The First 90 Days: What a New Head of Innovation Actually Does

You just became Head of Innovation. Or Head of CX. Or Head of Transformation. Congratulations. You have 90 days to prove yourself. And everyone is watching to see if you understand how things really work around here.

Here's what most new leaders do wrong in that first quarter. They come in with a vision. They spend six weeks presenting their strategy. They announce a new innovation framework. They build a deck. They reorganise the team.

By week twelve, they discover that nobody is actually doing the work they announced. The organisation has gone back to doing what it was doing before they arrived.

The problem is not the strategy. The problem is that new leaders skip the diagnosis phase. They come with answers before they have earned the right to have opinions.

Step 1: Map the Actual Decision Path

Not the formal org chart. The actual path an idea takes to become real in your organisation. Find one successful innovation from the past two years. Any innovation. Track the real decisions. Who actually approved it. Who blocked it. Who champions it. Who does the unglamorous work to make it real.

You will discover that the formal process on your org chart has almost nothing to do with how decisions actually get made. This is your real starting point.

Step 2: Find Your Sponsor and Make Them Successful

You have a boss. That person is your first stakeholder. Not the C-suite. Not your team. Your boss. Spend the first thirty days understanding what their actual job is. Not what the role description says. What are they measured on. What is their biggest headache. What is the one thing that would make their life easier.

Then make that one thing happen. Not your innovation strategy. Something they care about right now. Small, achievable, in 90 days. You are not trying to change the organisation yet. You are trying to build political capital with the one person who controls whether you get to stay.

Step 3: Do One Thing That Makes the Team Trust You

Your team has seen innovation leaders come and go. They are cynical. They have heard the speeches before. You will not convince them with words. You will convince them by removing one thing that is making their job harder.

Ask them. What is the one stupid rule or bureaucratic requirement that you all complain about in the coffee room. The thing that wastes time but nobody challenges because "that is how we do it here." Kill one of those things in your first 60 days. Make a decision. Remove a step from a process. Unblock them to do something they could not do before.

You are not proving you have a vision. You are proving you listen and you deliver.

The Pattern That Matters

These three steps follow one pattern. Listen before you lead. Diagnose before you prescribe. Build trust before you ask for change. Most new leaders get the sequence backwards. They come in, they lead, they prescribe, they ask for change. And then they wonder why nobody follows.

You have 90 days to become credible. Use them to understand how your organisation actually works, not how it is supposed to work. Build one relationship. Deliver one win. Remove one blocker. Everything else follows from that foundation.

Trust is a prerequisite for change, not a consequence of it.