You’re about to take on a new role as a leader. Between overseeing operations and steering your company in the right strategic direction, you need a game plan to lay the foundation for long-term success.
That’s why so many leaders worldwide use a 100 day plan.
Popularized in the US by Franklin D. Roosevelt and his jam-packed first 100 days in office, it sets the strategic tone for your entire leadership tenure. It lets you outline goals and priorities to make meaningful changes from the get-go.
In this article, we cover how to write a 100 day plan, complete with expert-led best practices to ensure success.
What Is a 100 Day Plan?
A 100 day plan is a structured roadmap to guide executive leaders through their first three(ish) months in a new role. It outlines strategies, tactics, goals, and priorities to help them build momentum and relationships, and steer the company toward success.
Think of it as a playbook, letting you put your best foot forward when making a first impression through the early months.
Why Make a 100 Day Plan?
You should make one because it gives you an actionable guide to securing initial success as a leader. Let’s face it. Soon, your calendar will be filled with everything from shareholder meetings to board votes—winging it is out of the question. You can always fall back on your trusty 100 day plan to tackle challenges and stay on course.
Some of the main benefits for a plan for the first couple of months in your new role include:
- Gaining credibility through quick wins: Finding opportunities for achieving quick, short-term goals helps you gain trust and credibility from your stakeholders.
- Creating stronger relationships: These plans outline “who’s-who” as well as strategies for building strong connections.
- Assessing the current state of affairs: Including processes, teams, and resources you’ll inherit in your new role.
- Keeping yourself accountable: By setting a timeline, success metrics, and milestones, you keep yourself on track for fulfilling objectives.
Heightening your confidence: Leadership roles are challenging. A 100 day plan helps lower the risk of failure by giving you actionable guidelines. As you tick off your milestones, you’ll gain more confidence in your abilities and progress toward success.
What Should Be In a 100 Day Plan?
A 100 day plan acts as a safety net to fall back on, a roadmap to success, and a shining source of truth for leadership—provided you have all the right components.
Here are the five elements you need for an effective, and comprehensive approach.
1. Situation Summary
It’ll be difficult to change your company if you aren’t acquainted with what you’ve inherited. A situation summary provides context and helps you capture important elements of your company. Some of these include responsibilities, challenges, cost pressures, and employee perceptions of you as the new leader.
At this point, however, you’re only making assumptions. Since you need an employee-centric perspective, consider scheduling a few informational interviews with key colleagues to help fill in the blanks.
2. Short-Term and Long-Term Goals
Your goals set the terms for success as a leader. By establishing them early on, you have a direction to work towards while you're in charge. They keep you accountable and provide a detailed roadmap to follow.
There are two types of goals you need for your 100 day plan:
- Long-term goals: What do you want to achieve in your company by the end of 18 months, and what are the actions to take you there? While you won’t achieve this in your first 100 days, these goals set the tone for your entire plan and should always be considered when making decisions.
- Short-term goals: These are smaller objectives you can achieve within the first three months. They should line up with your long-term goals and follow the SMART formula (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). Make sure to assign a timeline to each short-term goal, complete with checkpoints and milestones to monitor your progress and build confidence.
3. Success Measurements
Success measurements help benchmark your efforts, effectively showcasing if you’re moving toward your goals or away from them. The exact measurements you choose will depend on your objectives and your role.
Some common areas to measure success include:
- Stakeholder sentiment and morale: Consider regular pulse surveys to help gauge changes in employee satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty. You can also collect anecdotal accounts and conduct focus groups for qualitative sentiment.
- Direction and vision clarity: After meetings with leadership or employees, conduct message recalls. These are quick surveys or email check-ins tests that help you assess if stakeholders can articulate strategic priorities.
- Team and talent metrics: Check if turnover rates are stable, increasing, or decreasing. This metric shows if your people are staying, and if your leadership style is impacting team morale and stability.
- Financial metrics: Most financial benchmarks take over 100 days to improve, but metrics, like short-term sales, or revenue milestones, like pipeline volume and quality of leads, can be quickly assessed. Depending on your goal, you’ll also want to assess spending. A tool like Cledara analyzes how much of your budget goes into your tech stack and even spots alternatives for cutting costs.
4. Team and Stakeholder Engagement Strategy
Throughout your tenure, you’ll be communicating with a wide range of stakeholders. From employees to investors, each person will play a role in helping you achieve your goals—provided you have the right strategy to reach them.
Start your communications strategy by singling out the most impactful stakeholders and how they can help you achieve short- and long-term goals. You’ll likely need to do a thorough analysis of influential stakeholders at each company level, including frontline employees, mid-level managers, and the executive leadership team.
Next, figure out the most appropriate channels of communication for reaching each stakeholder group. For example, board meetings are especially useful for strategic initiatives, while all-hands meetings ensure everyone is in the loop for company-wide policy changes.
Some other communication channels to consider:
- Digital collaboration tool messages (Slack, Microsoft Teams)
- One-on-one meetings
- Team huddles
- Town hall meetings
- Email updates
- Internal newsletters
- Strategy reports
5. Key Messages
Effective communication helps stakeholders know exactly what your vision is, and how they can help achieve it. Take the time to write down key messages aligning with both your short-term and long-term goals. Keep them concise and clear.
There are a few points you should clarify early in your new role, such as:
- How your objectives tie into broader company goals
- A list of commitments for your new role
- Long-term vision and strategy
- Your leadership style
- Key priorities
A 100 Day Plan Example
POV: You’ve just been promoted from Procurement Manager to Head of Procurement for a project management and database tool called… Earthtable. 😉
Congratulations!
