The First 90 Days in a New Senior Role

The First 90 Days in a New Senior Role: What Nobody Tells You

When I was a VP of Sales at a global healthcare company, flying in and out of Basel and Frankfurt every other week, I was absolutely convinced that someone was going to tap me on the shoulder and say: "Erm, time's up Andrew. We've found a real VP of Sales."

That feeling lasted months. I tried to bring my full self to work, and he barely made it past reception. Acting a role is exhausting, and I did a fair old amount of it.

Nobody warned me that would happen.

They never do.

If you're in the early weeks of a new senior role right now and something about this resonates, I want to say it clearly: you're probably not in the wrong job. You're almost certainly just in the normal part.

The identity shift nobody puts in the induction pack

Here's the thing.

You got hired on the basis of who you were. But the role asks for a slightly different version of you.

The habits that made you successful in your last job don't automatically transfer. The style that worked in your previous culture might land differently here. When you step into a significant new position, you're bringing your old self into a situation where the rules are different, the tolerance for not-knowing is lower, and you're supposed to have it together from day one.

That tension is real, and we almost all feel it. Most of us deal with it alone and say nothing, because saying something feels like admitting we shouldn't be there.

It's not quite the right conclusion.

The colleague no bugger warns you about

Most people stepping into a senior role find one of these somewhere in the building.

The one who smiles in the meeting and briefs against you after it. The one who was perfectly pleasant through the whole interview process and is now, somehow, consistently difficult. The one who has been there fourteen years and has absolutely no intention of making your life easy.

The instinct is usually to accommodate them. Keep the peace. Kill them with kindness.

In my experience, that rarely works.

What tends to help is getting deliberate about the relationship early. Have the slightly cringy conversation about how you're going to work together before it becomes necessary. A difficult colleague with clear expectations is manageable. The more dangerous version is the one who's been biding their time for six months while you were still hoping they'd come round.

This is not unusual bad luck. It's the political reality of most organisations, and it's almost never visible from the outside looking in.

What almost everyone gets wrong first

The pressure to show impact is real. Your new organisation wants results. You want to justify the decision. That combination sends most newly-appointed senior leaders into a frenzy of simultaneous effort in the first quarter.

Show strategic vision. Win the team over. Fix what the last person left behind. Make your mark on the culture. All at once. Immediately.

In practice it scatters your energy and makes it harder to do any of it well.

My advice to most executives in this situation: identify one unhelpful pattern from your last role and consciously leave it behind. Then find your single primary objective for the first 90 days and concentrate your effort there.

Your employer didn't hire you to arrive fully formed. They hired you for what you can BUILD.

The conversation you're not having at work

At VP or director level, there are very few people you can be properly honest with.

Your team needs your steadiness. Your boss needs your results. Your peers are your competition in ways nobody acknowledges openly. Your partner is brilliant but they're not impartial.

So the real conversations happen elsewhere. Over dinner when you're tired. On the commute home, staring out of the window. In your own head at 2am when you've woken up and can't quite name why.

Whether this was the right move. Whether the culture is what it looked like from the outside. Whether you're OK.

That gap has a cost. Concerns that don't get aired. Decisions that don't get challenged. Good people who eventually check out without anyone quite understanding why.

It's not a leadership failure. It's a structural one. Senior leaders need a confidential space to think that doesn't exist inside most organisations.

What tends to work

Executive coaching in the first 90 days of a new senior role isn't about fixing something broken.

It's having a thinking partner who is completely outside your organisation, who has no stake in the politics, and who can help you find your footing without the cost of keeping it all in.

One of my clients, a newly appointed director, told me after a few months together that for the first time in her career she wasn't constantly trying to prove she deserved to be there.

That shift doesn't come from having it together. It comes from having the space to process what you're experiencing in real time, rather than letting it accumulate until something gives way.

If you're in your first 90 days in a new senior role and it's harder than you expected, that's completely normal. It doesn't mean you made the wrong choice.

It usually means you haven't had the space to think it through yet.

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💬 If you'd like to do that thinking with someone who has been there, I'm happy to talk. My details are on this site: Arrange a conversation