You have arrived. Something about how the place operates is wrong, several people have told you so within the first fortnight, and there is an expectation that you will act.
You also know less about this organization than anybody who works in it, and the latitude you currently hold is the largest you will ever have.
Maximum permission, minimum information
The first several months are the only period in which a leader can change things without having to justify each one against established practice. Everybody expects a new person to alter something and will absorb it.
It is also the period in which you cannot tell which practices are load-bearing, which of the people telling you things are reliable, and what any given arrangement is actually solving.
Those two facts point in opposite directions, and the pressure runs entirely one way. Acting is visible, expected, and produces a sense of progress. Enquiring looks like nothing is happening.
The resolution is to make the enquiry itself the visible activity. An organization watching a new leader systematically ask why things are done this way is not concluding that nothing is happening. It is concluding something quite favourable, and it is also being told what the leader considers important by which questions get asked.
Who tells you things first
The people who arrive early with an account of the organization are a non-random sample, and treating their account as the picture is the most common early error.
They are typically people who were unhappy under the previous arrangement, people positioning for something, or people who are simply comfortable approaching authority. Each may be telling the truth, and none of them is representative.
The people who wait are frequently the ones with the most accurate view, because they are watching to see what kind of leader you are before committing to a position. They will speak in month four, and only if what they observed in months one to three warranted it.
Which is a reason to hold conclusions loosely for longer than feels comfortable, and to go looking for the quiet ones rather than waiting.
Do not enforce a dormant standard without warning
The written standards say one thing. Observation establishes that the operative line sits well below them.
Enforcing the written version without notice is functionally the introduction of a new rule presented as continuity, and everybody caught by it will experience an injustice they can describe accurately. They were behaving acceptably last month under a standard the organization had established by four years of practice.
Say what you are doing instead. The handbook says this and it has not been the practice. It is going to be the practice from the first of the month, and here is what will happen when it is not met.
Nobody objects to a new standard announced as one. People object, correctly, to being held to something they had every reason to think was dormant.
The predecessor
How a new leader speaks about the person before them is read closely, and criticising them is more expensive than it appears.
The people in the room worked under that person, in many cases willingly and for years. An account that treats the previous arrangement as obviously deficient is also an account of them as having tolerated something obviously deficient, and it will be received that way.
It also establishes that leaders here are discussed unfavourably once they are gone, which every person in the organization will note and apply to themselves in due course.
The workable position is that circumstances have changed rather than that judgment was poor. It is frequently true, it costs nothing, and it permits the change without requiring anybody to disown their own history.
Name what is not changing
The single most stabilising thing a new leader can say, and it is almost always omitted.
In the absence of a statement, an organization assumes everything is provisional. People stop initiating, defer decisions until the new direction is clear, and spend months in a holding pattern that gets read as resistance.
Naming three or four things that will not change ends that immediately. It requires the leader to have decided what those are, which is itself a useful discipline, and it gives people something to work from while the rest is being examined.
The one thing worth doing early
If the enquiry period is the right general posture, one exception is worth making, and it should be chosen deliberately.
Somewhere in the organization there is a standard everybody agrees should hold and that has been visibly unenforced, usually because enforcing it would have been awkward for a specific reason. Enforce that one, early, and say why.
It costs little because the organization already believes the standard is right. It demonstrates that consequences now attach to it. And it does more to establish what kind of leader has arrived than any amount of stated intention, because it is an instance rather than a claim.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD