The job is not what the interview described. The sooner you accept that, the better.
The promotion or hire was months in the making. The new executive spent hours preparing, researching the organization, mapping the stakeholders, rehearsing how she would introduce herself. And then she shows up, and the job she prepared for bears almost no resemblance to the job she just started.
This is not a failure of research. It is the nature of executive roles. A job description and an actual position are two different things, and the distance between them only becomes visible from the inside. Charmain Bogue has watched this gap catch new leaders off guard repeatedly, in her coaching work and in her career across public and private sectors. The gap is not dangerous by itself. What makes it dangerous is how people respond to it.
The Most Common Mistake
The most common mistake is defaulting to what made them successful before. A new leader comes in with a strong operational background and starts optimizing processes within the first two weeks. It looks like initiative. It reads as premature to everyone watching. She has not yet understood the culture, the informal power structures, or the reason those processes exist the way they do. She is fixing things before she knows whether they are broken.
The second mistake is the listening tour that stays a listening tour. Every executive coach will tell you to listen before you act. Bogue agrees, but she pushes further: listening without synthesis is just a series of coffee meetings. A new leader has to form views from what she hears, and she has to be willing to share those views while they are still forming. People in the organization are watching to see whether there is a real thinker in the chair. A leader who only asks questions for the first three months is not inspiring confidence. She is broadcasting uncertainty.
The First Impression Problem
The third mistake is underestimating the first few weeks. Impressions set fast in organizations. The way a leader handles the first difficult moment, the first piece of bad news, the first person who tests her authority, sets the pattern. Not what she intends to do. Not what her predecessor did. What she actually does in that moment. Once that pattern sets, changing it costs three times what establishing it would have.
Bogue sees this particularly in leaders who came up in environments where success was individual. They were rewarded for their own output. Executive roles are different. The output is other people’s output. A new executive who cannot make that shift quickly ends up doing the work of her direct reports while her actual job — setting direction and making decisions — goes unattended.
What Actually Works
The practical advice Bogue offers is specific. In the first month, listen hard, form views, and share them informally. Not as directives. As working hypotheses: “Here is what I am seeing. Tell me what I am missing.” This does something the pure listening tour does not do. It signals that she can think. It invites correction while the cost of being wrong is still low. And it builds the trust that harder conversations later will require.
In the second month, make two or three decisions that are clearly hers to make. Not the biggest decisions on the table. Decisions that demonstrate how she thinks and what she values. Every organization is watching its new leader to understand what the new rules are. Those early decisions answer the question before it turns into a guessing game.
The Ninety-Day Window
By the third month, the question is not whether things are going well. The question is whether the leader has identified the one or two things that most need to change and has a plan for them that other people have contributed to. A plan she developed alone is a plan no one else will protect.
Most organizations give new executives ninety days as a grace period. Bogue’s view is that the grace period is not protection from judgment. It is the window when the concrete is still wet.