What to Do Before You Know What to Do

Somewhere between a quarter and a half of executive transitions are judged failures or disappointments within two years. When leaders are asked to rank life’s hardest challenges, making a transition at work comes out ahead of bereavement, divorce and illness. The outcome is often shaped in the early weeks, long before they feel consequential.

It’s your first weeks in a new role. The calendar fills with introductions. Everyone is lovely, and everyone is watching. You feel your manager wants a sense of direction within the month. Your team wants to know what will change and who it will affect. You were appointed on the strength of what you’ve already done, but you don’t yet know enough about this place to know what to do next. That is the normal starting position for a new leader—and when costly mistakes can begin.

The pressure tends to point one way: act early, act visibly, show the decision was right. But the instinct to prove you can lead can undermine the work of understanding what leadership requires here. Michael Watkins asked 210 CEOs and presidents how long a typical midlevel leader takes to contribute as much value as they consume. Their average estimate was just over six months. What you learn in those early months matters more than how quickly you appear to act.

Resist Premature Action

A useful first question is whether you are solving a puzzle or exploring a mystery. The distinction has a long history in intelligence analysis, where Gregory Treverton made it widely known, and economists John Kay and Mervyn King build on it in Radical Uncertainty. I heard it applied to leadership recently by Wojtek Materka at INSEAD’s CONNECT 26. A puzzle has an answer, even if you don’t know it yet: find the missing information and it resolves. A mystery has no single answer. It must be framed by working out which factors matter and how they interact. The numbers, structure and backlog are usually puzzles. Why the last leader left, what the team believes about itself and where influence really sits are mysteries. New leaders tend to treat the whole role as a puzzle because puzzles reward the expertise they were hired for.

Watkins offers a second diagnostic. He distinguishes five situations a new leader can inherit: a start-up, a turnaround, accelerated growth, a realignment, or sustaining success. Each asks for something different. A turnaround rewards speed and hard calls. A realignment, where a business is drifting without yet seeing the problem, rewards patience and a shared case for change. Sustaining success rewards restraint. Most roles contain more than one situation, across different teams or functions. Discover them before deciding how to lead them.

Marshall Goldsmith’s What Got You Here Won’t Get You There argues that the traits behind early success can become liabilities further up. Those traits are tools built for a particular job, not rules for every situation. If your reputation was made by moving fast, ask whether this situation rewards speed. If you’re used to being the most decisive person in the room, ask whether the room needs a decision yet—or needs to be heard first. Keep the habits that fit. Hold the others back on purpose.

The pressure to prove your competence early has a cost you may not see. Tiziana Casciaro and Miguel Sousa Lobo studied around 10,000 working relationships across five organisations to understand how people choose whom to work with. Competence mattered, but so did whether people wanted to work with you. Expertise had limited value when colleagues preferred to avoid someone; people sought out colleagues they liked and drew on the expertise they had. A new leader who spends the first weeks asserting expertise risks being seen as capable but difficult. That judgement shapes who brings information, who offers help and who tells the truth.

Build an Accurate Picture

Build a broader picture before you act on it. Kay and King describe any model or map as a “small world”: a simplified version of a larger, messier one, useful only while you remember what it leaves out. The map you bring from your last role is a small world built for somewhere else. Deborah Ancona at MIT describes sensemaking as building a plausible map of unfamiliar terrain, then revising it as you learn. Her advice is to draw on different kinds of data: financial reports alongside visits to the front line, employees alongside customers. Let a framework emerge from the situation rather than importing one from your last role. Go beyond the people who report to you. Talk to peers, customers, whoever held the role before, and people likely to see things differently. Watkins suggests asking each direct report the same questions about what’s working, what isn’t and what they would do in your position. Where everyone agrees, you have a starting point. Where accounts diverge, you’ve found a mystery worth investigating.

Act with Intention

You will still need early wins, so choose them carefully. Watkins warns that leaders often pour energy into quick, visible results that don’t connect to what the organisation needs over the longer term. A good early win builds credibility and affects something that will still matter in a year. Agree what success looks like with the person you report to before assuming you know.

If you’ve come from outside, the pressure can be sharper. Matthew Bidwell studied people entering similar roles at a US investment bank. External hires were paid around 18 percent more than people promoted from within, yet received lower performance ratings for their first two years and left at higher rates. An external hire can arrive costing more, trusted less and without a track record inside the organisation.

Stepping back matters especially in this situation. Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky describe it as getting off the dance floor and onto the balcony. On the dance floor you see only the people next to you; from the balcony you can see patterns across the room. For a new leader, that might mean setting aside an hour each week to ask: What have I noticed? What surprised me? What am I assuming without checking?

Build relationships you can rely on before you need them. The more senior the role, the less candid feedback tends to become. A coach, a peer outside your reporting line or a trusted colleague from a previous role can see what you can’t from inside your first months. Inside the team, the same principle applies. Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety shows that people are more likely to raise concerns, admit mistakes and question decisions when they believe it is safe to do so. A new leader sets that tone early, often without meaning to. The questions you ask—and how you respond to the first piece of bad news—tell people how much truth you can take. Wojtek Materka adds a turn I find useful. What holds a leader through uncertainty is less the map itself than the people they read it with. It is through those relationships that a map becomes something you can rely on, or shows you where it needs redrafting.

Before you act, ask yourself four questions: What do I need to understand before changing anything? Where do people agree, and where do their accounts differ? What am I assuming because it worked in my previous role? Which early improvement would still matter a year from now?

The early months in a role are usually treated as a test of whether the appointment was right. What would you do differently if you treated them as the time to find out what right looks like here?

Sources: Scott Keller and Mary Meaney, “Successfully Transitioning to New Leadership Roles,” McKinsey & Company (May 2018); Michael D. Watkins, The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter (Harvard Business Review Press, updated and expanded edition, 2013); Gregory F. Treverton, “Risks and Riddles,” Smithsonian Magazine (June 2007); John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future (Bridge Street Press, 2020); Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful (Hyperion, 2007); Tiziana Casciaro and Miguel Sousa Lobo, “Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks,” Harvard Business Review 83, no. 6 (June 2005): 92–99; Deborah Ancona, “Sensemaking: Framing and Acting in the Unknown,” in The Handbook for Teaching Leadership, ed. Scott Snook, Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana (Sage, 2012); Matthew Bidwell, “Paying More to Get Less: The Effects of External Hiring versus Internal Mobility,” Administrative Science Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2011): 369–407; Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading (Harvard Business School Press, 2002); Amy C. Edmondson, The Fearless Organization (Wiley, 2018); Wojtek Materka, “What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do,” INSEAD faculty masterclass, CONNECT 26, Melbourne, September 2026.