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The First 90 Days in Government: Critical Success Strategies for New Public Managers at All Levels
More than 250,000 public sector managers in the United States take on new positions each year and many more aspire to leadership. Each will confront special challenges--from higher public profiles to a greater number of stakeholders to volatile political environments--that will make their transitions even more challenging than in the business world. Now Michael D. Watkins, author of the best-selling book The First 90 Days, applies his proven leadership transition framework to the public sector. Watkins and co-author Peter H. Daly address the crucial differences between the private and public sectors that go to the heart of how success and failure are defined, measured, and rewarded or penalized. This concise, practical book provides a roadmap to help new government leaders at all levels accelerate their transitions by overcoming nine transition challenges, ranging from clarifying expectations to defining goals to building a team to managing personal stress. The authors also offer detailed strategies for avoiding major "transition traps." Zeroing in on the challenges facing new government leaders, Getting Up to Speed in Government is an indispensable guide for anyone seeking to lead and succeed in the public sector.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 2006
134 people are currently reading
295 people want to read
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January 11, 2017
The below was the product of my second day at work trololo.
Pertinent primer for aspiring public servants, with good context provided to educate the reader on how government is a different beast from the private sector.
First 90 Days Book Summary
Intro
In contrast to the business world, government programmes usually have a much higher public profile, a greater number of stakeholders, and a wider range of influence, so performance failures by government can have consequences measured not just by financial standards but also by public embarrassment, political defeats, and in some cases even by life or death.
When you find yourself in a new and unfamiliar situation, it is essential that you quickly grasp the risks and opportunities and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Most failures are the results of mismatches between the situation, with its challenges and opportunities, and the individual, with his or her strengths and weaknesses.
Knowing the right questions to ask can make the difference between success and failure.
e.g.: What am I expected to accomplish? What must I learn? How can I gain influence over events that will affect my success? How will I design my strategy? How will I manage my personal life and balance the new stresses that I will be experiencing?
It is much more difficult to figure out ‘the score’ in government than it is in business.
Public-sector leaders face the following challenges:
-The mission, goals and metrics of performance often are dictated by rigid statute or regulation beyond the control of the executive or those to whom he or she reports.
- Performance is subject to a high degree of transparency and often shifting, impatient public scrutiny.
-The stakeholders who exert influence over organisational performance are not only much vaster in number than those usually found in the business world, but they also bring to bear a more diverse and competitive set of interests.
-Direct access to critical resources often is impeded by opaque, remote, and onerous bureaucratic systems with long lead times.
Early in your transition, the overriding goal is to diagnose your situation so that you can develop situation-appropriate strategies. Using this early learning as a foundation you can define the goals you will seek to achieve as you strive to secure some early wins and build a foundation for improvement in your new organisation.
Bureaucracies of every kind depend on a clear chain of command to carry out the mission. Each level of leadership is directly linked to the agency’s ultimate goals through a carefully designed system of defined responsibilities, authority and accountability.
For more senior people, aligning the organisation’s architecture, building the team and creating alliances loom large. For less senior people, building a relationship with the new boss and creating a supportive advice-and-counsel network will be priorities. Every new leader needs to quickly become familiar with the new organisation, to secure early wins and to build supportive alliances.
Leaving people to flounder about in in transitions wastes time, energy and talent.
Clarify Expectations
The number one challenge you will face as a newly appointed public-sector leader is clarifying expectations concerning what you will accomplish in your new role. To surmount this challenge, you must engage in a focused effort to figure out what is required of you; to assess the associated risks, constraints, and opportunities; and to actively shape expectations. Critically, this means understanding the agendas of stakeholders and carefully diagnosing the political environment you are about to enter.
Clarify expectations before undertaking major initiatives.
It is imperative that you understand the conflicting pressure exerted on your boss by those who control key resources, administer various service systems such as personnel and procurement, and audit and evaluate organisational performance.
