Leadership Transitions: What Most Marketers Get Wrong in the First 90 Days
Leadership transitions are one of the highest-risk moments in any marketing organisation. The incoming leader brings pressure to perform, the team brings uncertainty about what changes, and the business brings expectations that rarely match the reality on the ground. Most transitions fail not because of capability gaps, but because of sequencing errors: moving too fast on strategy, too slow on relationships, or misjudging which problems are actually worth solving first.
Done well, a leadership transition is a rare opportunity to reset priorities, rebuild commercial rigour, and get the team pointed at outcomes that matter. Done poorly, it costs the business twelve to eighteen months of momentum it rarely gets back.
Key Takeaways
- The first 90 days of a leadership transition should be weighted toward listening and diagnosis, not strategy announcements.
- Most transitions fail because of sequencing errors, not capability gaps. Getting the order wrong is the most common and most avoidable mistake.
- Inherited team structures rarely match the business needs you actually face. Assess people on current performance, not their legacy reputation.
- Commercial credibility is built faster through small, visible wins than through ambitious restructuring plans that take months to land.
- The real work in any transition is separating the problems that need solving from the noise that surrounds them.
In This Article
- Why Leadership Transitions Go Wrong So Quickly
- The Diagnosis Phase Is Not Optional
- Assessing the Inherited Team Without Inherited Bias
- Sequencing: What to Change First and What to Leave Alone
- Building Commercial Credibility Without Overpromising
- Managing Upward During a Transition
- The 90-Day Mark: What a Successful Transition Looks Like
Why Leadership Transitions Go Wrong So Quickly
The first thing most incoming leaders do is announce a strategic review. It sounds thorough. It signals seriousness. And it immediately tells the team that everything they have built is under examination. That tension, if it is not managed carefully, becomes the story of the transition rather than the strategy itself.
I have been on both sides of this. When I joined Cybercom, there was no formal handover period, no structured briefing, no gradual assumption of responsibility. Within my first week, I was in a brainstorm for Guinness and the founder handed me the whiteboard pen on his way to a client meeting. The internal reaction in that room was visible. Nobody said anything, but the question was obvious: who is this person, and why should we follow their lead? I felt it too. The honest answer in that moment was: I do not know yet either, but we are going to find out.
That moment taught me something that took years to fully articulate. Authority in a new role is not given, it is earned incrementally, and the fastest way to earn it is not to arrive with a plan. It is to demonstrate that you understand the business before you start changing it.
The pressure to move fast is real and understandable. Boards want to see momentum. Teams want clarity. Clients want reassurance. But speed without diagnosis is just noise. Go-to-market execution consistently underperforms when leadership changes are handled reactively rather than deliberately, and the same dynamic plays out inside organisations when transitions are rushed.
The Diagnosis Phase Is Not Optional
Every incoming leader inherits three things: a set of people, a set of problems, and a set of assumptions about both. The diagnosis phase is about separating what is real from what is inherited narrative.
When I took on a turnaround situation at a loss-making agency, the business had a story it told itself about why it was struggling. That story blamed the market, blamed certain clients, blamed pricing pressure. Some of it was true. Most of it was displacement activity, a way of explaining underperformance without confronting the structural causes. The real problems were in delivery margins, in a pricing model that had never been properly interrogated, and in a team structure that had grown organically rather than commercially.
None of that was visible in the first week. It took deliberate, methodical diagnosis: sitting in on client calls, reviewing project financials line by line, talking to people at every level of the organisation without an agenda. The picture that emerged was different from the one I had been handed at the start.
This is not unique to agency environments. BCG’s work on organisational alignment points consistently to the gap between what leadership believes is happening and what is actually happening at the operational level. That gap is widest during transitions, when the incoming leader has not yet built the internal intelligence to see through the official version of events.
The diagnosis phase should cover four areas: commercial performance, team capability, client or customer relationships, and process quality. Not as a formal audit, but as a genuine attempt to understand the business from the inside. The questions to ask are simple. Where is the money actually coming from? Where is it leaking? Who in the team is driving outcomes, and who is managing the appearance of outcomes? What does the client relationship actually look like beneath the account reviews?
This kind of work sits squarely within the broader discipline of growth strategy. If you are building or rebuilding a marketing function, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the commercial frameworks that should underpin those decisions, from market positioning to team structure to performance measurement.
Assessing the Inherited Team Without Inherited Bias
One of the most consequential decisions in any transition is how you assess the people you inherit. And one of the most common mistakes is doing it through the lens of whoever briefed you before you arrived.
Every organisation has a received wisdom about its people. This person is a star. That person has been here forever and knows where the bodies are buried. This team is solid but needs direction. That individual is difficult. Some of it is accurate. A lot of it reflects the biases and relationships of whoever held the role before you, not the current reality.
I have seen this play out in both directions. People written off by previous leadership who turned out to be among the most commercially capable people in the building, once they had a leader who was actually interested in what they could do. And people who had been protected by their relationship with the outgoing leader, whose performance did not hold up once that protection was removed.
The practical approach is to assess people on current performance and current behaviour, not on their reputation. Give people a defined window, typically sixty to ninety days, to demonstrate how they operate under your leadership. Be explicit about what you are looking for: commercial thinking, accountability for outcomes, the ability to adapt. Then make decisions based on what you observe, not on what you were told.
