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New Executive Early Mistakes: Why Fast Action Costs More
The formation lap looks slow. No overtakes. No pressure. No urgency.
The irony? It decides the race most of the time. The drivers aren't waiting. They're calibrating.
Before every Formula 1 race, the twenty-two drivers complete one lap at reduced speed, weaving to warm tires, testing brakes at different pressures, feeling where the track surface provides grip, and noting where it's damp, where the rubber from previous sessions has laid down a faster racing line. The casual viewer wonders why they're going slowly. The driver is collecting information that will determine every decision in the first five laps: how aggressively to brake into turn one, which side of the track to position on for the start, whether the grip level matches what the data predicted, or whether the track has changed since practice.
The driver who skips this assessment, treats the formation lap as a formality, and pushes immediately when the lights go out is driving blind.
The executive who starts making changes in the first thirty days is doing the same thing.
The Pressure That Produces the Mistake
Action is visible. Understanding isn't.
The board that just spent six months on the search wants evidence that the investment is producing returns. The CEO who hired the new VP wants to see movement. The team watches for signals about what's going to change.
This pressure rewards movement, not accuracy. So leaders perform action before they earn it.
The new CMO launches a rebrand in month two to signal strategic vision. The new VP of Sales restructures the team in week three to demonstrate decisiveness. The new COO replaces processes in the first quarter to show operational impact. Each action is visible. Each action communicates "I'm here and I'm making a difference." Each action is based on the new leader's previous experience, not the current organization's conditions.
Every move says: "I'm in control." The reality is: they don't know the track yet.
What the Formation Lap Reveals
Grip Is Where Strategy Survives Contact With Reality
On a racetrack, grip varies by corner, surface conditions, and temperature. The driver maps where they can push and where to be conservative.
In an organization, grip is where intention translates into execution, where initiatives gain traction, and where they stall. You don't see grip in interviews. You feel it only after you're inside.
The new VP of Sales, who maps the organizational grip, discovers that the North American team executes reliably, but the European team has a handoff problem with sales engineering. The new CMO discovers that the content team produces excellent work, but demand generation lacks a process for converting content into a pipeline. Neither is visible from outside. Both determine every strategic decision the leader will make.
Slippery Sections Are Tripwires, Not Risks
In F1, slippery sections are danger zones, corners where the car can break away if the driver applies too much input. In an organization, they're the politically sensitive areas, the decisions that carry disproportionate risk.
Every new leader hits one. The good ones hit it slowly.
The new CHRO who doesn't map the politics discovers too late that the founder's executive assistant is the real organizational power center. The new COO who restructures a department without understanding its history discovers that the team lead they reassigned was the founder's first hire and the only person who understands the legacy supply chain. Every organization has these zones. The leaders who map them before they push avoid the crashes that derail first-year effectiveness.
Every Executive Starts With a Story. The Formation Lap Tests Whether It's Fiction.
Before starting, every new executive has data: interview insights, board presentations, and financial reports. This data forms a prediction about organizational conditions. The first sixty to ninety days test whether the prediction matches reality.
Most failures start in the gap between what was said and what is.
The CMO told that "marketing and sales are well-aligned" discovers during the formation lap that marketing defines a lead by engagement signals, and sales defines it by buying signals — a gap that creates a pipeline simultaneously full and empty. The CFO told the financial reporting is "solid" discovers that the month-end close takes three weeks because data integration between systems is manual. The prediction was sophistication. The reality is duct tape.
The Functional Formation Lap
The discipline applies across every C-suite function. The specific questions vary. The principle is identical: observe, map, and understand before changing.
VP of Sales / CRO — Map what's real. The CRM is a narrative. The reps know the truth. Talk to the salespeople, not just the managers. Understand what the sales cycle actually looks like, where deals die and why, and who carries account relationships that don't live in any system.
CMO — Before you touch the brand, find out who really owns it. If the founder emotionally owns the brand, you don't have authority yet. Understand the CEO's measurement horizon before proposing anything that takes eighteen months to compound. Close the sales definition gap before investing more in lead generation.
COO — Ignore the documentation. Find what actually runs the company. Every company runs on one undocumented system. Understand why the existing processes exist before changing them. The process that looks inefficient may exist because, three years ago, something went wrong and someone built in a safeguard. The context makes it essential.
CFO — Don't trust the reports. Trust how long they take to build. Speed reveals truth faster than accuracy. If month-end close takes three weeks, understand exactly why before proposing a faster timeline. Map who controls budget decisions in practice versus on paper.