Diagnose the situation:
4 Situations:
1. Start-up
Least common situation faced by government managers. Usually precipitated by new exigency or major policy initiative, this type of challenge demands rapid organisational design and functional integration decisions, under conditions of high public scrutiny. Unsurprisingly, start-up situations tend to be higher risk.
2. Turnaround
Somewhat more common than start-up situations. Usually precipitated by a major performance failure or a scandal of some kind, these situations involve shake-ups of people and structures under conditions of high public scrutiny. These too are high-risk situations.
3. Realignment
A fairly typical situation faced by government executives, usually precipitated by shifting political or public-policy imperatives, involving either major reductions or increases in resource, resizing, and retraining under moderate public scrutiny. These tend to be medium-risk situations.
4. Sustaining Success
The most common type of situation faced by government leaders. Usually characterised by a stable mission and established operational structures, these situations may have an expanding or shrinking service base. Major challenges are the defence of existing domain and error avoidance. Though not in any sense risk-free, these tend to be lower-risk situations.
5 Conversations:
1. The Situation Conversation
Your goal is to gain an understanding of how your new boss sees the state of your new organisation. Once you learn more your perceptions may differ from your boss’s but understanding how they see the situation is essential if you are later to achieve a shared understanding of what challenges and opportunities lie ahead.
2. The Expectations Conversation
Clarify and negotiate what you are expected to accomplish. The basic principle is that it is better to underpromise and overdeliver than vice versa. You must work to actively shape expectations. If you do not manage them, they will manage you.
3. The Style Conversation
What is your boss’s preferred form of communication – face-to-face, e-mail, voice mail, memos? What sorts of decisions do they want to be consulted on, and when are you expected to make the call on your own?
4. The Resources Conversation
What do you need to be successful? (Not limited to people and funds)
Focus on underlying interests. Look for mutually beneficial exchanges. Link resources to results (e.g. sensitivity analysis)
5. The Personal Development Conversation
A discussion of how your tenure and performance in this job can contribute to your own growth. Training courses? Special projects?
Most bosses consider it a far greater problem when subordinates fail to report emerging problems early enough.
You should always brainstorm a few ways of addressing the problem before presenting it to your boss.
You cannot change your boss’s style, so learn to adapt to it.
Match Strategy to Situation
One of the main hurdles in developing a realignment strategy is that many organisations are in denial about their current situation.
Clarifying strategy choices:
1. How much emphasis should you place on learning as opposed to doing?
2. How much emphasis should you place on offense (identifying new initiatives, developing new structures, acquiring new technologies) versus defence (protecting your organisation’s domain, strengthening existing functions)?
3. What should you do to secure early wins?
4. Will you adopt a revolutionary (high urgency, problem teaches people) or evolutionary approach to change?
The vast majority of assignments in public-sector organisations is heavily skewed toward realignment and sustaining-success situations. As such the vast majority of managers in the public sector have to be effective at managing evolution rather than revolution.
Accelerate your Learning
You should strive during your first few weeks to learn as much as you can about challenges, resources, and barriers. To get up the learning curve fast, you have to be both pragmatic about what you need to learn and focused in how you go about learning it so as to avoid early missteps that could sap your energy and undermine your credibility.
You should approach your efforts to get up to speed as an investment process, and your time and energy as assets to be carefully managed. You are not learning for its own sake; rather, you are seeking actionable insights, or knowledge that will enable you to figure out what you need to do. You can do this by asking questions – about the past, present and future.
3 Lenses to diagnose organisations:
1. Technical Learning
Understanding the connection between what your organisation does every day and what its constituency expects or requires must be a primary item on your learning agenda.
2. Political Learning
Learning how decisions are made, identifying whom to consult, recognising influential coalitions (especially those whose support you will require), and developing a keen sense of policy imperatives are keys to achieving good political positioning when it comes to competition for staff, money, and other critical resources.
