The First 30 Days
Every time I’ve taken over a new organization — and I’ve done it several times now, across different companies and different scales — the first 30 days follow roughly the same pattern. Not because I read it in a leadership book, but because I learned the hard way what happens when you skip steps.
The temptation when you walk into a new role is to start fixing things. You can see the problems. You probably identified some of them during the interview process. Your boss hired you because they want change, and the pressure to show early wins is real. But if you start changing things before you’ve listened, you’ll solve the wrong problems, alienate the people you need most, and burn credibility you haven’t earned yet.
Listen before you touch anything
When I took over a global support organization of over 200 people, I spent my first 30 days doing almost nothing but listening. Roughly 250 one-on-one meetings. Thirty minutes with every peer and direct report. Fifteen to thirty minutes with every person in the organization — all of them.
That sounds excessive. It’s not. Here’s what those conversations gave me:
First, I learned what was actually broken versus what leadership thought was broken. Those are rarely the same things. The C-suite had a narrative about what was wrong with the support org. The people doing the work had a different one. Both contained truth, but the version from the ground was far more actionable.
Second, I learned who the real leaders were. Not the people with the titles — the people the team actually trusted and relied on. Every organization has an informal power structure that doesn’t match the org chart. If you don’t map it in the first 30 days, you’ll spend the next six months wondering why your directives aren’t landing.
Third — and this is the one nobody talks about — I learned what had already been tried. Almost every problem I identified had been raised before, sometimes years earlier. People had proposed solutions. Those proposals had been ignored, deprioritized, or killed by someone upstream. Walking in with a “fresh perspective” and suggesting the same thing that was shot down two years ago doesn’t make you visionary. It makes you tone-deaf. Understanding the history of failed attempts is just as important as understanding the current state.
Build the punch list
Every piece of feedback I collected went into a single document. Not categorized by department or priority level — just a running list of everything people told me. Complaints, ideas, frustrations, observations, requests. All of it.
Then I organized it. Some items were quick wins — things I could fix in a week with a decision or a conversation. Some were systemic — problems that required structural changes, budget, or cross-functional cooperation. Some were things I couldn’t fix at all, because they were above my level or outside my scope.
The punch list became the single most important artifact of my first 90 days. Not a strategy deck. Not a transformation roadmap. A list of things people told me were broken, with a status next to each one showing what I was doing about it.
I shared it openly. In monthly all-hands meetings, we’d walk through the list: what we’d tackled, what was in progress, what was blocked and why. People could see their feedback turning into action. They could see that what they told me in that 15-minute conversation actually mattered.
That transparency did more for trust than any vision statement ever could.
Quick wins aren’t optional
There’s a school of thought that says new leaders should take their time, observe, build relationships before making changes. I agree with the spirit of that — don’t blow things up in week one. But I disagree with the implication that you should wait months before doing anything visible.
People are watching you from day one. They’re trying to figure out if you’re different from the last person, or if you’re just another leader who’ll listen politely and change nothing. If three months go by and nothing has visibly improved, they’ll have their answer.
Some of the quick wins I’ve landed in first 30 days: approving a schedule change that a team had been requesting for a year. Killing a standing meeting that everyone hated but nobody had the authority to cancel. Getting budget for a tool that cost less than a single employee’s monthly salary but removed hours of manual work. Fixing a broken escalation path that was causing tickets to bounce between teams.
None of these were strategic. None would show up in a board presentation. But every single one told the team: this person listened, and this person can get things done. That currency is worth more than any 90-day plan.
Don’t announce a vision
This is where I differ from a lot of leadership advice. The conventional playbook says: listen, assess, then present your vision. Do the listening tour, synthesize what you’ve learned, and come back with a bold strategy for where the organization is going.
I think that’s backwards — at least in the first 30 days.
When you’re new, your vision is based on incomplete information. You don’t understand the political landscape yet. You don’t know which hills are worth dying on and which ones have bodies already buried on them. And a grand vision from someone who just arrived can feel presumptuous to a team that’s been living with these problems for years.
What I do instead is show direction through action. The punch list, the quick wins, the things I prioritize and the things I don’t — all of that communicates where I’m headed without requiring a PowerPoint. By the time I’m ready to articulate a real strategy (usually around the 90-day mark), the team already has a feel for it because they’ve been watching it take shape through my decisions.
Vision without credibility is just a speech. Credibility without vision is just competence. You need both, but credibility comes first.
The relationship map
The other thing I build in the first 30 days is a relationship map — not of my team, but of the people my team depends on.
Who controls the budget decisions that affect my org? Who runs the engineering teams that build the tools my team relies on? Who makes the prioritization calls that determine whether my team’s needs get addressed or pushed to next quarter? Who has the CEO’s ear?
In most organizations, the support or services function is downstream of nearly every other department’s decisions. Product decides what to build. Engineering decides when to fix things. Sales decides what to promise customers. Finance decides how much to invest. My team inherits the consequences of all those decisions. If I don’t build relationships with those decision-makers early, I’ll spend my entire tenure reacting instead of influencing.
I learned this the hard way. In an earlier role, I spent my first months focused entirely inward — getting my team right, fixing processes, building culture. All good things. But by the time I looked up and tried to influence cross-functional decisions, the priorities were already set and my team’s needs were at the bottom of the list. Again.
Now, the relationship-building starts in week one. Not as a political exercise — as an operational one. The people who control the inputs to my organization need to hear from me early about what my team needs to succeed. And I need to hear from them about the constraints they’re operating under. That mutual understanding makes everything that follows easier.
What you’re really doing
The first 30 days aren’t about assessment, even though that’s what it looks like from the outside. They’re about three things:
Earning the right to lead. You have the title from day one. You don’t have the credibility. The team is watching to see if you’re worth following. Every meeting you take, every question you ask, every small thing you fix — it’s all building or eroding that credibility.
Mapping the real organization. The org chart tells you who reports to whom. The first 30 days tell you who actually influences what, where the real bottlenecks are, and which problems are structural versus political versus cultural. You can’t fix what you don’t understand, and you can’t understand it from the outside.
Building momentum. Organizational inertia is powerful. If a team has been neglected or poorly led, they’ve adapted to that reality. They’ve lowered their expectations. Getting them to believe things can actually change requires proof, not promises. The punch list, the quick wins, the visible follow-through — that’s the proof.
None of this is glamorous. There’s no dramatic “new sheriff in town” moment. It’s 250 conversations, a spreadsheet of complaints, and a series of small actions that individually mean nothing but collectively mean everything.
That’s what the first 30 days look like when you do them right. Not a listening tour — a credibility-building exercise disguised as one.
— Bruno