When stepping into a new role, it’s natural to feel compelled to act quickly: to decide, to change, to make an immediate and obvious impact. But leaders who create durable momentum tend to do something more deliberate first. They slow down just enough to understand the system they’ve inherited, the people who power it, and the forces—visible and invisible—that shape outcomes.
It’s generally not speed or bold moves that determine success for a new leader—it’s strategic alignment. When priorities, internal expectations, and resources are aligned early, leaders can create real momentum.
On the flipside, one of the most underestimated risks for new leaders is misalignment. Success can mean very different things to different stakeholders: short-term results versus long-term transformation, stability versus disruption, speed versus precision. When those internal expectations remain implicit, even strong execution can miss the mark.
Early on, it’s critical to align on what matters most, how success will be evaluated, where authority begins and ends, and which constraints are truly non-negotiable. Just as importantly, these assumptions need to be revisited as conditions change and new information emerges.
Strategic alignment creates freedom. When expectations are clear, you and your team can move decisively toward a well-defined goal. Let’s look at some ways to slow down, gather and evaluate insights, make early progress, and ultimately work toward strategic alignment in your new leadership role.
When you’re ready to dig in further, find the resources you need to develop your 30-60-90 plan in our 90-Day Leadership Playbook.
Conduct a Listening Tour as a Source of Strategic Intelligence
As a new leader, listening is both a relationship-building tool and your most valuable means of gaining insight. Structured, intentional listening allows you to see how work actually gets done—not just how it’s described in decks or org charts.
As you conduct a listening tour, place more weight on patterns than individual opinions. When you ask consistent questions across functions and levels, disconnects often begin to surface: between strategy and execution, priorities and resources, authority and accountability. You also start to see informal power structures, cultural fault lines, and long-standing friction points that rarely show up in formal reports.
Essential Questions for a Listening Tour
- The Organization: What do we do especially well? What are the biggest opportunities for improvement?
- Strategy and Priorities: What are the most important priorities for the next 12 months? Are there initiatives we should reconsider or stop?
- Culture and Ways of Working: How would you describe our culture in a few words? What gets in the way of people doing their best work?
- Leadership and Teams: Who are the unsung heroes making a big difference? Where do you see gaps in leadership or critical capabilities?
- Relationships and Stakeholders: Which relationships should I focus on strengthening immediately?
The posture you bring to these conversations is just as important as the content. Curiosity, patience, and authenticity signal genuine interest and invite candor. In these moments, credibility is earned less by having answers and more by demonstrating the discipline to fully understand the problem before acting.
Understand Culture Before Trying to Change It
Culture either reinforces strategic alignment—or quietly undermines it. It shapes how decisions are made, how conflict is handled, and which behaviors are rewarded or discouraged. Culture is shaped and reinforced through everyday interactions.
As a new leader, it’s important to be mindful that you are stepping into a culture that predates you. Take time to observe and acknowledge underlying threads, assumptions, and forces at play across the organization.
In the early days of a leadership tenure, small actions carry disproportionate weight—how you listen, how you follow through, and how you respond under pressure. These signals shape internal expectations about what will be rewarded, what will be tolerated, and what kind of environment is being reinforced.
While cultural change takes time, cultural awareness starts immediately. By noticing and naming patterns—without rushing to judge or fix them—you make the invisible visible and begin building the trust required for meaningful change later.
Evaluate the Team with an Eye Toward Trajectory
Assessing a team isn’t simply about identifying top performers or underperformers. It’s about understanding whether the current configuration is suited for what lies ahead. Keep in mind that strong results can hide exhaustion or inefficiencies, and quieter contributors may hold disproportionate influence or institutional knowledge. Misalignment between capability and strategy often shows up as underperformance.
Rather than rushing into structural change, this is the moment to focus on clarifying roles, stabilizing responsibilities, and identifying gaps in capability or capacity that could slow progress. A measured approach gives you space to make better long-term talent decisions while still addressing risks that require near-term attention. Ultimately, team structure should reflect strategic priorities, not historical roles.
Remember that not every priority needs to be resourced internally. Thoughtful use of cross-functional partners, short-term specialists, or external project leadership can unlock progress without waiting for ideal conditions.
The Power of Interim Talent in the First 90 Days
Interim leaders and experts can be extremely valuable when strategic alignment is still forming. Used thoughtfully, on-demand talent can stabilize critical functions, deliver rapid diagnostics, and absorb operational demands, while you stay focused on getting your 360-degree view of the organization and fostering leadership alignment.