3. Cultural Learning
Culture has been defined as a set of shared expectations. To understand your group’s culture, you must peer beneath the surface-level signals, such as styles of dress and ways of communicating and interacting, as well as the social norms, or shared rules that guide behaviour, and explore the various work-specific mind-sets that exist in the organisation. For example, do people seem more interested in individual accomplishment and reward, or are they more focused on group performance? Do they show up to meetings on time? Do they seem engaged?
Figure out the deep-set assumptions group members take for granted. The more relevant assumptions involve the following:
Power. Who do employees believe can legitimately make decisions and exercise influence?
Value. What actions and outcomes do employees believe create value?
Perhaps the most critical role played by any leader, especially those at an organisation’s highest levels, is one of interpretation; the rules may provide a framework within which to act, but they do not by themselves dictate decisions.
Therefore, it is important to realise that an organisation’s culture more than its rules will serve to shape how it approaches new problems, problems not dealt with within the extant structure. Organisation charts and rule books are static and serve mainly to shape the present; they have little to say about how a bureaucracy should face new challenges and problems. In this sense, culture starts where rules leave off.
Some leaders make the mistake of arriving in their new positions with ‘the answer’. This causes their people to become hesitant to share information. Other new leaders take the time to learn but focus on the wrong things by drifting onto a risky course of self-fulfilling learning. Self-fulfilling learning means avoiding venturing into new areas and instead restricting your acquisition of information to the boundaries of your previous experience and training. This may leave you with a serious knowledge gap.
Vertical slices are a series of meetings with people at different levels of the organisation. They are especially useful for understanding how effectively upward and downward communication works in your new organisation.
Secure Early Wins
Making untested assumptions about the company culture is dangerous and can put you behind the curve during the most tenuous period of your transition.
Addressing the problems your boss sees as important will go a long way toward building your credibility with them and easing your access to resources.
You need to establish one-year goals to have a concrete target that guides your efforts both to get early wins and to lay a foundation for deeper improvements in performance. Well-defined goals will pull you forward. Critically, they will help you avoid getting caught up in firefighting or in overly tactical efforts to secure early wins.
Build the Team
It is essential to be clear about the mix of knowledge and judgement you need from key people. The best way to assess judgement is to work with a person for a while and assess whether they are able to make sound predictions and develop good strategies for avoiding problems. Both these abilities draw on an individual’s mental models, or ways of identifying the essential features and dynamics of emerging situations and translating those insights into effective action.
The limited power of monetary incentives coupled with the strong sense of job security that prevails across the government sector leave public-sector managers heavily reliant on pull tools.
The two kinds of decision making approaches:
Consult-and-decide: When a leader solicits information and advice from a group or series of individuals, but reserves the right to make the final call. More suited when the decision is likely to be divisive, otherwise everyone will be mad with each other. Make the call, take the heat. Also recommended for inexperienced teams, pointless to consult those who don’t know. Good for establishing authority early on (e.g. leading former peers).
Build Consensus: When the leader seeks both information and buy-in for any decision. If the decision requires energetic support from people whose performance you cannot adequately observe and control, use this.
Create Alliances
Listening and being known as a listener, for example, is a potent way to build credibility early on. Other key drivers include how you focus your time, how you treat people at lower levels in the organisation, and what early decisions you make.
As you assess your credibility-building strategy, consider whether you are at risk of:
-Being too frank or too tactful
-Being too accessible or too remote
-Being too demanding or not demanding enough
-Being too conservative or too impulsive
-Being too rigid or too flexible
-Being too energetic or not energetic enough
-Being unwilling to make hard personnel calls or prone to doing so in ways that could be perceived as inhumane
Achieve Alignment
Skipped this chapter because hey I'm not upper management, but I think this great article is very pertinent: https://hbr.org/2017/01/execution-is-...
Avoid Predictable Surprises
Bad news is usually much more valuable than good news, and it stifled at great risk.
Organisations become vulnerable when they lack the capacity either to (1) sense and respond to emerging threats in a timely manner or (2) learn from experience and disseminate the resulting lessons learned to the right people and places.
