2 Priorities For New CEOs
The first thing most new CEOs do is start solving problems. That's the second thing they should be doing.
CEO Brief: McKinsey research on executive transitions finds that two years after a new leader takes over, between 27% and 46% of those transitions are regarded as failures or disappointments, with politics, culture, and people issues cited as the dominant cause (McKinsey, 2018). The instinct to prove capability through action is understandable. But the organizations most in need of a new CEO are not usually organizations with a straightforward problem queue. They're organizations that need direction and cohesion before the individual problems can be properly addressed. The two priorities that matter most in the first 90 days are rarely the ones the CEO is busiest with.
Why Do New CEOs Underestimate the Cost of Waiting on Vision?
Because the cost doesn't show up immediately, and by the time it does, it's easy to misattribute.
A new CEO who delays articulating direction doesn't see the damage in the first week. The team has existing momentum, existing meetings, existing priorities. The organization keeps moving. What happens quietly, in that initial absence of direction, is that each part of the team defaults to its own interpretation of what the new leader would want. Those interpretations diverge. By the time the CEO is ready to share their vision, they're not establishing direction from a blank slate. They're competing with the direction the organization has already started building without them.
Vision doesn't have to be polished to be valuable. The CEO who says, in their first month, "here is the problem we exist to solve, here is how I see the business needing to evolve, and here is what we'll be measuring" gives the organization something to organize around. The CEO who waits until the vision feels certain and complete gives the organization an implicit instruction: keep doing what you're doing until I figure it out.
Research by Watkins at Harvard Business School found that leaders who establish clear direction within their first 90 days are significantly more likely to hit their year-one performance targets than those who delay that work beyond the first quarter (Harvard Business School, 2003). The relationship isn't accidental. Direction doesn't just tell the team where to go. It tells them what to stop doing, which is often more valuable.
What Happens to Organizations Running Without People Systems?
They develop informal ones, and those tend to be worse.
When an organization grows or transitions without establishing clear systems for how people work together, conflict doesn't disappear. It goes underground. Teams develop their own norms for managing disagreement, usually ones based on avoidance. Roles that should be explicit stay implicit, which means disputes about ownership don't get resolved. They get managed through side conversations, which means the CEO ends up being the arbitration point for things that should have been resolved structurally long ago.
This is one of the more predictable costs of rapid growth without organizational development investment. The founding culture, which operated on high trust and informal coordination, stops scaling around the time the company reaches 30 to 50 people. New people join without being fully socialized into how decisions get made, how feedback is supposed to flow, or how conflict is supposed to surface. They adapt by reading signals, and what they often read is that raising difficult things is risky, so they don't.
Gallup's research on team performance consistently finds that employees who know what is expected of them and who feel they have a system for raising concerns perform measurably better across every major output metric (Gallup, 2023). For a new CEO, the discovery that these systems don't exist tends to happen at the worst possible moment: when a conflict arises that needs them. Building them reactively, under pressure, produces worse results than building them deliberately while the environment is calmer.
What Should a New CEO Build in the First 90 Days?
Two things, in roughly this order.
First, a working version of the direction. Not a strategic plan, not a polished vision statement, but a clear answer to: what does success look like in 12 months, what are the two or three things we need to get right for that to happen, and what are we explicitly not doing in order to focus on those things? This doesn't require certainty. It requires enough clarity to allow the people closest to execution to make better-aligned decisions each day.
The working direction should be shared early and updated often. New CEOs who worry about committing to something that might change tend to forget that the cost of ambiguity compounds daily. A direction shared in month one and updated in month three is always better than a refined direction shared in month four. The update itself signals learning and honesty, not weakness.
Second, a system for how people work together. This doesn't require a formal HR function in its full form, but it does require clarity on three things: how feedback is supposed to flow between people, how conflict or disagreement gets escalated when it can't be resolved at the team level, and who has authority to make which categories of decision without checking in. Resolving that last question alone tends to reduce the volume of decisions landing on the CEO by more than most new CEOs expect.
For many new leaders, both of these feel like distractions from the real work. That's the exact reason to do them first. And knowing which problem to solve first is its own discipline.
3Peak Wisdom
New CEOs are hired to change things. The things most worth changing early aren't on the problem list. They're the conditions that determine whether the problem list can ever get shorter.
Direction and people systems aren't leadership support activities. They're the infrastructure that makes everything else executable. A new CEO who builds both in the first quarter gives the organization a foundation it will use for years. One who skips both to focus on immediate problems tends to find those problems still waiting when everything else has moved.
Frequently Asked Questions
How specific does a new CEO's vision need to be in the first 90 days?
Specific enough to be useful, not complete enough to be final. The working direction needs to answer: what problem does this business primarily exist to solve, who for, and what does progress look like in the near term? It doesn't need to cover competitive positioning, five-year strategy, or every growth scenario. The test is whether the people closest to the work can use it to make better decisions without checking in constantly.
What if the CEO doesn't have enough information to set direction in the first 90 days?
Then share the direction based on what you do know, and name what you're still learning. "Here is what I'm confident about, here is what I'm still figuring out, here is how and when I'll update you" is a more useful signal than silence. The organization doesn't need certainty. It needs to see that the person in the role is thinking clearly and will be honest about the gaps.
What people systems matter most for a new CEO to establish early?
Three tend to have the most impact: a clear feedback mechanism (how people are expected to give and receive feedback, and how often), a conflict escalation path (what happens when a disagreement can't be resolved at the team level), and decision rights (who can make which decisions without seeking approval). These three cover most of what informal cultures manage badly at scale, and establishing them removes a significant source of friction and CEO dependence.
How do you build people systems without it becoming bureaucracy?
By keeping the structure proportionate to the size and complexity of the organization, and by tying it to behavior rather than process. The goal isn't a policy manual. It's a shared understanding of how people are expected to work together. That understanding can often be established through a few direct conversations and written norms rather than formal documentation. The test is whether it reduces the volume of people-related decisions landing on the CEO, not whether it checks a governance box.
What is the most common reason new CEOs avoid addressing vision and people systems early?
Discomfort with appearing to have answers before they feel fully informed. Most new leaders understand intuitively that they should do these things. The hesitation is about legitimacy: who am I to set the direction when I haven't been here long enough to really understand the situation? The answer, counterintuitively, is that the newness is part of the value. A CEO who hasn't yet been socialized into the organization's existing assumptions is in the best position they'll ever be in to ask "where are we going and why" without being constrained by what's always been done.