A 30-60-90 look at how interim support can help new leaders:
Days 1–30
Buy Time: Place interim leaders in critical roles so you’re not forced into rushed hiring decisions. Deploy project-based specialists to stabilize while you assess long-term needs.
Reduce Risk: Tap seasoned leaders and subject matter experts to run rapid diagnostics (financial health, cultural risks, operational bottlenecks). Lean on experienced operators to manage sensitive initiatives or transitions where early missteps could erode credibility.
Create Bandwidth: Assign interim talent to handle day-to-day execution, freeing you to focus on strategy and leadership alignment. Bring in short-term project leads to deliver quick, visible wins that build early momentum.
Days 30–60
Deepen Insight: To gain a more holistic view of the business, tap subject-matter experts to analyze market dynamics, customer data, or operational performance.
Accelerate Cross-Functional Alignment: Deploy project managers or interim leaders to coordinate cross-functional efforts, ensuring your strategy synthesis doesn’t stay theoretical. Facilitators or coaches can help run workshops or off-sites to align leadership teams.
Unlock Options: Bring in specialists to model scenarios, stress-test strategies, or evaluate transformation pathways. This builds confidence that your plan is grounded, feasible, and resilient to external shifts.
Days 60–90
Deliver Results: Bring in interim leaders or project specialists to drive execution of your first few visible initiatives, ensuring momentum doesn’t stall while you balance strategy with delivery.
Strengthen Systems: Use interim experts to assess, design, or refine core processes so improvements stick.
Extend Capacity: Assign short-term project leads to accelerate change initiatives or manage workstreams that would otherwise stretch your permanent team.
Look Ahead: Engage specialists to scope future opportunities, risks, and capability needs for the next 6–12 months. Begin building optionality with talent pipelines and external partners so you’re not starting from scratch later.
The flexibility harnessed through the use of on-demand talent in the early days of a leadership position allows for greater speed, agility, and confidence later on.
Aligning Around a Clear Focus and Shared Priorities
As information accumulates, it can be tempting to act on everything at once. But narrowing the field to a small number of priorities—and being explicit about what will pause or stop—demonstrates discipline and clarifies intent.
Once you have both granular insights (from a listening tour) and high-level perspective (from strategy and performance reviews). It’s time to distill that into a clear, integrated understanding of the business—its strengths, risks, and opportunities.
Synthesize findings into a concise, shareable narrative—whether as a strategy brief, visual map, or presentation. Use it to align your leadership team, inform key stakeholders, and create a shared understanding of the priorities ahead. This synthesis becomes your compass for decision-making and your foundation for future planning.
Wondering if your team is aligned and ready to move forward? Here are some questions you can ask:
A quick strategic alignment check:
- Are success metrics consistent across stakeholders?
- Do decision rights match accountability?
- Are resources aligned to stated priorities?
- Do incentives reinforce or contradict strategy?
- Is culture supporting—or resisting—the direction of travel?
Turn Early Progress into Credibility
Visible progress—delivered through a small number of focused initiatives—demonstrates competence and builds confidence among stakeholders and teams alike.
Early wins don’t need to be sweeping transformations; they should be real, measurable, and aligned with stated priorities. Clear ownership, defined metrics, and regular communication are essential.
Celebrating progress builds energy and signals that effort leads to impact. As results accumulate, your credibility grows—and with it, the ability to take on more complex or contentious change.
Reflect, Recalibrate, and Look Ahead
Establishing clear rhythms for communication, decision-making, and accountability creates stability—not rigidity. Teams work more effectively when they understand how decisions are made, how issues are escalated, and how progress is tracked.
Remember to pause periodically to reflect. What’s working? What remains stuck? Which assumptions need revisiting? What new feedback have you received? Capturing these insights—individually and with the team—helps refine direction and reinforce team alignment. Leaders who regularly recalibrate stay adaptive, grounded, and credible as conditions evolve.
The Throughline: Alignment
Strategic alignment between people, priorities, and execution is the first step toward sustained momentum. Leaders who invest early in team alignment don’t just move faster; they move together.
Ready to put these concepts into action? Our 90-Day Leadership Playbook offers a practical 30-60-90 plan, with diagnostic tools, worksheets, and checklists to help you stay grounded and moving forward in your new role.
