The First 100 Days Advice You Won’t Find in the Leadership Books

Aug 25

9 min read

How to build power, protect your peace, and stay connected to the bold vision that brought you into the role.

Every fall, a new cohort of leaders steps into administrative roles with energy, passion, and a mandate for change. Perhaps you’re becoming a dean, vice president, provost, department chair, or taking on another role that significantly expands your sphere of responsibility.

You were chosen because someone believes in what you can contribute. You may have been recruited specifically because the institution needs transformation.

And then you arrive. The budget is worse than you realized. Faculty and staff are exhausted. Key positions have been left vacant. Political pressures constrain actions that once seemed straightforward. Your calendar fills before you’ve figured out where the bathroom is. People want you to take a position on conflicts that began years before you arrived. Some believe you can fix everything. Others are watching carefully to determine whether you can be trusted. Still others may have already decided that you cannot.

Welcome to leadership in this moment.

Much of the traditional advice about the “first 100 days” emphasizes establishing credibility, demonstrating competence, securing quick wins, and building momentum. There’s wisdom in some of that. But I’ve become increasingly concerned about what this advice can produce, particularly for women, leaders of color, LGBTQ+ and neurodivergent leaders, equity-oriented leaders, and others whose authority, identities or commitments may attract heightened scrutiny.

We turn the first 100 days into an audition.

We overprepare. Overfunction. Say yes too often. Solve problems that should remain with the people who own them. Accept meeting invitations when we are already overscheduled. Work evenings to compensate for impossible daytime calendars.

We try to demonstrate responsiveness by answering every email. Mask parts of ourselves that we fear will be read as too different, too much, too political, too emotional, too unconventional. And postpone the practices that sustain us until some mythical future moment when things “settle down.”

Then the honeymoon ends.

And increasingly, some leaders don’t get much of a honeymoon at all. The roles of deans, provosts, presidents, and other senior leaders have become increasingly precarious as institutions navigate financial instability, political intervention, polarized campuses, governing-board pressures, and rapidly shifting expectations about what institutions and their leaders should, or should not, say and do.

This changes how we need to think about the first 100 days. The Liberated Leadership Framework I've developed through my work with senior leaders suggests a different approach.

Your goal isn’t simply to make an impact quickly. It’s to build the relationships, strategic insight, political capital and sustainable leadership practices that will allow you to stay long enough to make the impact you came to make.

The bold vision that helped you win the role may take years to implement. Your first 100 days should help create the conditions that make those years possible.

1. Learn the institution beneath the institution

The organizational chart tells you where formal authority is located. It doesn’t tell you how the institution actually works.

Spend your early months listening for the invisible architecture. Who has influence without positional authority? Which relationships have histories you don’t yet understand? Where does information travel quickly, and where does it stop? What subjects make people suddenly careful? Which problems are genuinely urgent, and which have simply acquired urgency through repetition?

Pay particular attention to the stories people try to convince you of. Every institution has stories about itself: We tried that before. Faculty would never support that. The president doesn’t care about this. This department always causes problems. We can’t afford to take that risk.

Listen respectfully without automatically inheriting the conclusions.

One of the gifts of being new is that you have not yet learned which possibilities are supposedly impossible. Protect that gift.

2. Build your power base before you need it

Traditional first-100-days advice usually tells leaders to build relationships. I want to go further: Build a power base.

Not a collection of loyalists. Not transactional alliances. A network of authentic relationships with people who understand how you lead, know what you stand for, have experienced your integrity, and can speak accurately about you when you are not in the room.

Get to know Cabinet members, trustees, peers, influential alumni, community partners, faculty and staff leaders, and others who carry formal or informal influence. Pay attention to who people listen to, not simply who holds the title.

This relational infrastructure helps you accomplish ambitious things. It also matters when your leadership is challenged. New leaders are extremely vulnerable to organized opposition. By the time you realize you need allies, it may be too late to build key relationships.

