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Issue 004
June 30, 2026
You got the job because you fix things. That is not a guess. People who get promoted into broken organizations earn it by being the person in the room who identifies the problem, moves on it, and delivers. That pattern is the reason you are here.
It is also the reason the first thirty days are so dangerous.
The real version of events lives in the people closest to the work. They will not tell you in week one or two. They will tell you when they have watched you respond correctly to an uncomfortable truth, and that cannot happen until you have created the conditions for someone to tell you one. Most newly promoted leaders never create those conditions, because they are too busy doing the thing that got them promoted.
The instinct that got you promoted is the same one most likely to hurt you now.
I made this same mistake and it was costly. The first time I inherited an organization that was genuinely in trouble, I had spent my career being the person who fixed things fast. Assess, identify the constraint, intervene, move. I was good at it. The problem was that the pattern works in environments where you have enough context to assess accurately, and I didn’t have that context yet, and I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
What I thought was the constraint was a symptom. The actual constraint was three layers upstream, invisible to me until I had been in the organization long enough for people to trust me with the real version of events. That hadn’t happened yet, because I hadn’t earned it.
The changes I made addressed the symptom. In doing so, I disrupted several informal systems that had been compensating for the underlying problem in ways that were imperfect but functional. I made things worse before I made them better. That is the specific outcome the first-thirty-days rule is designed to prevent.
Here is the rule: the fastest way to fail in the first thirty days is to act.
I’m not telling you not to observe, ask questions, build relationships or map the informal power structure to figure out who actually runs what regardless of what the org chart says. Those things are the job. Acting is when you start making changes based on what you think you know before you understand what you are actually looking at.
What you are looking at, in week one, is a performance. Not a deceptive one. People are not trying to mislead you. They are showing you the version of the organization they believe you want to see, because they don’t know yet whether you can be trusted with the real one. That determination is not made by your title or your track record. It is made by watching how you respond when something uncomfortable surfaces in front of you. Every response either expands or narrows your access to reality.
Days 1 through 30: Observe.
Your only objective is to earn access to reality. Build trust before you build plans. Listen for what people hesitate to say. Map where decisions are actually made and where risk is quietly accumulating. Pay attention to who everyone consults before difficult decisions, because those people often carry more influence than anyone with the biggest title.
Days 31 through 60: Diagnose.
Start separating symptoms from causes. Pressure test your assumptions. Look closely at the workarounds people have created, because organizations don’t invent those by accident. Every workaround tells the story of a system that stopped working. By now you should have enough context to distinguish what looks broken from what is actually broken.
Days 61 through 90: Act.
Only now should significant decisions begin. You know where formal authority exists and where real influence lives. You know which problems deserve immediate attention and which ones only appear urgent because they are visible. The plan you develop by day ninety will be slower than the one you would have written in week two. It will also be built on something real.
By day thirty you have a picture. By day sixty you have a diagnosis. By day ninety you have a plan built on top of the real situation rather than the “official one”.
Most organizations are not suffering from the problem everyone is talking about. They are suffering from the problem nobody has found the language to name yet, and the reason nobody has named it is that naming it requires trusting whoever is in the room.
You are whoever is in the room now. That trust is not given. It is earned, slowly, in the first thirty days, when everything in you is pushing to move faster.
See you every other Tuesday.
~ Alicia
P.S. This topic is one I keep coming back to because there is more to say about it than one issue can hold. I am building something for leaders who want the full operating system, not just the principle. More on that soon.