Two kinds of failures:
Sense-and-respond failures, which have subsets:
Recognition Failures, due to preconceived notions, confirmation bias, inoculation (boy who cried wolf), silos (e.g. various members of an organisation have pieces to the puzzle, but no one has them all – and no one knows who knows what). There is immense pressure within bureaucracies to filter information as it rises through the hierarchy. The temptation to withhold or gloss over sensitive, confusing or embarrassing information is great. Organisations can also suffer from illusory consensus, a problem rooted in the twin desires of most bureaucracies to avoid expending energy and incurring blame. The mirror image of illusory consensus is suppressed dissent, which can arise when one part of the organisation is vested with too much responsibility for a particular issue and seeks to retain its primacy.
Prioritisation failures, due to competing priorities, (information / noise) overload, secrecy, conflicts of interest, discounting the future, low-probability events. Failure to establish an ongoing process or environmental scanning will almost surely at some point result in the unpleasantness of a predictable surprise.
Mobilisation failures, including collective action problems (hoping someone else will step up), and
special-interest groups (e.g. lobbyists)
Learn-and-disseminate failures, which have subsets:
Focus failures: Where organisations are caught up in a cycle of firefighting and do not prioritise learning from experience.
Embedding failures: Lessons learnt and recorded are not disseminated appropriately. Possibly due to lessons being relational / tacit, which makes it harder for them to be reproduced.
Forgetting failures: Institutional knowledge not saved, perhaps due to retirement of experienced people.
Manage Yourself
Establish boundaries. If you cannot do it for yourself, you cannot expect others to do it for you.
Build an advice-and-counsel network. Staff them with the three kinds of supporters:
Technical advisers (provide expert analysis of tech and strategy),
Cultural interpreters (help you understand new culture and adapt to it)
Internal political counsellors (help you deal with political relationships within new organisation)
Pertinent primer for aspiring public servants, with good context provided to educate the reader on how government is a different beast from the private sector.
First 90 Days Book Summary
Intro
In contrast to the business world, government programmes usually have a much higher public profile, a greater number of stakeholders, and a wider range of influence, so performance failures by government can have consequences measured not just by financial standards but also by public embarrassment, political defeats, and in some cases even by life or death.
When you find yourself in a new and unfamiliar situation, it is essential that you quickly grasp the risks and opportunities and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Most failures are the results of mismatches between the situation, with its challenges and opportunities, and the individual, with his or her strengths and weaknesses.
Knowing the right questions to ask can make the difference between success and failure.
e.g.: What am I expected to accomplish? What must I learn? How can I gain influence over events that will affect my success? How will I design my strategy? How will I manage my personal life and balance the new stresses that I will be experiencing?
It is much more difficult to figure out ‘the score’ in government than it is in business.
Public-sector leaders face the following challenges:
-The mission, goals and metrics of performance often are dictated by rigid statute or regulation beyond the control of the executive or those to whom he or she reports.
- Performance is subject to a high degree of transparency and often shifting, impatient public scrutiny.
-The stakeholders who exert influence over organisational performance are not only much vaster in number than those usually found in the business world, but they also bring to bear a more diverse and competitive set of interests.
-Direct access to critical resources often is impeded by opaque, remote, and onerous bureaucratic systems with long lead times.
Early in your transition, the overriding goal is to diagnose your situation so that you can develop situation-appropriate strategies. Using this early learning as a foundation you can define the goals you will seek to achieve as you strive to secure some early wins and build a foundation for improvement in your new organisation.
Bureaucracies of every kind depend on a clear chain of command to carry out the mission. Each level of leadership is directly linked to the agency’s ultimate goals through a carefully designed system of defined responsibilities, authority and accountability.
For more senior people, aligning the organisation’s architecture, building the team and creating alliances loom large. For less senior people, building a relationship with the new boss and creating a supportive advice-and-counsel network will be priorities. Every new leader needs to quickly become familiar with the new organisation, to secure early wins and to build supportive alliances.
Leaving people to flounder about in in transitions wastes time, energy and talent.
