The change you make in week three is the one you pay for in month seven

I took over a Nordic business unit three weeks after its previous leader was removed. In my second week I reorganised a reporting line. It was, on the information available to me, defensible. It was also wrong, and it cost me the trust of the two people whose support would have made the following year straightforward.

I have since watched perhaps sixty leaders through their first hundred and twenty days. The early visible change is the most common and most expensive error in the set.

Why it happens

Because doing nothing looks like nothing. A new leader arrives into a vacuum of expectation: the organisation is watching, the sponsor wants evidence, and the leader themselves is anxious to prove the appointment. Announcing a change is the fastest available proof of life.

The trouble is that in week three you know the org chart and the numbers, and almost nothing about who actually gets things done, which alliances are load-bearing, or why the obviously stupid process exists. That last one is worth dwelling on: the obviously stupid process is usually a scar. Somebody was burned, and the process is the bandage. Remove it without knowing that and you will re-open the wound in front of an audience.

What to do instead

Not nothing. Deliberate waiting, announced.

Write an entry plan that says: here is what I am learning, here is who I am learning it from, here is when I will decide, and here is the one thing I am changing now — because there is almost always exactly one thing that is safe and useful to change immediately, and choosing it well buys you the room to wait on everything else.

Then tell people that is what you are doing. The anxiety in an organisation waiting for a new leader is not really about the changes; it is about not knowing when they will come. A date removes most of it.

Design the listening tour like a message

The order in which a new leader sees people is itself a communication, and it is read carefully. If you see every executive in week one and the front line in week six, you have said something. If you see the two internal candidates who did not get your job late, politely, you have said something considerably worse.

A well-designed tour front-loads the people whose experience is furthest from the executive floor, and gets to the disappointed early rather than delicately.

Then check, at ninety days

Six structured conversations at day ninety: what has this arrival been like, what is clearer, what is less clear, what are people still waiting to see. Themed, de-identified, back within a week.

It is the cheapest course correction in leadership and virtually nobody does it, because at day ninety you are busy and the question feels risky. It is far less risky than finding out at month nine.

Deliberate waiting is a strategy. Passive waiting is a vacuum. They look identical from outside unless you say which one you are doing.