A few months ago we wrote about why the first 90 days define a chief people officer. This is the other half of that story. We place a lot of these leaders and we stay close to them afterwards, so we hear how it actually went once the welcome emails have stopped and the real work has started. Six months in, the gap between the CPOs who are flying and the ones who are quietly struggling almost always traces back to how they spent that first quarter.
It matters more than it should, because the role does not give a chief people officer much time. Leadership at the top is turning over faster than it used to, and the Josh Bersin Company puts average CHRO tenure at under five years. A leader coming in from outside typically needs six to twelve months just to read a culture properly, and for a first-time CPO the climb is steeper still, so the first 90 days go on building an understanding you do not yet have, while everyone around you expects answers you are not quite ready to give. Here is what we hear from the ones who get that balance wrong, and from the ones who get it right.
Where the first 90 days go wrong
By far the most common regret we hear is moving too fast on culture. A new CPO arrives with a mandate to change things and feels the pressure to show impact early, so the restructure or the new values land before anyone has been won round, and the place reacts the way a body reacts to a foreign object. Six months on, they are unpicking the damage and rebuilding trust they spent in week three. When we ask what they would do differently, the answer is nearly always some version of the same thing: spend the first month asking questions, not making statements.
Others retreat into HR’s comfort zone, under pressure people go back to what they know, the policy refresh and the engagement survey, and it feels like progress because it is visible. The trouble is that it is not what the chief executive hired them for, and it quietly confirms the old suspicion that HR is a support act rather than a partner at the table. We watch capable people spend a first quarter perfecting the people plan and a second quarter realising they had never really built the relationship with the CFO. It is seldom a shortage of ability; it is a reflex, and under pressure the reflex wins.
And a good number simply try to carry all of it at once. A new CPO wants to be useful, says yes to everything, and arrives at month three with forty priorities, no team built and no real plan. It reads as energy for a while, and then it reads as drift. By month six it looks like firefighting, and the CEO starts to wonder whether the appointment was right, when the real problem was only ever a lack of focus.
What the strong ones do instead
The ones who land well do close to the opposite, and it starts with diagnosis. They treat the opening weeks as a listening exercise, getting under the numbers and the commercial pressure and forming a real view of the culture before they touch it. From outside it can look slow, and the good ones are comfortable with that, because a decision taken in week ten, once they understand the place, is worth far more than a confident one taken in week two. The Josh Bersin Company’s research points the same way: the leaders who last embed change into how the business actually runs, instead of launching it as an initiative.
They also put the relationships at the top first, the chief executive and the CFO above all. Early on they get the mandate spelled out rather than guessed at, so they know what they are really being asked to fix and what success looks like to the people who will judge them. A surprising number of the CPOs who struggle never had that conversation, and spent a year delivering beautifully against the wrong brief. The CFO relationship is usually the one left too late, and the one that repays the most attention, because a CPO who can talk about the people agenda in terms of cost and risk earns a very different hearing at the top table.
And they are ruthless about focus. They pick two or three things that genuinely matter, get something visible done on at least one of them inside the quarter, and use that early credibility to buy room for the slower work that follows. They build their team from the start too, because they cannot carry it alone, and because the people they inherit will decide whether any of the strategy actually happens. Trying to be excellent at everything is how a lot of capable CPOs end up trusted with very little.
Setting a new CPO up to succeed
If you are stepping into one of these roles, the lesson from the people who did it well is to resist the urge to prove yourself through sheer activity. Use the first weeks to understand the business and the culture and to get the mandate straight with your chief executive, keep your priorities few, and build your team sooner than feels necessary. The instinct to change everything quickly is the one to keep in check.
And if you are the chief executive or board bringing a first-time CPO in, a fair amount of this sits with you. Spell the mandate out rather than leaving them to infer it, give them real sponsorship through the first quarter rather than a warm welcome and silence, and do not expect the culture fixed in the first 90 days, because the research and our own experience both say that reading it properly takes far longer. The best new CPO appointments we see are the ones where the business was as deliberate about the first quarter as the candidate was.
If you are hiring a chief people officer, or about to step into the role yourself, and you want a candid view of what the first quarter should look like, that is a conversation we have most weeks. Get in touch with James Cumming at re:find.