By Dennis Rizzo & John Elliott
In our last conversation, John Elliott of Strategy Elevation Alliance walked me through five signals that separate real alignment from polite agreement: silence in the room, delayed dissent, inconsistent language around priorities, metrics that quietly miss, and trust measured in defensiveness. That piece struck a nerve. The feedback I received was some version of, “This is exactly what happened after our last executive hire.”
That reaction raised the question this article sets out to answer. If misalignment is often visible within months of a leadership transition, what actually determines whether a new executive closes that gap or gets buried by it?
John has a name for this window: time-to-value, the speed at which a leader and the team around them begin producing results that matter.
What “Value” Actually Means
Before going further, it’s worth being precise about the second half of that term, because “value” gets used loosely in most onboarding conversations.
“Value isn’t a feeling the room has about the new leader,” John said. “It’s the business result that justified the hire in the first place. Somebody built a case for this role: a turnaround that needs to happen, a market that needs to open, a function that needs to mature. That case is the actual target. Trust, culture, alignment, those are the mechanism that gets you there faster or slower.”
That framing lines up with what researcher Michael Watkins calls the breakeven point: the moment a new leader has contributed as much value to the organization as the organization has invested in bringing them on board. Watkins’ research puts that point at roughly six months for a typical transition, and organizations that use a structured 90-day approach tend to reach it meaningfully faster. The first 90 days don’t produce the final business result. They set the slope of the line that gets you there.
There’s a second reason the first 90 days carry so much weight, and it has less to do with strategy than with the room. Research cited in Harvard Business Review found that roughly 70% of newly hired executives who struggle point to unfamiliarity with the organization’s culture or political climate as the primary cause, not a lack of experience or technical skill. The business case for the hire and the cultural terrain the leader has to move through are two different problems, and most 90-day plans only address the first one.
The First 90 Days Carry Outsized Weight
John has watched enough executive transitions to know the pattern. The moment a new leader walks in, employees start asking three unspoken questions: Who are they? What do they believe? Where are we going? The answers people construct in the first weeks, often from a handful of decisions and conversations, tend to calcify quickly. By the time a ninety-day review happens, the organization has usually already decided, informally, whether it trusts this person. Everything after that is either confirmation or an uphill climb against a first impression.
“Boards love to talk about the long-term vision a new executive brings,” John told me. “But time-to-value is decided in the small stuff. Who gets credit in the first team meeting. Whether the new leader asks questions before making changes. Whether they say the same thing in private that they say in public.”
|
SIDEBAR: John’s TLC Journey Earlier this year, John became a Certified Master in The Leadership Challenge (TLC), the culmination of ten years applying the framework inside tribal business operations. He didn’t pursue the certification to add a line to his bio. “The Leadership Challenge is one of the few frameworks I’ve found that’s backed by extensive, ongoing research and grounded in observable behavior,” John said. “It’s an operating model: an organization learns a common set of leadership behaviors and a shared language, then keeps building on that foundation by tracking how consistently people actually use it.” The certification also gave him a structured way to do something he’d wanted to do for years: coach the next generation of leaders coming up through tribal enterprises, alongside the leaders already in the seat, and give something back to the communities those organizations serve. “Most leadership programs hand people a shared vocabulary for a single event, and the language fades once everyone’s back at their desks,” John said. “What I’ve seen over ten years inside tribal business operations is different. Once a leadership team adopts these practices as a shared language, it doesn’t expire. It’s the foundation every later change effort gets built on, without re-teaching the basics each time.” That compounding effect, the same framework that onboards a first-time supervisor can also anchor a multi-year transformation, is where he’s seen the clearest return over the past decade. “It’s also the single biggest lever I know of for shortening time-to-value,” John said. “A new executive who steps into an organization that already shares this language doesn’t have to build trust and vocabulary from zero. They inherit both.” |
John’s 3 L’s
The other thing John brought to this conversation was less a framework and more a personal discipline. He calls it the 3 L’s: Listen, Look, and Learn. It is the philosophy that has guided how he pays attention to leadership alignment long before we ever sat down to name the five warning signs we discussed last time.
