5. Assess and build your team.

In your first 90 days, it's important to assess the alignment of the

organization. Start with the mission, vision, and strategy. Then, dive
into how people are organized and coordinate to get work done.
Next, identify the core process and activity that create value. Finally,
assess the capabilities of the workforce. Your goal during your first
90 days is to identify potential misalignments and design a plan for
correcting them.

The most important decisions you make in your first 90 days are
often about people. Building a high-performance team gives you
tremendous leverage. However, you have to strike the right balance
between stability and change. You want to avoid forcing too much
change at once, but you also don’t want to wait too long. You should
make the key changes to your team in your first 90 days.

Start by assessing your existing team members. By the end of your

first 30 days, you should be able to group your people into high
performers, potential high performers, and low performers.

Then, decide what changes you need to make and how you can make
them without damaging short-term performance. Make sure your top
performers know where they stand and retain them. You don’t want
to lose your best people. Also, avoid criticizing the previous
leadership. There's nothing to be gained from this and it can damage
your credibility.

In your first 90 days, you'll want to identify problematic behavior

patterns. You may notice a lack of focus, discipline, teamwork,
urgency, or creativity. Some team members may not be able to
clearly define priorities or have too many priorities. Some team
members may lack self-accountability.

Hold off on team-building until you let the lower performers go. It
confuses your team members when you let go of people they've
begun to form bonds with. Also, when possible, wait to implement
major new initiatives until you have the team in place. It's often
counterproductive to commit a future team member to a course of
action they did not choose.