Beyond the First 90 Days: Sustaining Success in a New C-Suite Role

Enterprisewide plans demand unified action, making strong, cross-functional ties between middle and frontline managers essential. As you move beyond your first 90 days, prioritize building this kind of collaboration.

Encourage managers to shift from task-based planning to true business partnering early in the strategic planning process. As you shape your stakeholder engagement strategy, guide your leadership team to strengthen project partnerships, assess their networks and work across silos.

Another key tactic is to encourage horizontal information sharing. While vertical cascades help clarify strategy and drive initial alignment, they often provide only a limited view. To deepen understanding and uncover interdependencies across departments, integrate cross-silo messaging into your communications. 

Here are a few ways to do that:

• Highlight interdependencies in team updates — show how one team’s work affects another (e.g., how marketing timelines impact product launches).

• Share cross-functional success stories in newsletters or town halls.

• Ask coordination questions in project kickoffs, like “Who else could be affected?” or “What overlaps should we flag?”

• Use strategy updates to spotlight shared goals, not just department-specific ones.

This broader perspective helps those below you connect their work to the enterprise strategy and make more informed decisions.

Nearly two-thirds of surprise events are unfamiliar and demand a response within a month. Gartner analysis shows that giving managers the tools to interpret and act on these developments midexecution is the single biggest driver of long-term strategic alignment.

Middle managers are closest to the day-to-day events, projects and issues that cause misalignment. However, realignment efforts are typically managed by senior leaders through formal performance cycles, which often occur infrequently. This lag means that middle managers are left to navigate misalignment on their own, forcing them to make trade-offs and shift project focus prematurely — decisions that can ultimately perpetuate or even worsen underlying problems.

As a New To Role executive, you have the opportunity to break this cycle. Give leaders the authority to make timely changes through self-directed pivots.

A successful pivot has four essential components:

• Enterprise visibility. Be sure leaders know about cross-silo interdependencies, data and metrics in a fluid environment.

• Collaboration structure. Leaders need a 360-degree view of a business problem to look for mutually beneficial solutions.

• Mental model. Be mindful that staff need to update their mental models to account for changes while fighting the change fatigue that can follow multiple readjustments.

• Reprioritization tools. Organizations need mechanisms to ensure that changes reflect strategic intent and that teams are kept honest about new resource requests.