Don’t wait until you’re under attack to discover who will stand beside you.

And remember that the strongest power base isn’t built around you. If the bold vision remains your vision, removing you can remove the vision. When others begin to see their hopes and commitments reflected in it, it becomes our vision. That is how personal leadership begins to become institutional transformation.

3. Resist the seduction of the quick win

Sometimes a quick win is exactly what’s needed. But not everything that can be fixed quickly by wielding your authority should be.

Before acting, ask:

What could I learn by not solving this yet?

Whose problem is this to solve?

A problem landing on your desk may reveal a broken process, an unresolved conflict, unclear accountability, or a culture in which leaders routinely compensate for dysfunctional systems. If you immediately fix the problem, you may become part of the system that keeps producing it. Your job isn’t to become indispensable, it’s to build greater institutional capacity.

4. Establish your leadership rhythms before urgency establishes them for you

Your calendar is becoming your leadership practice whether you’re designing it intentionally or not.

Don’t wait until you’re exhausted to decide how you want to work. Protect thinking time now. Determine which meetings genuinely require you and decline the rest. Pay attention to which environments help you think expansively and which leave you depleted. Create space between high-intensity conversations and meetings. Decide what time you will stop working and make that commitment sacrosanct. Decide how you will replenish your energy.

And model this visibly.

At a time when faculty and staff are experiencing extraordinary levels of burnout and stress-related health concerns, leaders who send emails at 2:00 a.m., routinely sacrifice weekends, and perform exhaustion as commitment inadvertently teach everyone around them what leadership requires.

You are always shaping culture, including through the ways you care for yourself.

5. Don’t confuse visibility with availability

New leaders need to be visible, but they don’t need to be continuously accessible.

Walk around. Attend events. Meet faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community partners. Ask questions. Learn people’s names. Let people experience you as curious and present.

But don’t allow accessibility to become unlimited availability.

This can be particularly complicated for leaders who experience gendered or racialized expectations to provide emotional labor alongside administrative leadership, and for neurodivergent leaders who may be navigating sensory, social, or executive-function demands that are invisible to others.

Warmth and boundaries are not opposites. You can be deeply relational without becoming infinitely absorbent.

6. Understand that your leadership is public before you think it is

There is another reality new leaders need to understand in this political moment: your first months aren’t only a time when you are assessing the institution. Other people are assessing you, too.

For women, leaders of color, LGBTQ+ and neurodivergent leaders, equity-oriented leaders, and others whose authority or commitments may be more readily contested, that scrutiny can create precarity very quickly.

Excellent work, good intentions, and positional authority are rarely sufficient protection in a highly politicized environment.

We’ve watched a familiar playbook unfold across higher education: anonymous complaints and whistleblower allegations; plagiarism accusations; selective leaks of emails or internal conversations; public-records requests; social-media campaigns; external organizations mobilizing around a leader’s scholarship, identity, or perceived political commitments; and internal constituencies using the external political environment to advance longstanding institutional conflicts.

This doesn’t mean entering leadership suspicious of everyone around you. It means entering with deep political awareness and discernment.

Assume that anything you write or say in your professional capacity could eventually become public. That doesn’t require becoming guarded, masking your identity, or abandoning courageous speech. It requires developing the discipline of strategic courage: knowing what you believe, what needs to be said, when and where to say it, and how to communicate in ways you would be prepared to stand behind outside the room in which the conversation occurred.

7. Practice strategic courage, not performative bravery

Courageous leadership does not mean saying every true thing you believe in every room. In highly politicized environments, discernment is not cowardice or lack of caring, it is a critical leadership skill. You will encounter more challenges than you can solve. Some potential solutions will offend your values. Some will break the hearts of some of the people you serve. Some will genuinely threaten the institution’s mission. Learning to distinguish among them and chart a wise path forward is one of the central disciplines of senior leadership.

