Key Takeaways
- The first 30 days are for listening, not for demonstrating what you know.
- The most important relationships to build first are the ones most critical to executing your top priority.
- A written 30-60-90 day plan is useful less for its content than for the process of creating it.
Saim Abbasi has joined new organizations multiple times and has watched dozens of executives join portfolio companies. The pattern that distinguishes the ones who become effective quickly from the ones who struggle is almost entirely about how they use the first 30 days.
Listening as Active Work
The first 30 days should be structured around a specific set of conversations rather than a specific set of deliverables. The conversations should cover every major stakeholder: team members at every level, key customers, relevant investors, and any critical external partners. The goal is to understand how the organization works, what it has tried and learned, what the real priorities are versus the stated ones, and where the most important opportunities and risks sit.
This is not a passive exercise. It requires preparation, active listening, good note-taking, and the synthesis of a large amount of information into a coherent picture. The 30-day output is a clear-eyed assessment of the situation that becomes the foundation for the next 60 days of action.
The Priority Relationship
Within the first week, the new leader should identify the one or two relationships that are most critical to executing the highest-priority objective. Those relationships get disproportionate time and investment in the first 30 days, not because other relationships do not matter but because establishing trust with the right people early creates leverage for everything that follows.
The Written Plan as Process
The 30-60-90 day plan is valuable as a communication tool and as a thinking discipline. Writing down what you believe the priorities are and what you plan to do about them forces clarity that conversations do not. It also creates a public commitment that the team can hold you to, which is a feature rather than a bug for leaders who want to build accountability-based cultures from the start.
"The new leader who starts making changes in week one has not listened long enough to know what to change."