The first hundred days
What does a new government tell us about starting a new role?
I have found myself a bit conflicted by some of the criticism of the new Government’s slightly lacklustre start in power.
On the one hand, Rachel Reeves came in for a lot of flak for leaving it until October to produce her budget, which I thought was a tad unfair. The economy is massive and complicated and the Treasury is full of people who know it well, so taking a few weeks to get your head around the facts before setting out a generational shift in economic policy struck me as a fairly sensible move.
But on the other hand, I write this on the day we’ve had our 5th or 6th statement that the Government really really is going to sort out the broken planning system in the UK any day now. This strikes me as deeply frustrating. In 14 years of opposition there was plenty of time to run consultations, talk to experts and draft a new Planning Bill that should have been laid down on day 1 of the new regime, barrelled through the parliamentary process and made law as quickly as humanly possible.
So how to reconcile these two different emotional reactions? I think the tension there speaks to something that anyone who has taken on a new job (particularly a leadership role) will also have wrestled with.
Because on the one hand, it takes some time to learn an organisation and its business well enough to become effective. We are often guilty in this age of 24hr news of expecting leaders to form views and strategies far faster than is sensible. Take over as CEO of a public company, for example, and you are expected to run your strategic review and offer your views to City analysts about the future of the business practically before you’ve figured out where the staff canteen is.
The reality is that it takes a few months to become effective in a new role, however clever or well trained you are. In that sense, the measured view of the new Government, for example, is that whilst they’ve had a fairly torrid start there is all to play for, and we are just arriving now at the point where they really ought to be shifting up a few gears.
But on the other hand, leadership is about the hearts and minds of those you are leading as much as it is about the mechanics of strategy setting. Smart leaders, then, will want to send some clear signals about where they think everyone should be heading right from day one.
They might do that by changing out some of their team, bringing in new thinking and shedding some of the inbuild biases and preconceptions that a long established team might have developed. They might make some symbolic cultural changes, moving their office out into the open plan or abolishing executive parking - not material in their own right but intended to indicate a new approach. Equally they might make some strategic decisions about the future of the business, perhaps resolving disputes or logjams that have been impacting the business for some time.
In general, what a smart new leader will want when they join a business are some quick wins - that show the business what ‘success will look like’ in this next phase and that signal to shareholders, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders what is likely to happen next.
The reconciliation of that with the fact that it takes a while to really learn a business comes from realising that those quick decisions have to be chosen very carefully. They have to signal new direction but make that new direction just vague enough to allow some wiggle room when a more considered decision can be made. Think “we are all going broadly in this direction” rather than “in 2 years we’ll have grown £100m of new revenues”.
All of this can best be encapsulated in the often discussed concept of the “First hundred days”. Really, what we’ve laid out here is that there are two objectives for your first hundred days leading a business. The first is to set out a small number of noticeable quick wins or quick decisions that signal change without creating too many hostages to fortune. The second is to use that hundred days wisely so that you become a leader with a grasp of the detail and ready to make the really big strategic calls.
Getting that balance right - not rushing into action too quickly but equally not disappearing into an ivory tower for your first few months - is, in my view, a critical determinant of whether a leader’s tenure will end up a success or not.
And what of the Government’s first (more than) 100 days? Well, writing from a retail sector point of view the hammering we’ve taken from tax and wage hikes probably casts a bit of a pall on my verdict.
It’s clear, taking a long view, that this is still early days and there is a good deal for the new team to get on with. It is also clear, though, taking a shorter term view that the exercise in setting a clear direction early and getting some quick wins has been much less successful.
It is tempting, when you work in politics, to mistake announcing something with actually achieving it. My recommendation, for what it’s worth, is that now is the time to get on with bringing legislation forward and enacting actual change. Any of us who have tried that in a business context know that delivering change is much harder than writing the Powerpoint that describes it.