The First 100 Days of a New Managing Director: Building the Leadership Team Behind Your Vision

There is no shortage of advice about the first 100 days of a new Managing Director.

Listen before you act, get to know the business, meet the clients, understand the numbers, build relationships, clarify the strategy and work out what needs to change and what needs to stay. All sensible advice.

But having spent nearly 30 years co-founding and running an international events and exhibitions agency, and now working with founders, MDs and senior leadership teams going through periods of change, I think there is another part of the first 100 days that deserves far more attention.

A new MD doesn't arrive into a blank organisation.

They inherit a leadership system.

They inherit people who have learned over many years how decisions get made, who really has the final say, what they are trusted to decide for themselves, when they need permission and what happens when something goes wrong. They inherit relationships and loyalties, workarounds and habits, as well as a version of leadership that may bear surprisingly little resemblance to the organisation chart.

Changing the person at the top does not automatically change any of that.

Which is why I think the first 100 days of a new MD need to be considered from two directions. Of course there is the familiar question of what the incoming MD needs to learn, but there is another question that matters just as much:

What does the leadership team beneath them need to learn to do differently?

Because if that part of the transition is ignored, a very capable new MD can spend their first 100 days becoming extraordinarily well informed about the business while simultaneously becoming its newest bottleneck.

What should a new Managing Director focus on in their first 100 days?

I would start by looking beyond what people tell you about the business and paying close attention to how the business actually behaves.

Every established agency has its formal structure. There are job descriptions, reporting lines, leadership meetings and areas of responsibility.

Then there is the real structure.

You see it when a difficult client decision needs to be made, when a project starts losing margin, when two departments disagree, when somebody senior isn't performing, or when an opportunity falls outside the usual way of doing things. You see it particularly clearly when a decision carries enough risk that nobody particularly wants to own it.

What happens next tells you far more about the leadership of the business than an organisation chart ever will.

In some businesses, senior leaders genuinely take responsibility for their part of the organisation. They use judgement, involve the right people, make decisions and remain accountable for the outcome. In others, people can hold very senior titles and still look upwards when the stakes rise.

That distinction matters enormously for an incoming MD.

One of the most useful things they can do in those early months is begin to understand the movement of responsibility through the business. That means going beyond who reports to whom and noticing where decisions actually go when they become difficult.

Who is confident making a call without checking? Who tends to bring a recommendation and who tends to bring an unresolved problem? Where does responsibility become blurred between functions? Which decisions continually travel upwards? Where does the founder still appear in conversations even though they are supposedly stepping back? And who gets pulled into things because everyone knows they will sort them out?

Pressure is particularly revealing because it tends to strip away the formal version of how a business says it operates and expose how leadership actually works.

Senior people don't necessarily make a self-directing leadership team

This is one of the distinctions I find particularly interesting.

You can have a room full of experienced, intelligent, highly capable senior people and still not have a genuinely self-directing leadership team.

The individuals may be excellent at their jobs. They may run substantial departments, manage important client relationships and carry impressive titles. But if the MD is still required to connect everything, resolve every tension, arbitrate between functions and provide the final reassurance before decisions are made, the business has senior people without yet having the leadership capacity it appears to have.

This is especially easy to miss in agencies because responsiveness is part of the culture. We are used to solving things because we have spent our careers working in businesses where things move quickly. Clients change their minds, deadlines move, budgets tighten, something doesn't arrive, somebody has to get on a plane, a pitch suddenly appears and an event opens whether everybody feels ready or not.

People who become successful in this environment are often very good at stepping in.

The difficulty comes when the same instinct that makes someone brilliant in a crisis begins to limit the development of the people around them.

Every time an MD steps in, rescues, fixes or becomes the automatic final decision-maker, the organisation learns something about where responsibility really sits.

With a newly appointed MD, those lessons can be learned remarkably quickly because people are watching closely. They are working out what the new MD wants to know about, what they expect to be brought into and what they trust other people to handle. They are noticing whether disagreement is welcome, whether bringing a considered recommendation is enough or whether the MD needs to reach the answer themselves.

Nobody has to announce these rules. The organisation learns them through repetition.

How should a new MD work with an existing leadership team?

There can be a temptation for an incoming MD to prove their value quickly.

That is understandable. They have been appointed for a reason and there may be considerable expectation around the role, particularly if the business is already changing.

