Originally published January 6, 2025 · Edited February 23, 2026 · About our editorial process
Stepping into a city manager role presents a unique kind of pressure. Not just the operational complexity, but the fact that every early decision sends a signal about what kind of leader has arrived. Whether transitioning from another organization or stepping into a newly created position, the first 90 days are less about what you accomplish and more about what you reveal.
These observations come from a City Manager and County Administrator Think Tank session where practitioners shared what they’ve learned about navigating transitions. They aren’t a comprehensive checklist. They’re patterns that experienced leaders noticed after the fact, sometimes only visible in the rearview mirror.
Trust Is Built Before the First Decision
A new leader’s earliest interactions set the tone for everything that follows. Not the first policy change or the first budget meeting, but the quieter moments: one-on-one conversations, the questions asked (and not asked), the willingness to listen before forming conclusions.
Leaders who navigate transitions well tend to create conditions where employees, elected officials, and stakeholders feel heard before they’re directed. That means sitting with ambiguity longer than feels comfortable. It means asking questions that don’t have operational answers, like “What do people here protect when things get hard?”
Think Tank Insight: A long-standing employee with informal influence can shape perceptions across the organization. Leaders who engage these individuals early, not to manage them but to understand the culture they carry, tend to build rapport that compounds.
Authority Gaps Surface Fast
Confusion about roles or conflicting governance documents can undermine a new leader before the first council meeting. Experienced city managers who’ve navigated this describe a pattern: the formal authority described in the offer letter doesn’t always match the authority embedded in ordinances, policies, or institutional memory.
The leaders who addressed this early, reviewing governance documents with legal counsel, clarifying expectations with elected officials, and aligning policies with the actual scope of the role, described it as the single highest-leverage move in their first month. Not because it solved problems, but because it revealed where the real authority boundaries sat.
Think Tank Insight: Establishing a formal leadership path early solidifies the chain of command and creates organizational clarity. The alternative, discovering authority gaps during a crisis, is far more costly.
The Relationships That Matter Most Aren’t on the Org Chart
Success as a city manager often depends on relationships that no formal structure captures. Informal influencers, community leaders, department heads who carry institutional knowledge, elected officials with priorities that don’t always surface in public meetings.
Leaders in the Think Tank described spending early weeks being intentionally strategic about where they invested time. Not simply being present, but choosing interactions that would reveal the culture’s actual operating system. One practitioner described asking each person they met: “What do you feel is necessary from a culture perspective for us to get to 2035?” The question itself signaled something about what this leader intended to protect.
Think Tank Insight: Spending time strategically is more effective than simply being present. The environment and purpose of each interaction matter more than the volume of meetings.
Adaptability Reveals Values
Every organization carries its own culture, its own unwritten rules about what gets rewarded and what gets punished. A leadership style that worked in one city may create friction in another, not because the style is wrong, but because the environment responds to different signals.
The leaders who navigated this well described something beyond flexibility. They described a willingness to examine their own assumptions about what “good leadership” looks like, and to test those assumptions against the reality of the organization they’d inherited. That examination is a Define What Matters practice: asking not just “What works here?” but “What am I protecting by defaulting to the approach I already know?”
Think Tank Insight: Leaders who ask themselves, “What does success look like to me?” can better distinguish between quick wins that build trust and quick wins that simply relieve their own anxiety about the transition.
Early Wins and the Pace Question
The pressure to demonstrate impact immediately is real. Elected officials want evidence that the hire was right. Staff want signs that change is coming (or that stability will hold). The community watches.
But the leaders who described the most successful transitions were the ones who resisted the urgency to make sweeping changes. They addressed pressing governance gaps quickly, made symbolic changes that signaled a new chapter without destabilizing the organization, and established regular check-ins with the elected body after the first 30 days to share observations and set priorities together.
The pace question is itself a values question. Moving fast signals that the leader’s judgment is the primary input. Moving deliberately signals that the organization’s experience matters. Both can be appropriate. The choice reveals what the leader actually protects.
Think Tank Insight: A deliberate pace builds trust while preventing the burnout that often follows a sprint-start. The leaders who lasted described the first 90 days as a listening season, not a proving season.
Communication as Ongoing Calibration
Effective communication in a new role isn’t a skill to deploy. It’s a feedback loop to maintain. The leaders in the Think Tank described learning this the hard way: what they intended to communicate and what people actually heard were often different things, especially in the first months when every word carried extra weight.
The ones who navigated this well maintained two-way conversations with direct reports and elected officials, actively sought feedback on how their communication was landing, and treated every miscommunication as data about the gap between their intention and the organization’s experience.
Think Tank Insight: “We’re not all Dr. Martin Luther King when sharing our vision, but we can all strive to communicate better.” Regular feedback helps calibrate. The gap between what a leader intends to say and what people hear is a Face the Truth diagnostic in real time.
What the First 90 Days Actually Test
The first 90 days as a city manager aren’t really about establishing authority, building relationships, or creating early wins, though all of those happen. They’re about something more fundamental: discovering what you actually protect when the pressure to perform meets the complexity of a real organization.
Every choice in that window, who gets time, what gets fixed first, which problems get named and which get deferred, reveals something about the leader’s operating values. Not the values on the resume. The ones that show up under pressure.
That’s the territory Define What Matters maps. In The Shift That Sticks methodology, this practice asks leaders to examine the gap between what they claim to value and what they actually fund, build, and sustain when protecting it costs something. For a new city manager, the first 90 days are that examination in compressed form.
Face the Truth creates the conditions for honest observation during the transition. Make It Real turns early insights into systems that outlast the honeymoon period. And Reinforce the Change builds the rhythms that prevent the clarity of the first 90 days from fading into the noise of the first year.
Related Reading
Research Foundation:
- The Expectation Gap: Why employee engagement matters from day one of a leadership transition
- Political Dynamics: Understanding the governance and trust challenges facing new local government leaders
Related Articles:
About Rob Duncan
Rob Duncan spent two decades watching what happens when leaders say one thing and protect another. As founder of Imagine That Performance, he works with city managers, county administrators, and government leaders through Think Tanks, workshops, and executive coaching to close the gap between intention and experience.
The Question Worth Asking
The observations in this article came from a Think Tank session where city managers and county administrators shared what they wish they’d known during their own transitions. If you’re navigating a transition now, or preparing for one, the question underneath all of this is: what will your first 90 days reveal about what you actually protect?
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