CEOs' First 100 Days

The first 100 days for a new CEO are anything but normal these days. CEOs must be prepared for the unusual and the abnormal, especially for those newly named. The good news is that many of the first 100 day principles — listening, building your top team, setting priorities, communicating internally and setting forth behavior and actions that explain who you are and what matters — are still in effect. But in the COVID era, everything seems to need greater haste and more intensity to advance a business that has essentially moved online.

Over the weekend, thinking about a new president-elect, I went back to a terrific article from McKinsey on the CEO moment. It is chock full of interesting CEO advice and reflection from CEOs themselves on what it has been like leading an enterprise during these abnormal times, lessons learned and what is needed to succeed. Although I highlighted one sentence after another, a good place to start for a new CEO would be asking oneself, “What would an outsider do? And what would your COVID-19 answer be?”

The article describes what actions and experiences CEOs have found to be necessary, adaptive and beneficial to the company. Many of the CEOs quoted are not brand new but I would argue that being a CEO during COVID, leading through the social unrest in the USA and societal challenges in general, the geopolitical risks facing us and the pressing economic issues surging around us are akin to starting over. I pulled together many of the excellent questions that are sprinkled throughout the article and which might provoke a framework for thinking ahead. They are:

• Where should we be aspiring 10x higher and/or 10x faster?

• What beliefs or long-held assumptions do I need to explicitly reset in the organization and with stakeholders to achieve this?

• What do we say no to, or stop doing, to create the additional space to go bigger and faster?

• What qualities am I bringing and showing up with that I should continue to bring into the future?

• How, practically, should I hold myself accountable? How will I ensure that others help hold me accountable?

• What will I look for differently in leaders as a result of what I’ve learned during the pandemic? How can these attributes be hardwired into our people model to ensure they are institutionalized in how we develop, reward, and promote?

• On what stakeholders should I explicitly recalibrate my personal focus and our company’s overall focus?

• How and when will I reset expectations with my shareholders?

• What makes for a valuable peer interaction, and how can I ensure that these conditions are in place when I interact with other CEOs?

• How can I maintain the same level of intensity that I did during the pandemic?

• What issues will I take personal leadership on and convene others around?

McKinsey authors….thanks for the sound advice and questions to ask.