But one of the most useful things a new MD can establish early is clarity about where leadership responsibility now belongs.

That requires more than delegation.

Delegation is often understood as giving somebody a task or a decision. Leadership responsibility is broader. It means being clear about what somebody owns, what judgement they are expected to exercise, where they have authority to act and when something genuinely needs to come upwards.

Without that clarity, senior people often do something entirely rational: they check.

It rarely announces itself as dependency. It looks perfectly reasonable at first. The MD gets copied into an email, joins a meeting because their view would be useful, or gets asked to sense-check a decision before somebody commits. None of those things matters particularly on its own. But repeat them across a senior team and, almost without noticing, the new MD becomes woven into the operating fabric of the business.

Before long, they are attending meetings they shouldn't need to attend and carrying decisions that should be made elsewhere. Then comes the familiar complaint that there aren't enough hours in the day.

Often the more useful question isn't how the MD can manage their time better. It is why so much of the organisation's responsibility is arriving in their diary in the first place.

This is where the Leadership Line's Above the Line lens becomes useful. Above the Line leadership is intentional: people take ownership, exercise judgement, have the conversations that belong at their level and remain accountable when things become uncomfortable. Under pressure, it is easy to move below that line. Decisions travel upwards, difficult conversations get delayed, permission is sought where judgement could have been used, or somebody steps in to rescue and responsibility quietly moves away from the person who should be carrying it.

No leadership team operates permanently Above the Line. I don't think that would be a particularly realistic expectation.

What matters is being able to see when the movement happens.

A new MD has a particularly valuable opportunity to notice those patterns before they become part of them.

What happens when a founder hands over to a new MD?

Founder succession adds another layer because founders rarely occupy only one role in a business.

Their authority is not simply positional.

They may hold decades of client history in their head. They know why certain decisions were made, which relationships matter, where the commercial bodies are buried and who can be trusted with what. People may have worked alongside them for 10, 15 or 20 years, so the relationship between the founder and the business has developed through thousands of interactions rather than through an organisation chart.

When a new MD arrives, the founder's influence does not disappear because somebody changed the job titles. Nor should it.

The challenge is understanding how that influence now needs to work.

A leadership team that has spent years orientating itself around a founder has learned a particular way of operating. The founder may always have made the difficult commercial call, stepped into the most important client situations or been the person department heads ran decisions past because it was quicker, safer and simply how things were done.

If the founder steps away and none of those behaviours are examined, there is a strong possibility that the team simply redirects them towards the new MD.

The dependency survives. Only the person changes.

That can create a strange outcome in which the appointment of an MD appears to have professionalised the structure of the business without materially increasing its leadership capacity.

It can be equally frustrating for the founder. They may have appointed an MD precisely because they want the business to depend less heavily on them, yet continue to see issues travelling upwards and decisions clustering around one person.

It would be easy to conclude that the new MD simply needs to become stronger or more decisive. Sometimes the bigger opportunity sits underneath them.

The leadership layer needs to become stronger too.

The first 100 days after acquisition, merger, EOT or restructuring

This becomes even more important when the MD appointment is part of a wider business transition.

Acquisition changes authority even when the day-to-day business initially looks much the same. A merger creates new relationships, reporting lines and sometimes overlapping leadership roles. An EOT changes ownership while potentially raising much bigger questions about accountability, participation and what leadership now means. A restructure can leave people carrying different responsibilities while still behaving according to the old ones.

In all of these situations, there is a period when the formal organisation has changed faster than people's understanding of it.

That gap is where a lot of leadership difficulty lives.

People are trying to work out what the new normal is while continuing to deliver the work in front of them. Senior leaders may be entirely supportive of the change and still be uncertain about their own authority within it. Some become more cautious, others may overreach, and decisions which used to feel straightforward can suddenly acquire a different significance.

Having worked with leadership teams during periods of significant organisational change, I think this is one of the areas businesses can underestimate. The change may make complete sense commercially and structurally, but people still have to work out what it means in practice when they walk into the office on Monday morning and have a decision to make.

This is why leadership transition needs attention below the MD as well as around them.

We spend a great deal of time preparing the person stepping into the top job. Their brief is discussed, objectives are agreed and they may receive coaching or support from the board.

Meanwhile, the people immediately beneath them are often expected to absorb the change while carrying on.

Yet they are the people who will determine whether the new leadership structure actually works.