Clarify Expectations
The number one challenge you will face as a newly appointed public-sector leader is clarifying expectations concerning what you will accomplish in your new role. To surmount this challenge, you must engage in a focused effort to figure out what is required of you; to assess the associated risks, constraints, and opportunities; and to actively shape expectations. Critically, this means understanding the agendas of stakeholders and carefully diagnosing the political environment you are about to enter.
Clarify expectations before undertaking major initiatives.
It is imperative that you understand the conflicting pressure exerted on your boss by those who control key resources, administer various service systems such as personnel and procurement, and audit and evaluate organisational performance.
Diagnose the situation:
4 Situations:
1. Start-up
Least common situation faced by government managers. Usually precipitated by new exigency or major policy initiative, this type of challenge demands rapid organisational design and functional integration decisions, under conditions of high public scrutiny. Unsurprisingly, start-up situations tend to be higher risk.
2. Turnaround
Somewhat more common than start-up situations. Usually precipitated by a major performance failure or a scandal of some kind, these situations involve shake-ups of people and structures under conditions of high public scrutiny. These too are high-risk situations.
3. Realignment
A fairly typical situation faced by government executives, usually precipitated by shifting political or public-policy imperatives, involving either major reductions or increases in resource, resizing, and retraining under moderate public scrutiny. These tend to be medium-risk situations.
4. Sustaining Success
The most common type of situation faced by government leaders. Usually characterised by a stable mission and established operational structures, these situations may have an expanding or shrinking service base. Major challenges are the defence of existing domain and error avoidance. Though not in any sense risk-free, these tend to be lower-risk situations.
5 Conversations:
1. The Situation Conversation
Your goal is to gain an understanding of how your new boss sees the state of your new organisation. Once you learn more your perceptions may differ from your boss’s but understanding how they see the situation is essential if you are later to achieve a shared understanding of what challenges and opportunities lie ahead.
2. The Expectations Conversation
Clarify and negotiate what you are expected to accomplish. The basic principle is that it is better to underpromise and overdeliver than vice versa. You must work to actively shape expectations. If you do not manage them, they will manage you.
3. The Style Conversation
What is your boss’s preferred form of communication – face-to-face, e-mail, voice mail, memos? What sorts of decisions do they want to be consulted on, and when are you expected to make the call on your own?
4. The Resources Conversation
What do you need to be successful? (Not limited to people and funds)
Focus on underlying interests. Look for mutually beneficial exchanges. Link resources to results (e.g. sensitivity analysis)
5. The Personal Development Conversation
A discussion of how your tenure and performance in this job can contribute to your own growth. Training courses? Special projects?
Most bosses consider it a far greater problem when subordinates fail to report emerging problems early enough.
You should always brainstorm a few ways of addressing the problem before presenting it to your boss.
You cannot change your boss’s style, so learn to adapt to it.
Match Strategy to Situation
One of the main hurdles in developing a realignment strategy is that many organisations are in denial about their current situation.
Clarifying strategy choices:
1. How much emphasis should you place on learning as opposed to doing?
2. How much emphasis should you place on offense (identifying new initiatives, developing new structures, acquiring new technologies) versus defence (protecting your organisation’s domain, strengthening existing functions)?
3. What should you do to secure early wins?
4. Will you adopt a revolutionary (high urgency, problem teaches people) or evolutionary approach to change?
The vast majority of assignments in public-sector organisations is heavily skewed toward realignment and sustaining-success situations. As such the vast majority of managers in the public sector have to be effective at managing evolution rather than revolution.
Accelerate your Learning
You should strive during your first few weeks to learn as much as you can about challenges, resources, and barriers. To get up the learning curve fast, you have to be both pragmatic about what you need to learn and focused in how you go about learning it so as to avoid early missteps that could sap your energy and undermine your credibility.
You should approach your efforts to get up to speed as an investment process, and your time and energy as assets to be carefully managed. You are not learning for its own sake; rather, you are seeking actionable insights, or knowledge that will enable you to figure out what you need to do. You can do this by asking questions – about the past, present and future.