A wise mentor once told me: The more positional authority you receive, the more people you will have to disappoint. I would add: The more power you have, the more you will find that the challenges in front of you have no easy answers.

Strategic courage isn’t self-censorship disguised as pragmatism. Nor is it speaking out simply to demonstrate that you are courageous.

It means asking:

What matters enough to act on?

Who needs to be with me?

What am I willing to risk?

What is the courageous move that actually advances the work?

In today’s political environment, courage without strategy can leave leaders isolated. Strategy without courage can leave institutions drifting away from their values. We need both.

8. Build a circle where you don’t have to perform leadership

The more senior your role becomes, the fewer institutional relationships are entirely uncomplicated.

You need people with whom you can say:

I don’t know.

That meeting shook me.

I’m furious.

I think I got this wrong.

I’m considering something bold. Help me think.

Find mentors, trusted peers, coaches, affinity communities, former colleagues, or others who can offer both affirmation and challenge. Your circle of trust shouldn’t simply tell you that you’re right. It should help you become more discerning. For women, leaders of color, LGBTQ+ and neurodivergent leaders, and others whose identities or leadership approaches fall outside dominant expectations, these spaces should also be places where unmasking is possible.

You need somewhere you don’t have to continuously monitor how you are being perceived. Somewhere you can distinguish between useful feedback and bias, genuine political danger and learned hypervigilance, strategic adaptation and self-erasure.

The goal isn’t to refuse all adaptation. Effective leadership always involves self-management.

The question is whether you are choosing when and how to adapt, or slowly disappearing inside the role.

9. Keep something larger than the crisis in view

Perhaps most importantly, don’t allow the institution’s immediate problems to consume the vision that brought you into leadership. Fiscal reductions are real. Political constraints are real. Enrollment challenges are real. Burnout is real.

But leadership cannot become exclusively the management of scarcity.

Ask yourself regularly:

What are we trying to make possible?

Not simply: What are we trying to preserve?

Your faculty and staff need honesty about constraints. They also need reasons to believe their work matters and that a different future remains imaginable.

Hope isn’t pretending everything will work out. Hope is the discipline of continuing to imagine different possibilities and organize toward them when outcomes are uncertain.

That is a critical skill for leadership that liberates rather than managing dissent in the service of the status quo.

At Day 100, ask different questions

Traditional first-100-days advice might ask what early wins you’ve accomplished.

I’d invite you to ask something else:

What possibilities can I see now that I couldn’t see on Day One?

Where have I built trust, influence, and shared ownership?

Who knows my leadership well enough to speak for it when I’m not in the room?

Which parts of myself have become more present in my leadership, and which am I beginning to mask?

What am I carrying that doesn’t actually belong to me?

Where does this institution most need my courage?

And, perhaps most importantly, is the way I’m leading sustainable for the person I want to be a year from now?

Your first 100 days don’t have to prove that hiring you was the right decision. You already got the job. Use these months to build relationships and power. Understand the institution beneath the institution. Establish boundaries. Preserve your imagination. Find your people. Foster strategic courage in yourself and others. Rest. Make mistakes. Repair. Learn.

And begin building a way of leading that you can actually breathe inside.

Because the goal isn’t to survive your first 100 days. It’s to stay long enough to make the impact you came to make, without losing yourself along the way.

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Chinyere Oparah is an executive coach, strategist and educator. She has served in senior leadership roles in the nonprofit and higher education sectors, including dean, provost and vice president for academic affairs for over three decades and is the founder and CEO of the Center for Liberated Leadership and NeuroSpicy Leaders. Sign up for a free leadership consultation with her here.

About the Center for Liberated Leadership

The Center for Liberated Leadership (C4LL) cultivates courageous, sustainable leadership, strengthens organizations, and advances more equitable and neuroinclusive workplaces. Through thought leadership and community dialogue, we are reimagining leadership as a practice that centers authenticity, freedom, and joy.