They need the opportunity to understand what has changed in their own leadership, not simply what has changed above them.

How do you stop a new MD becoming the new bottleneck?

I don't think the answer is for the MD to become deliberately unavailable or to start batting decisions back down the organisation for the sake of proving a point. That can feel artificial and, particularly in the early days, can be counterproductive.

The better starting point is curiosity about why a decision has arrived with them.

There will be times when somebody genuinely needs the MD's authority, information or perspective, and there will be risks that quite properly belong at that level. But there will also be decisions that have travelled upwards largely because that is how leadership has historically worked in the business.

Being able to tell the difference matters.

Leadership independence doesn't mean everybody operating autonomously without boundaries. A healthy leadership system still needs escalation, collaboration and appropriate oversight. The difference is that escalation becomes deliberate rather than habitual.

The MD also needs to pay attention to what happens when somebody brings them a problem. If the quickest route is always to provide the answer, they may resolve today's issue while quietly creating tomorrow's dependency.

Sometimes the more valuable conversation is to understand the thinking that has already happened. What has the leader considered? What do they believe should happen? What are they weighing up, and which part of the decision genuinely requires the MD?

Over time, this changes the quality of what comes upwards.

Instead of senior leaders arriving with an unresolved problem and waiting for the answer, they begin arriving with judgement already applied.

That is a significant shift because the MD is no longer simply delegating more. The leadership capacity of the organisation is increasing.

The MD's behaviour becomes part of the new operating system

One of the reasons the first 100 days matter so much is that everybody is paying unusually close attention.

The new MD may believe they are simply dealing with the volume of information coming at them, while the organisation is reading much more into their responses.

If they repeatedly take decisions back from their senior team, overturn decisions without discussing the thinking behind them, or say they want ownership while continuing to involve themselves in every detail, people adjust. They become more cautious about acting without approval because experience has taught them that this is the safer option.

The opposite happens too.

When people see that thoughtful judgement will be supported even when the outcome isn't perfect, they learn something important about the authority they genuinely hold. When senior leaders are expected to resolve tensions with each other rather than automatically escalating them, a different pattern starts to form. When the MD can remain interested and informed without automatically taking over, other leaders have room to lead.

This is why I don't see the first 100 days simply as an induction period for the MD.

They are an important learning period for the whole leadership team.

Both sides are discovering how the relationship will work, and the patterns established during those early months can become surprisingly difficult to undo later.

What should the MD know by day 100?

Of course the new MD should understand the numbers, clients, people, risks and commercial priorities considerably better than they did on day one.

But I would want them to understand something else as well.

By day 100, I would want the MD to have a reasonably clear picture of where responsibility really sits in the business. They should be able to see which decisions are travelling further upwards than they need to, where authority remains ambiguous, which senior leaders are comfortable exercising judgement and where reassurance is still being sought.

They should understand the gaps between functions that they are already starting to fill themselves, which difficult conversations are happening at the right level and where the founder may still be carrying responsibilities everyone assumed had transferred with the title.

And I would want the MD to be able to look at their own behaviour with the same degree of honesty. Where have they already started becoming more involved than they intended? What are people beginning to rely on them for? Which decisions have they inadvertently taught the organisation belong with them?

That gives you a very different picture of the organisation from the one contained in its reporting lines.

It also reveals something important about its ability to grow.

Because leadership capacity is not simply the number of senior people you employ. It is the amount of responsibility the organisation can carry without continually concentrating it at the top.

For an agency that wants to grow, integrate an acquisition, prepare for succession, transition to employee ownership or simply give its founder room to step away, that capacity has real commercial value.

One hundred days from now

The first 100 days of a new Managing Director will always involve learning the business. There is no shortcut around that.

But I think we should expect more from the transition than a better-informed MD.

One hundred days later, the senior team should also have greater clarity about what belongs to them. Decisions should be sitting closer to the people with the knowledge and authority to make them, leadership conversations should be happening at the right level, and the MD should be beginning to see where they can step back without the business losing momentum.

That does not happen simply because a new person has arrived at the top. It happens because the organisation has paid attention to the leadership system around them.

For me, that is one of the most important tests of whether a leadership transition is actually working.

One hundred days from now, success shouldn't simply be that the new MD understands the business better.

The leadership team beneath them should also be more capable of running it without everything travelling upwards.