3 Lenses to diagnose organisations:
1. Technical Learning
Understanding the connection between what your organisation does every day and what its constituency expects or requires must be a primary item on your learning agenda.
2. Political Learning
Learning how decisions are made, identifying whom to consult, recognising influential coalitions (especially those whose support you will require), and developing a keen sense of policy imperatives are keys to achieving good political positioning when it comes to competition for staff, money, and other critical resources.
3. Cultural Learning
Culture has been defined as a set of shared expectations. To understand your group’s culture, you must peer beneath the surface-level signals, such as styles of dress and ways of communicating and interacting, as well as the social norms, or shared rules that guide behaviour, and explore the various work-specific mind-sets that exist in the organisation. For example, do people seem more interested in individual accomplishment and reward, or are they more focused on group performance? Do they show up to meetings on time? Do they seem engaged?
Figure out the deep-set assumptions group members take for granted. The more relevant assumptions involve the following:
Power. Who do employees believe can legitimately make decisions and exercise influence?
Value. What actions and outcomes do employees believe create value?
Perhaps the most critical role played by any leader, especially those at an organisation’s highest levels, is one of interpretation; the rules may provide a framework within which to act, but they do not by themselves dictate decisions.
Therefore, it is important to realise that an organisation’s culture more than its rules will serve to shape how it approaches new problems, problems not dealt with within the extant structure. Organisation charts and rule books are static and serve mainly to shape the present; they have little to say about how a bureaucracy should face new challenges and problems. In this sense, culture starts where rules leave off.
Some leaders make the mistake of arriving in their new positions with ‘the answer’. This causes their people to become hesitant to share information. Other new leaders take the time to learn but focus on the wrong things by drifting onto a risky course of self-fulfilling learning. Self-fulfilling learning means avoiding venturing into new areas and instead restricting your acquisition of information to the boundaries of your previous experience and training. This may leave you with a serious knowledge gap.
Vertical slices are a series of meetings with people at different levels of the organisation. They are especially useful for understanding how effectively upward and downward communication works in your new organisation.
Secure Early Wins
Making untested assumptions about the company culture is dangerous and can put you behind the curve during the most tenuous period of your transition.
Addressing the problems your boss sees as important will go a long way toward building your credibility with them and easing your access to resources.
You need to establish one-year goals to have a concrete target that guides your efforts both to get early wins and to lay a foundation for deeper improvements in performance. Well-defined goals will pull you forward. Critically, they will help you avoid getting caught up in firefighting or in overly tactical efforts to secure early wins.
Build the Team
It is essential to be clear about the mix of knowledge and judgement you need from key people. The best way to assess judgement is to work with a person for a while and assess whether they are able to make sound predictions and develop good strategies for avoiding problems. Both these abilities draw on an individual’s mental models, or ways of identifying the essential features and dynamics of emerging situations and translating those insights into effective action.
The limited power of monetary incentives coupled with the strong sense of job security that prevails across the government sector leave public-sector managers heavily reliant on pull tools.
The two kinds of decision making approaches:
Consult-and-decide: When a leader solicits information and advice from a group or series of individuals, but reserves the right to make the final call. More suited when the decision is likely to be divisive, otherwise everyone will be mad with each other. Make the call, take the heat. Also recommended for inexperienced teams, pointless to consult those who don’t know. Good for establishing authority early on (e.g. leading former peers).
Build Consensus: When the leader seeks both information and buy-in for any decision. If the decision requires energetic support from people whose performance you cannot adequately observe and control, use this.
Create Alliances
Listening and being known as a listener, for example, is a potent way to build credibility early on. Other key drivers include how you focus your time, how you treat people at lower levels in the organisation, and what early decisions you make.
