An inside look at Microsoft’s 90-day comms plan for new executives

The first 90 days of an employee’s tenure is a key window in which they get culturally acclimated to a new organization, often with the help of communicators. The same concept applies to new executives.

During Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, Washington, Kristen Larsen, director of executive communications for the chief marketing officer at Microsoft, shared what she’s learned in her first 90 days with several executives, sometimes the hard way.

“We’re good at our jobs, and it’s really dangerous,” she said. “Our instinct is to start proving our value immediately. But you can be really good at solving the wrong problem.”

With one leader, employee survey comments called the individual cold and distant. But when Larsen read them herself, she also found employees who called him the best leader they’d ever had.

“The super fans had experienced a leader in a small room setting,” she said. “Now he had a really big team, and he had to be on stage in front of a large audience. Employees didn’t experience that context. They didn’t understand how he thought.”