The first ninety days in a new executive role are unlike any other period in a leader’s career. Everyone is watching — internal teams trying to determine whether you’re someone worth following, external stakeholders deciding whether you’re someone worth trusting, and peers assessing whether you’re going to make their lives easier or harder. The pressure to project competence is real. So is the temptation to fake familiarity you don’t actually have yet.
That temptation is worth resisting.
Stepping into new executive roles across genuinely different industries — sensor hardware, connected lighting, gaming technology, hybrid edge cloud, and wireless chips — teaches you something consistent: what works isn’t performing authority. It’s earning it. Sam Miri, Vice President of Marketing & Business Development at Atmosic Technologies, has done exactly that across more than two decades of executive leadership in technical markets, and the approach that has held across every transition comes down to a few specific disciplines.
Listen More Than You Talk — But Not Passively
The most common mistake new executives make is filling their first weeks with statements. Declarations of intent, summaries of their background, early observations about what needs to change. Some of this is necessary. Most of it should wait.
The more valuable use of early time is active listening — not passive absorption, but the kind of listening that involves asking specific, intelligent questions and taking what you hear seriously enough to let it change your thinking. Teams notice when a new leader’s questions reflect genuine curiosity versus a preformed agenda. They also notice when feedback they gave in week one shows up in a decision made in week six. That connection — between what the team said and what the leader did — is one of the fastest credibility builders available.
Ask the people closest to the work what’s actually hard. Not what the deck says is hard. What they find hard every day. Then listen without immediately solving it.
Be Specific About What You Don’t Know
Counterintuitively, one of the fastest ways to build credibility in a new role is to be explicit about the gaps in your knowledge — not in a self-deprecating way, but in a practical, matter-of-fact way that signals you’re operating honestly rather than performing confidence.
“I don’t have enough context on this yet — help me understand the history” builds more trust than most executives realize. It signals intellectual honesty, invites collaboration, and sets a tone where the team feels their expertise is valued rather than bypassed.
The alternative — speaking with authority you haven’t earned yet — creates a fragile impression that cracks the first time a technical team member or seasoned customer asks a follow-up question you can’t answer.
Find One Early Win That Actually Matters
Early credibility also has a practical component. Alongside the listening and honest positioning, new executives need a visible win — something real, specific, and meaningful to the team — that demonstrates they can actually execute.
The key word is meaningful. A cosmetic change, a reorganized meeting structure, a new reporting template — these things register as activity, not progress. What builds credibility is solving something the team has been stuck on, unblocking a deal that stalled, or making a call that needed to be made and hadn’t been. The size of the win matters less than its relevance to what the team is actually trying to accomplish.
With External Stakeholders, Honesty About Your Timeline Is an Asset
With customers, partners, and industry contacts, new executives often feel pressure to project immediate authority. In practice, external stakeholders are more sophisticated than that. A new VP or SVP who acknowledges they’re three weeks into a role and still getting up to speed — while demonstrating genuine command of the strategic picture — reads as credible, not weak.
What reads as weak is getting caught having overstated your familiarity. Enterprise relationships are long. Getting caught once early in a role can define how a customer or partner sees you for years.
The consistent approach: be honest about where you are in the learning curve, be specific about what you already understand well, and let the quality of your questions do the work that premature answers can’t.
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