As you assess your credibility-building strategy, consider whether you are at risk of:
-Being too frank or too tactful
-Being too accessible or too remote
-Being too demanding or not demanding enough
-Being too conservative or too impulsive
-Being too rigid or too flexible
-Being too energetic or not energetic enough
-Being unwilling to make hard personnel calls or prone to doing so in ways that could be perceived as inhumane
Achieve Alignment
Skipped this chapter because hey I'm not upper management, but I think this great article is very pertinent: https://hbr.org/2017/01/execution-is-...
Avoid Predictable Surprises
Bad news is usually much more valuable than good news, and it stifled at great risk.
Organisations become vulnerable when they lack the capacity either to (1) sense and respond to emerging threats in a timely manner or (2) learn from experience and disseminate the resulting lessons learned to the right people and places.
Two kinds of failures:
Sense-and-respond failures, which have subsets:
Recognition Failures, due to preconceived notions, confirmation bias, inoculation (boy who cried wolf), silos (e.g. various members of an organisation have pieces to the puzzle, but no one has them all – and no one knows who knows what). There is immense pressure within bureaucracies to filter information as it rises through the hierarchy. The temptation to withhold or gloss over sensitive, confusing or embarrassing information is great. Organisations can also suffer from illusory consensus, a problem rooted in the twin desires of most bureaucracies to avoid expending energy and incurring blame. The mirror image of illusory consensus is suppressed dissent, which can arise when one part of the organisation is vested with too much responsibility for a particular issue and seeks to retain its primacy.
Prioritisation failures, due to competing priorities, (information / noise) overload, secrecy, conflicts of interest, discounting the future, low-probability events. Failure to establish an ongoing process or environmental scanning will almost surely at some point result in the unpleasantness of a predictable surprise.
Mobilisation failures, including collective action problems (hoping someone else will step up), and
special-interest groups (e.g. lobbyists)
Learn-and-disseminate failures, which have subsets:
Focus failures: Where organisations are caught up in a cycle of firefighting and do not prioritise learning from experience.
Embedding failures: Lessons learnt and recorded are not disseminated appropriately. Possibly due to lessons being relational / tacit, which makes it harder for them to be reproduced.
Forgetting failures: Institutional knowledge not saved, perhaps due to retirement of experienced people.
Manage Yourself
Establish boundaries. If you cannot do it for yourself, you cannot expect others to do it for you.
Build an advice-and-counsel network. Staff them with the three kinds of supporters:
Technical advisers (provide expert analysis of tech and strategy),
Cultural interpreters (help you understand new culture and adapt to it)
Internal political counsellors (help you deal with political relationships within new organisation)
March 27, 2019
To be fair to the authors, this book is supposed to be a reference guide one revisits during the first 90 days. I read it over two weeks and will likely not revisit it. I found it to be a typical self-help book that offers common sense wisdom, but little practical advice for implementation. Example, the book states a leader should be accessible to his subordinates, but not familiar. We all would agree, but what does that look like? That was the book's weakness.
July 6, 2018
Fantastic resource for anyone contemplating taking on a new role as manager in the public sector. Thoughtful, with helpful frameworks and practical tools... best read when you have a particular situation in mind to apply it to.
June 9, 2015
Great book for re-energizing how you think about your current position in government - or for those who have made, or are contemplating a change in jobs.
July 2, 2018
The best gift I received as I became a public servant.
August 30, 2022
Nothing of deeper value in the book specific for government when compared to the previous “The First 90 Days.” Having read both and reviewed Gartners “First 100 Days” I suggest the earlier Watkins book that is less government focused. The early book is more a playbook for transition.
This book architecture was less the 90 day plan and more; organization change inhibitor, use case, collection of list or diagrams, acceleration check list, and conclusion. The use cases are a blend of examples in bright spots and failures. The book is less a playbook and more collection of organization change challenges, unique challenges of government transformation, and possible figure exhibits.
However, if you have the time and US government is new to you read with the previous Watkins book too.
This book architecture was less the 90 day plan and more; organization change inhibitor, use case, collection of list or diagrams, acceleration check list, and conclusion. The use cases are a blend of examples in bright spots and failures. The book is less a playbook and more collection of organization change challenges, unique challenges of government transformation, and possible figure exhibits.