This is harder than it sounds. Organisations are social systems. Relationships, history, and loyalty all create pressure to preserve existing structures. But a team that was built for the previous leader’s priorities is rarely the right team for yours. The structure needs to follow the strategy, not the other way around.
Sequencing: What to Change First and What to Leave Alone
Not everything that is broken needs to be fixed immediately. And not everything that looks broken actually is. Part of the skill in a transition is knowing which problems to address first and which to leave alone while you build the credibility and the context to address them properly.
A useful frame is to separate problems into three categories. First, the things that are actively damaging the business right now and cannot wait. Second, the things that are structurally wrong but not immediately critical. Third, the things that are suboptimal but functional and not worth the disruption of changing them in the short term.
In the turnaround I led, the first category included delivery margins on active projects, a pricing structure that was costing us money on every new win, and a client relationship that was at genuine risk of walking. These needed attention in weeks, not months. The second category included team structure, process quality, and the agency’s positioning in the market. These needed to change, but they could wait until I had enough credibility and enough information to do it properly. The third category was a long list of things that could be improved but were not worth the noise of changing while everything else was in motion.
Getting this sequencing right is what separates transitions that build momentum from those that create chaos. Every change you make in the first ninety days sends a signal. The signal should be: this leader understands what matters and is making deliberate choices, not: this leader is changing everything at once and we should all be anxious.
Forrester’s intelligent growth model makes a similar point about organisational change: sustainable growth comes from disciplined prioritisation, not from attempting to fix every constraint simultaneously. The same logic applies to leadership transitions.
Building Commercial Credibility Without Overpromising
The fastest way to lose credibility in a new role is to make promises you cannot keep. The second fastest is to announce a strategy before you have earned the right to lead it.
Commercial credibility in a transition is built through small, visible wins. A client problem that gets solved properly. A process that was broken and is now working. A piece of analysis that changes how the business thinks about a decision. These things accumulate. They tell the team and the wider organisation that this leader delivers, not just talks.
This is particularly important in marketing leadership, where there is often a gap between what marketing claims to deliver and what the business actually experiences. If you arrive as a new CMO or marketing director and immediately start talking about brand building and long-term positioning, but the sales team is struggling to generate pipeline, you have already lost the room. The commercial credibility has to come first.
When I was rebuilding the agency from a loss-making position, the credibility came from a very specific set of decisions: cutting costs that were not delivering value, repricing contracts that were underwater, and bringing in a piece of new business that demonstrated the agency could still win. None of it was strategic in the grand sense. All of it was necessary to create the conditions in which strategy could actually work. The swing from significant loss to meaningful profit, roughly £1.5 million in movement, did not happen because of a vision document. It happened because of a sequence of commercial decisions made in the right order.
Understanding how market conditions affect those decisions matters too. Market penetration dynamics shift the calculus on where to focus commercial energy, whether the priority is defending existing revenue, winning new accounts, or expanding within the customer base you already have. In a transition, you rarely have the bandwidth to do all three at once.
Managing Upward During a Transition
The relationship with the board, the CEO, or whoever you report to is as important as the relationship with your team. And it requires different management.
The most common mistake incoming leaders make with their superiors is trying to manage expectations by being optimistic. They want to signal confidence, so they understate the problems they are finding and overstate their early progress. This is a short-term play that creates long-term problems. When the reality eventually lands, the credibility hit is significantly worse than if you had been straight about what you were finding from the beginning.
The better approach is to be honest about the diagnosis early and specific about the plan. Not a plan that promises everything, but a plan that identifies the three or four things that will move the needle in the next six months and explains the logic behind each one. Boards and CEOs can handle bad news. What they cannot handle is surprises.
This also means being clear about what you need. Resources, time, support on specific decisions. If you need to make a difficult people decision and you want backing for it, say so explicitly rather than hoping the support will materialise. Most leadership failures in transitions are not about the incoming leader’s capability. They are about misaligned expectations between the leader and the organisation above them.
BCG’s research on evolving organisational needs points to the importance of aligning leadership decisions with the actual commercial context of the business, not the context as it was twelve months ago or as the board wishes it to be. That alignment starts with honest communication, not optimistic positioning.
The 90-Day Mark: What a Successful Transition Looks Like
By the end of ninety days, a successful transition should have produced a small number of specific things. A clear-eyed diagnosis of the commercial situation. An honest assessment of the team. A prioritised list of what needs to change and in what order. A set of early wins that demonstrate the leader can deliver. And a relationship with the organisation above them that is built on honesty rather than optimism.
What it should not have produced is a comprehensive strategy document, a complete restructure, or a set of ambitious promises about where the business will be in three years. Those things come later, when the leader has the credibility, the context, and the team to deliver on them.
The transitions I have seen succeed share a common characteristic. The incoming leader was willing to slow down long enough to understand the business before trying to change it. That patience, in an environment that consistently rewards the appearance of speed, is genuinely difficult to maintain. But it is what separates transitions that compound over time from those that burn out after the initial announcement.
If the transition sits within a broader commercial reset, the frameworks around go-to-market strategy and growth planning become directly relevant. The Growth Strategy hub at The Marketing Juice covers the strategic and operational disciplines that should inform how a marketing function is rebuilt after a leadership change, from audience strategy to channel selection to performance measurement.
About the Author
Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.