CHRO — Ignore the values. Watch the decisions. Culture is what gets rewarded, not what gets written. The company website says "innovation" and "accountability." The formation lap reveals whether either of those words describes what actually happens. Understand the CEO's actual relationship with the people function before proposing an organizational redesign agenda.
Why It Works
The formation lap replaces assumption with contact. Most leaders don't fail from bad decisions. They fail from early decisions made on bad assumptions.
Speed amplifies error.
Every new executive arrives with assumptions shaped by interviews, board presentations, industry experience, and their last company. Some are correct. Many are not. The executive who acts on assumptions produces changes that may not match the conditions. The restructured sales team may not align with how deals are actually closed at this company. The rebranded marketing may not resonate with how this company's customers actually make decisions.
The executive who tests assumptions through a formation lap produces changes calibrated to conditions because they took 60 to 90 days to understand what the track actually looks like before they pushed.
Slowing down feels expensive. It's not.
In F1, the formation lap takes ninety seconds. In business, it takes at least ninety days.
Skip it, and every lap after is a correction. The best leaders don't start fast. They start accurately.
Charlie Solórzano is a Managing Partner at Alder Koten, a boutique executive search firm specializing in C-suite and board placements across the U.S. and Mexico markets. He advises founders, investors, and boards on leadership transitions using The Race Conditions Model™, a proprietary diagnostic framework built on the thesis that leadership success is determined by conditions, not credentials.
Onboarding a New Executive — or Just Starting a New Role?
The first ninety days determine whether a new leader builds credibility or spends the next year correcting early decisions. If you're navigating this transition — as the executive or the CEO bringing one in — let's talk about what the calibration period actually requires.
Schedule a Confidential ConsultationFrequently Asked Questions
Why do new executives make costly mistakes in the first 30 days?
Because the pressure they face rewards visible action over accurate understanding. The board wants evidence that the hire is producing returns. The CEO wants movement. The team watches for signals. This pressure creates an incentive to act before understanding — and early decisions based on assumptions about the new organization, rather than observations of it, produce changes that either don't match the conditions or actively damage the relationships and systems the new leader depends on.
What is the formation lap principle in executive leadership?
It's the practice of deliberately slowing down in the first sixty to ninety days to map organizational conditions before making changes. In Formula 1, drivers use the formation lap before each race to test grip, identify slippery sections, and verify whether track conditions match their predictions. New executives should do the same: identify where organizational initiatives gain traction, map the political and relational tripwires, and test whether the assumptions formed during the hiring process match the reality of the organization. The discipline replaces assumption with contact.
What should a new CMO do in the first 90 days?
Find out who really owns the brand before touching it. If the founder has emotional ownership of the brand, the CMO doesn't have the authority to rebrand yet — and discovering this after proposing one costs credibility that takes months to rebuild. Understand the CEO's measurement horizon: if success is measured in quarters, a brand strategy that compounds over eighteen months won't survive. And assess the marketing-sales relationship honestly — fix the lead definition gap before investing in more lead generation.
What should a new COO or VP of Operations do in the first 90 days?
Ignore the documentation. Find what actually runs the company. Every organization runs on at least one undocumented system — a spreadsheet, a person, an informal process — that the documentation doesn't describe. Before changing any process, understand why it exists. The process that looks inefficient from outside often has a history: a past failure, a key customer requirement, a constraint that's not visible without context. Changing it without understanding the reason breaks something for reasons no one can immediately diagnose.
Why does slowing down in the first 90 days produce better results?
Because speed amplifies error. Most executive failures don't come from bad decisions — they come from early decisions made on bad assumptions. The executive who acts on assumptions from interviews and board presentations produces changes that may not match organizational conditions. The executive who spends sixty to ninety days testing those assumptions produces changes calibrated to reality. Every decision that follows the calibration period is more accurate, faster to implement, and less likely to require reversal. The slowdown is the most productive investment of the entire first year.
What should a new CHRO or Chief People Officer do in the first 90 days?
Ignore the stated values and watch the decisions. Culture is what gets rewarded, not what gets written on the website. The formation lap for a new CHRO means mapping the gap between the organization's aspirational culture and its actual behavior — which decisions get made, which get avoided, what tolerance for accountability really looks like. It also means understanding the CEO's actual relationship with the people function before proposing a strategic agenda. If the CEO wants operational reliability, not organizational redesign, knowing that in month one saves the tenure.