However, if you have the time and US government is new to you read with the previous Watkins book too.
September 7, 2020
Don’t let the title fool you. This is not just for individuals transitioning from the private to the public sector. Instead, it offers guidance for anyone transitioning into a new leadership position within the government. In particular, I think that the advice is beneficial to those who have been brought in to fix a problematic division. There’s much in here about learning about the organization’s culture, what led to the challenges, and how you can leverage the current culture to shape the desired behavior.
June 5, 2020
Should be mandatory reading
This is a great book! It has practical at solutions for problems that all new supervisors, managers, and leaders will face. My only small recommendation is to make an edition specifically for the Department of Defense, perhaps with the help of a former Chairman of the Joint Chief’s of Staff, and make it mandatory at every phase of Primary Military Education.
Great book, I’m sure I will re-read it many times in the future.
This is a great book! It has practical at solutions for problems that all new supervisors, managers, and leaders will face. My only small recommendation is to make an edition specifically for the Department of Defense, perhaps with the help of a former Chairman of the Joint Chief’s of Staff, and make it mandatory at every phase of Primary Military Education.
Great book, I’m sure I will re-read it many times in the future.
April 24, 2022
Decent read about being in government. I think a lot of the content is applicable to those working in the commercial sector. Some useful advice, but this book is really directed towards those in senior leadership positions. The book is older and needs a revision re: discussion about how relationships and transitions etc change in the new era of mass telework / remote work.
January 2, 2023
This book was very comparable to the blue-cover “First 90 Days,” but added some insights concerning where government businesses make value. For example, providing national security versus turning profit.
Some tools and techniques stand out as more immediately practical than others, but all in all a good aid in developing a leadership transition plan.
Some tools and techniques stand out as more immediately practical than others, but all in all a good aid in developing a leadership transition plan.
July 22, 2017
Not the easiest read on the shelf (unless you need some help nodding off) but the advice is quite solid and actionable. Wish I had read this book when I first started my job, and I will likely buy my own copy to reference with future job changes.
February 5, 2020
Definitely some good, core advice here. Just a warning that a lot of this book is geared toward arriving in a situation that is under turmoil or in transition. So, people coming into other situations won't get as much from this book. But there's something to learn for most people.
September 10, 2018
Really wonderful book to help frame leadership challenges and opportunities in a point of transition.
January 24, 2019
Nice framework to accelerate your transition to a new management position in the government.
May 31, 2019
4.5 out of 5 stars. I will concede that this book is dry. So is the subject matter. So is dietary fiber. The contents of this book are extremely helpful in shaping how you think about managing new teams in a range of scenarios. I would give this book a strong recommend, especially because the vocabulary that the book introduces (STaRS, etc.) are well-used among the management ranks throughout the government, and understanding the terminology gives you a common vocabulary when considering or obtaining new managerial jobs.
September 18, 2020
Interesting and positive take on how to understand a leadership role coming in somewhere for the first time. A lot of useful tips and strategies on how to proceed and avoid mistakes.
April 17, 2025
A little repetitious but overall had some helpful information.
December 28, 2025
For anyone looking at taking on new leadership roles, inside or outside of government, this book is very very useful.
November 15, 2008
This is actually a great book if you are going into a new position in any organization at a decision-making or management level. It even has some excellent suggestions for questions to ask (which I will refer to when interviewing for future jobs) in order to understand the environment at an organization.
June 7, 2010
Thought this was a pretty sensible book offering good, usable tips. While differences do exist across systems in different countries, I thought it was still good to find such a book customised for public managers, which highlighted significant challenges when making transitions in the public sector vis-a-vis the private sector. Useful reference.
January 27, 2013
Excellent resource
January 14, 2017
Even though this is tailored to managers in the government, I think that this is a useful reference for a manager in a corporate environment or officer in the military as well.
August 18, 2007
The title says it all.
Currently reading
April 20, 2012Very helpful so far.
July 8, 2013
Great book with great advice.
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