Insights from the Harvard Institute of Coaching (IOC) Webinar: Beyond the First 90 Days
Leadership transitions are among the most critical, and most under-supported, moments in any organization. Yet most onboarding efforts stop just as things get hard.
Research consistently shows that 40–50% of leaders underperform or fail within their first 18 months in a new role. Even among senior executives, the ability to meet expectations after 12 months barely clears 50%. Despite these sobering statistics, most organizations concentrate their onboarding support in the first 90 days, leaving leaders without structured guidance precisely when they need it most.
That’s the core challenge explored in our recent Harvard Institute of Coaching (IOC) webinar, “Beyond the First 90 Days: Evidence-Based Strategies for Successful Leadership Transitions,” featuring our founder Johan Naudé, global coaching lead Natalie Schürmann, and Pilgrimage Professional Development Group founder Glenn Newsom. Together, they shared a practical, research-backed framework that is already producing dramatically better outcomes for leaders in transition.
Why Smart Leaders Still Struggle in New Roles
One of the first questions the webinar tackled is the most intuitive one: if a leader is smart, experienced, and capable, why do they so often struggle in a new role?
The research is clear: it’s rarely a technical skills problem. The root causes of leadership derailment are almost always behavioral, cultural, or interpersonal. Leaders fail to build the right relationships, misread the political dynamics of a new organization, or don’t adapt their leadership style to the expectations of a new culture.
Presenters and the more than 100 coaches in attendance shared the common experience of being brought in 6–18 months after a leader started — not to help them thrive, but to help them get back on track. This reactive pattern prompted a fundamental question: Is there a better way?
A Three-Phase Framework for the Full First Year
The answer, grounded in decades of research on leadership transitions and organizational socialization, is the Transitions Accelerator: a structured, three-phase process designed to support leaders throughout their entire first year, not just the first 90 days.
Phase 1 (Months 1–3): Building Relationships and Trust
The opening phase is what most people think of when they imagine onboarding. The focus is on cultural integration, curiosity, and building interpersonal equity. Leaders who succeed here prioritize listening over telling, invest in relationships at all levels, and work to understand how the organization really works — not just how it’s supposed to work.
Phase 2 (Months 4–6): Setting Direction and Creating Impact
Good relationships alone aren’t enough to sustain a leader’s success. By the mid-year mark, leaders must shift into what the presenters call the “initial impact phase.” This means articulating a clear point of view on what’s working and what needs to change, starting to shape strategy and direction, and assembling the right team around them.
Phase 3 (Months 7–9): Sustaining Performance and Accountability
In the final phase, the hallmark of success is building systems and structures that don’t depend entirely on the leader’s individual effort. This means establishing clear metrics, accountability mechanisms, and a team capable of driving the mission forward independently. Leaders who reach this phase effectively have demonstrably moved the dial.
The Power of Pulse Check Feedback
What separates the Transitions Accelerator from standard onboarding programs is its use of structured, multi-rater pulse check feedback at the end of each phase — at three months, six months, and nine months. Each pulse check is targeted to the competencies most relevant to that phase, and takes only 10–12 minutes for raters to complete.
The results are striking. Leaders who follow this model are rated as “effective” or “highly effective” after nine months more than 90% of the time, compared to the 50% baseline success rate.
The key insight: people generally stop doing ineffective things once they know they’re doing them. The problem is that without structured feedback, leaders simply don’t find out until it’s too late to correct the course.
Real-World Applications: Two Case Studies
The Direct Communicator Promoted from Within
Natalie Schürmann shared the story of a nurse leader promoted to Chief Nursing Officer within a large medical organization. Well-respected and competent, she nonetheless carried some tendencies — blunt communication and a reserved personal style — that created friction in her new peer environment. Her pulse check feedback revealed strong relationship-building scores overall, but flagged her directness as sometimes coming across as abrasive. Rather than waiting for a larger performance review cycle, she was able to adjust in real time, refining how she gave feedback and opening up more personally to build trust. By Phase 2, she was focused on vision-setting and influence — a completely different set of leadership challenges, now addressed with a strong foundation under her.
The Well-Liked Leader Who Needed to Lead Harder
A senior leader at a large industrial company integrated beautifully during Phase 1 — universally liked, building strong relationships. But his Phase 2 feedback told a different story: raters needed him to push harder, be more assertive, and drive accountability in a business that needed change. The feedback was both quantitative and qualitative, and it surprised him. He leaned in, adjusted his style, and by Phase 3 was receiving strong marks for direction-setting and decisive leadership.
Context Is Everything
The Transitions Accelerator framework is designed to be applicable across any organization — corporate, nonprofit, government — and at any leader level. But the presenters were emphatic: the framework must be contextualized. What does “good” look like in this specific role, at this specific organization, at this particular moment in the business? The integration plan must answer those questions, and coaches, managers, and HR partners all play a role in helping leaders surface those answers.
Coaches also noted the particular challenge of internal promotions: a leader who has been in the organization for years must adapt to a new micro-culture within the same company, manage what were previously peers as direct reports, and reshape perceptions that formed over a long period. Identifying internal ambassadors who can support a leader’s reputation rebranding becomes especially important in these cases.
The Case for Getting in Early
One of the most consistent themes in the webinar was the cost of waiting. Coaches are frequently called in at the 6–12 month mark when problems are already visible, but by then, patterns are entrenched, perceptions are set, and the window for the most impactful interventions has passed.
Organizations that build integration coaching into their succession and onboarding processes from day one see dramatically higher success rates. And while the methodology was developed primarily for senior leader coaching, the presenters noted its potential to scale through cohort-based models for early managers, group coaching formats, and even AI-assisted coaching support.
Final Takeaway
Leadership transitions will always carry risk. But that risk is far more manageable than most organizations realize. With the right framework, phased feedback, and coaching support extended across the full first year, not just the first 90 days, leaders can course-correct in real time, build genuine organizational impact, and succeed at rates that should make any organization take notice.
The question isn’t whether your organization can afford this kind of support. Given the cost of leadership failure, the real question is whether you can afford not to provide it.
