened again. Write it down. Ask about it later, once you've earned the standing to ask without it sounding like a complaint. Most of these things resolve themselves once you understand the history. The ones that don't, you can act on — but from a position of understanding, not assumption.
I learned a harder version of this lesson the first time I stepped back and let competence — not rank — earn the room's trust. The instinct to act fast is almost always a confidence move, not a leadership one.
5. You Have to Be Accepted by the Tribe First
Here's the part nobody puts on a slide: authority is granted on paper, but acceptance is earned in person, and the two timelines are not the same. You can have the title on day one and still be an outsider in week six.
This isn't sentiment — it's wired into how groups actually work. Neuroscience research on status and social hierarchy has identified specific brain regions that track an individual's position relative to others in a group, a process that operates largely below conscious awareness. Groups are constantly, automatically assessing whether a new member belongs — and that assessment isn't settled by a title change. It's settled by repeated, consistent behavior that shows you understand and respect the norms of the people you're now leading.
That means orienting yourself to how the team actually operates before you start changing how it operates. It means showing up consistently, following through on small things, and letting your competence — not your position— do the early talking. Attempting to use your position to coerce the organization is a surefire road to disaster. Durable change will occur when you possess legitimate authority through a relational foundation. It almost always follows slower than you'd like, but it is crucial to possess.
If you'd like a further discussion on this topic and the differences between authority and power in organizations, this Mitchell and Spady article has been incredibly influential in my thinking. (unfortunately, only accessible through institutional library access)
You were given the position. You still have to earn the room.
Bringing It Together
Ninety days isn't a deadline. It's a window — the only one you'll get where it's still acceptable to ask basic questions, where people will forgive you for not knowing things, where your standing is still forming instead of fixed. Use it. Map the people. Find the ones who actually hold influence. Write down what confuses you instead of fixing it. And give the room time to decide you belong before you start telling it what to do differently.
The leaders who struggle in their first year aren't usually the ones who moved too slowly. They're the ones who tried to lead a team they hadn't yet taken the time to understand.
What did you learn in your own first ninety days — the thing nobody told you, that you had to figure out the hard way? I'd genuinely like to hear it.
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