Most new CEOs spend their first quarter firefighting. The ones who succeed spend it laying groundwork. Here’s the difference.
A new CEO landed at a mid-market industrial company last month. Smart person, industry veteran, came from a scaled-up tech background. Week one, she sat in back-to-back meetings. Week two, she was deep in the budget cycle. Week four, she was debugging a supplier issue that technically wasn’t her job.
By week eight, she realised she hadn’t made a single actual decision. She’d been pulled into operations, firefighting, and process reviews. The board’s next call was eight weeks away. She had no strategy to present, no leadership moves to announce, and no early wins to build on.
This is the trap nearly every new CEO falls into. And it’s almost entirely avoidable.
What The Research Actually Shows
Russell Reynolds conducted a survey of 178 CEOs in their first 18 months. When asked what their top priority should have been, 52 per cent cited their senior leadership team. Not strategy. Not operations. Not the board. The people they’d be running the company through.
But here’s the catch. Most CEOs don’t move fast on this. They spend the first quarter assessing, observing, and deferring. They tell themselves they need to understand the business before making team changes. By the time they act, they’ve lost momentum. The organisation has already figured out who’s actually in charge and what the power dynamics are.
A separate finding: 79 per cent of new CEOs said culture was something only they could shape. Yet most of them don’t act on it until month six or later. By then, the culture has already set itself around who the CEO is, not around what the CEO wants it to be.
The pattern is clear. The decisions that matter most get deferred. The decisions that don’t matter most consume all the time.
What Successful CEOs Do In The First 100 Days
The CEOs who actually build momentum do three things differently.
First, they make one critical decision on leadership within the first 60 days. Not a full restructure. Not a revolution. One decision about one person. Either someone needs to go, or someone needs a bigger role, or someone needs to move laterally. Just one move that signals change is coming and the CEO is in control.
This serves a specific purpose. It tells the organisation the CEO is a decision maker, not just an observer. It shows the board the CEO has conviction. And it forces you to start building relationships with your leadership team immediately, not in month three or four.
The move doesn’t have to be wrong to be right. It just has to be clear. A CEO who makes a decision and course corrects is more credible than a CEO who waits three months to be certain.
Second, they publicly articulate what winning looks like. Not a 50-page strategic plan. Not a quarterly roadmap. Two or three specific things the company will accomplish or change in the next 12 months. Things the board cares about. Things employees can understand and measure progress against.
This does two things. It gives you cover to say no to everything else. “That’s interesting, but it’s not one of our three priorities.” It also forces clarity in your own head. If you can’t describe three things that matter, you don’t actually have a strategy yet.
Most new CEOs get this backwards. They spend 12 weeks building a strategy, then announce it to the organisation expecting everyone to understand. Successful CEOs articulate direction fast, then use the next year to fill in the detail.
Third, they create a single operating rhythm that forces the company to execute against priorities. Not a new meeting structure. Not a reorganisation. Just a clear cadence where progress on the three things gets measured, discussed, and acted on weekly. Directors know what’s expected. The C-suite knows what the CEO cares about. Execution becomes visible.
This is unglamorous. It’s not strategy, and it’s not culture. But it’s the mechanism that turns good intentions into actual results.
What CEOs Get Wrong About Their Time
New CEOs universally struggle with one thing: saying no to the inherited workload. Your predecessor was probably great at operations. So every operational question lands on your desk because “we need the new CEO to understand this.”
Successful CEOs establish within the first four weeks that operational decisions are the CFO’s job, not theirs. Strategy decisions are the CEO’s job. Culture and leadership are the CEO’s job. Everything else gets delegated or pushed back.
This feels rude when you’re new. It feels like you should be available, approachable, hands-on. In reality, you’re just being hijacked into other people’s jobs.
The best insight we’ve found from research with CEOs is this: the CEO should only do the work no one else can do. For the first 100 days, that’s three things. Leadership decisions. Strategic direction. Culture messaging. Everything else gets delegated or ignored.
Once you’ve established that boundary, you can actually think. And once you can think, you can lead.
Board Relationships Don’t Happen By Accident
New CEOs are often surprised by how much time board management actually takes. The board wants updates. They want clarity. They want to understand where you’re going and why you’re going there.
Most new CEOs treat this as optional. They think they’ll brief the board when they have something to brief. Actually, the board needs a consistent relationship with you, starting in week one.
The practical play: schedule one on one meetings with every board member in the first month. Not in a boardroom. In their office, or over dinner, or wherever they’re comfortable. Ask them three things. What are you worried about? What do you want me to focus on? What would failure look like?
That information is gold. Because then when you’re building your three priorities, you can build them knowing what the board actually cares about. You’re not guessing. You’re not positioning. You’re informed.
This is boring work. But CEOs who do it in month one don’t lose board confidence in month 18. CEOs who skip it are fighting board doubt by month six.
Why The First 100 Days Matter
A new CEO has goodwill for maybe 120 days. After that, expectations solidify. The board has made up its mind about whether you’re serious. The organisation has figured out who you are. Investors have formed an opinion. Customers have seen if you’re different from your predecessor.
That window is not long enough to execute strategy. But it’s exactly long enough to do three things. Make one leadership move. Articulate two or three priorities. Establish the board knows you’re in control.
Those three things buy you the real estate to make bigger moves in year two.
If you’ve taken on a CEO role, what would you do differently in those first 100 days?
What did you get wrong that only became obvious in hindsight?