“Listen isn’t the same as hearing,” John explained. “It means paying attention to what’s said in the room versus what surfaces later, in the hallway, over coffee, in a side channel. Look means noticing what happens outside the meeting entirely: who gets pulled aside afterward, whose calendar fills up with ‘quick syncs,’ which decisions quietly get revisited. Learn means treating every signal, encouraging or uncomfortable, as information to update on rather than something to defend against.”
John raises this because he does not think alignment, or time-to-value, is something a leader can diagnose from a dashboard. It has to be observed, in real time, by someone practicing exactly this kind of attentiveness. That was true of the five signals in our last conversation, and it is just as true in the first ninety days of a new executive.
What Actually Determines Time-to-Value
When I asked John what separates a fast, durable transition from a slow, costly one, he did not point to a 90-day plan template or an onboarding checklist. He pointed to the same Five Practices that sit at the center of The Leadership Challenge, and showed me how each one shows up, or fails to, in a new leader’s earliest days, and how each one moves the business result the hire was made for.
Model the Way. This is the answer to the three questions every employee is silently asking. A new executive who says one thing in the leadership meeting and does another in practice answers “what do they believe” the wrong way, fast. Credibility is not granted by title. It is granted by consistency between word and action, observed and re-observed, and it is what lets a team move on the leader’s decisions without seeking side confirmation first.
Inspire a Shared Vision. This is where alignment and agreement diverge, the theme of our last conversation. A new leader can get a room to agree with a vision statement in a single meeting. Getting that same room to describe the vision the same way, unprompted, weeks later, is a different achievement entirely, and it is the one that actually predicts execution.
Challenge the Process. John pointed back to one of the five signals we discussed last time: disagreement that surfaces after the meeting instead of during it. A new executive who invites dissent early, who asks “where do we actually disagree” out loud instead of assuming silence means agreement, turns that signal into an early advantage instead of a late discovery. The leaders who shorten time-to-value most are the ones who make it safe to disagree in the room, so the disagreement shows up as a conversation in week three instead of a missed metric in month three.
Enable Others to Act. Nothing slows a transition down faster than a new leader who tries to make every decision. The executives who accelerate value fastest are the ones who identify, quickly, who already has credibility on the ground and delegate real authority to them, rather than importing an entirely new decision-making structure on day one. Every decision that doesn’t have to route through the new leader is time-to-value compounding in the background.
Encourage the Heart. John returned, as he often does, to the idea that leadership is ultimately an affair of the heart. In the first 90 days, this shows up in small, visible moments: publicly crediting the team for wins that predate the new leader’s arrival, acknowledging the difficulty of change honestly instead of only celebrating it. Executives who skip this practice may hit their numbers and still fail to build the trust that makes the next quarter easier than the last.
The Bigger Picture
Time-to-value, in the end, is not really a calendar measurement. It is a measure of how quickly shared language and shared experience take root between a new leader and the organization around them. A workshop, an offsite, a two-day retreat, these are exactly where that shared experience gets built. The mistake isn’t the event itself; it’s treating it as a single moment instead of the start of something the organization keeps reinforcing and measuring afterward. Do that, and the language survives long after everyone goes back to their desks.
Boards and CEOs often want to shorten the transition window by adding more structure: a longer onboarding plan, more check-in meetings, a more detailed 90-day agenda. Those tools help, but they solve a scheduling problem, not a language problem. Organizations that already share a common leadership vocabulary before a new executive arrives give that person a running start.
Most organizations don’t have that in place, though, and a new leader rarely gets to choose the organization they’re inheriting. That doesn’t put the leader at a permanent disadvantage. It puts them in a specific role: the person best positioned to introduce that shared language deliberately, rather than wait for it to accumulate by accident. A new executive who does that in the first 90 days isn’t just building trust faster. They’re building the leadership operating system the rest of their tenure runs on.
That is the thread I want to pull on next: what it actually looks like when an organization adopts a common leadership framework as a leadership operating model, not just for one transition, but as the foundation for everyone who follows.
