How much do the first ninety days in a new job matter? There is disagreement in the CEO onboarding literature, and I think that there are lessons in both approaches.

Michael Watkins built an entire field around the fast start. The First 90 Days makes the case that the early period is decisive, that a new leader should move quickly to learn, secure early wins, and set direction before the window closes. The other for-profit guides I have written about, Bradt and his coauthors among them, share that premise. Get a fast, effective start, because the first impression hardens into the lasting one.

Ty Wiggins pushes the other way. In The New CEO, he argues that the weight placed on the first ninety days is overstated. By the end of three months, he says, a new chief executive is still coming to grips with the organization, the team, and above all the culture, which cannot be read from the outside. His research backs it up. Across the CEOs he studied, it took an average of nearly three months before the first change to the executive team, more than nine months before the final team was in place, and close to a year before the team was considered high-performing. He does not tell new leaders to sit on their hands. His rule is that if something is on fire, you fix it, and if it is only smoldering, you leave it until you understand it better. But his frame is the first year, not the first quarter.

I think this is a yes, and. A solid, effective start matters. So does the long arc of the first year. And in the nonprofit world, the case for the long arc is even stronger than Wiggins makes it.

Here is why. A new nonprofit executive is not only learning a staff. You are learning a board of volunteer leaders, a membership, a donor base, and a wider community of people outside the organization who have a stake in it and a history with it. That is more relationships, and more kinds of relationships, than most for-profit CEOs manage in their first year. Unless you have walked into a genuine turnaround, you usually have the luxury of time to understand those people, and you need it.

The other reason is the calendar. So much of what defines a nonprofit happens on an annual cycle, and you cannot learn it until you live it once. Your first board meeting. Your first budget cycle. Your first annual meeting. Your first large event. These are the key moments of the organization, and oftentimes they do not occur in your first ninety days. You can prepare for them, but you do not actually understand them until you have been through one.

So I am holding both. The first ninety days are a sprint, and I ran them as one, deliberately and with intent. But I am not treating the finish line as ninety days in. The marathon is the first year, and probably longer. The mistake would be to sprint hard, hit day ninety, and ease off the gas, just as the annual cycle starts handing me important firsts. I plan to keep learning at full attention well into the second year, because this sector demands it.