In your new position, you are responsible for procuring and managing your company’s tech stack, building relationships with suppliers, and creating purchase policies that align with company objectives.
You’re excited, eager, and even a little bit nervous. All the more reason to get started on your plan.
You begin by doing a situation analysis of your department's current state. Given that you’ve spent time as a manager, you’re already informed.
You highlight two specific challenges:
- Your company’s messy tech stack contains over 400 software solutions. Many are redundant and have fallen out of use.
- Leadership has communicated their priorities to cut costs wherever possible during the next quarter.
With the information above, you develop two goals:
- One short-term goal: Includes organizing your tech stack to remove redundant software and double subscriptions. This helps get quick wins, reduce costs, improve efficiency, and start on a good note.
- One long-term goal: Develop a procurement policy that includes standardizing procurement processes, performing audits, and strengthening supplier relationships for better deals.
To ensure you’re on the right track to success, you determine two metrics for your short-term goals:
- Cost savings achieved: The total amount of money you’ve saved by getting rid of redundant software licenses and optimizing your tech stack.
- Software use: Monitoring usage rates helps you home in on solutions that employees don’t really need for completing daily operations. A high usage rate signifies your tech stack is consolidated and free of waste, while a low usage rate implies you still have bloat to lose.
“It’s a big goal” you think to yourself, and you’ll need all the help you can get.
“Amara from IT will definitely have the information I need… Our CFO, Sandra, is my link to the rest of leadership. I’ll need to report to her too!”
You identify key stakeholders who can help you run the initiative:
- Your procurement management team: To help you manage supplier relationships by setting meetings and spotting redundant software throughout the organization.
- Head of IT: To provide insights on your current software stack, including licenses, double subscriptions, and which software is essential for daily operations. They’ll closely collaborate with your procurement team.
- Chief Financial Officer (CFO): To give you insights on financial initiatives, KPIs, and budget allocation. You’ll also need to report to them regularly so they can communicate your progress to the rest of leadership.
To make sure everyone is on the same page, you settle on regular monthly email updates for the strategy, weekly meetings with your procurement team, and a quarterly report between you and the CFO to align on long-term business strategies.
Finally, you pencil in one-to-one meetings with each team member to discuss your main priority for your first 100 days: Cutting procurement costs while increasing efficiency.
Best Prow To Create a 100 Day Plan: 3 Best Practices
Creating your plan involves a lot of moving parts. To ensure you’re creating one successfully, here are three best practices our experienced experts emphasize.
1. Don’t Overload Your Plan: Balance Optimism and Practicality
You might be tempted to fill out your plan with ambitious goals, business-disrupting changes, and rehauling entire departments. Resist this urge. While it may look good on paper, there's a limit to what anyone can do in the first 100 days. You’ll need to account for potential setbacks, and attempting to do too much can leave you burnt out by the end of your three months.
Rob Stevenson, CEO and Founder of BackUpVault, emphasizes learnings from his first 100-day plan:
The most challenging part was being realistic about what could actually be achieved in such a short time. It’s easy to set ambitious goals, but knowing how to break them down into actionable steps and avoid overloading the team was tricky. You also have to account for unforeseen setbacks, so balancing optimism with practicality is key.
2. Divide Your Timeline Into Three Phases: Discovery, Strategy, and Execution
With so many goals, strategies, and milestones in your plan, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Instead of trying to accomplish everything at once, divide your timeline into three distinct phases in which the next phase builds upon the previous one.
Jayanti Katariya, CEO of Moon Invoice explains how:
“A well-structured 100-day plan should have three pillars: discovery, strategy, and execution.
In the discovery phase, I prioritized in-depth stakeholder dialogues and data audits to uncover pain points in product scalability and customer retention.
The strategy phase focused on defining KPIs that linked directly to our revenue targets and client satisfaction goals.
By the execution phase, the focus shifted to rolling out quick wins, such as streamlining our billing integrations, which demonstrated immediate ROI to internal and external stakeholders.”
3. Prioritize Communication and Cross-Collaboration
You won’t be able to complete your goals alone. To successfully implement initiatives, open your lines of communication and align with key stakeholders ASAP. Consider creating a feedback loop to help you efficiently communicate and build strong relationships with key players.
Lucas Botzen, CEO of Rivermate states:
A feedback loop with both peers and direct reports was of vital importance in keeping me on track and ensuring progress that truly matters. If I could redo my 100-day plan, I would put more emphasis on team culture and communication right from day one. Not that attaining tactical goals is unimportant, but the cultural fit and alignment between team members are equally important for long-term success. I would also try to incorporate more frequent check-ins with key stakeholders to ensure constant alignment with the organization's evolving needs.
Failing to (100 Day) Plan is Planning to Fail in 100 Days
There you have it, a 100 day plan that sets you on your way to executive success. By covering all your bases before starting, you have a plan of action to push the envelope on strategy, build strong relationships, and measure success. Just make sure you have the right tools for the job.
If one of your 100-day priorities includes cutting costs, Cledara can help you manage your tech stack. With Cledara, you can spot duplicate tools, analyze usage, and compare spend to budgeting. Cledara even identifies consolidation opportunities and changes in pricing.
By putting your tech stack in order with Cledara, you can start your new role with a series of cost-saving quick wins to build credibility from day one.
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