The Relationships New CEOs Must Form in Their First 60 Days

According to Equilar, between 12 and 13% of CEOs are new to their position in any given year, and roughly 28% of those new CEOs are being hired externally. That means a significant share of CEOs start the job with no real feel for the culture they’ve inherited, let alone the strengths and weaknesses of the business itself.

The first 60 days are when that gap either closes or hardens into blind spots that can follow a CEO for years, making this early window of listening and assessment one of the highest-leverage periods in the entire tenure.

Yet new CEOs often overlook key stakeholders during onboarding, and that mistake could mean missing out on crucial information that should inform strategic planning, the skills and structure required to build a leadership team and how a company refines its messaging and go-to-market approach.

Most CEOs focus on reaching out to mission-critical, yet obvious, stakeholders. The real opportunity is to move past surface-level questions and go deeper faster.

Talk to the stakeholders everyone expects you to

With the board chair and key investors, focus on understanding their strategic aspirations, risk tolerance and definitions of success. Every board has its own communication style and cadence, so pay attention to how they operate, not just what they say. These conversations are also a chance to both educate and be educated.

With the executive team and direct reports, assess their capabilities, spot the silos and identify the early adopters who already align with your vision. Watch for a hero culture, since it won’t scale, and watch for detractors and excuse generators who keep pulling the organization back towards legacy habits.

Phrases like “we’ve always done it this way” or “we tried that, and it didn’t work” are red flags. So is a leadership team that struggles to set priorities or complains about workload instead of building a roadmap to get there.

Don’t stop at leadership. Schedule focus groups with individual contributors and mid-level managers to get a ground-level view of morale and execution speed; it’s also one of the fastest ways to build trust and transparency early on. Pay attention to the employees who show up with ideas and energy. Influencers and culture carriers exist at every level of an organization, and they matter for how new thinking gets adopted.

Existing clients deserve time in the first few weeks too, both to build confidence and to ask the kind of basic questions that would seem uninformed coming from a CEO six months into the job.

Don’t skip the relationships most new CEOs overlook

Few people know the pitfalls of the job better than the person who held it before you, particularly if the departure wasn’t amicable. A former CEO can speak to what worked, what’s still in progress and what fell short, along with insights into the culture, the clients and how the board actually operates.

Partners — whether they work in tech, data, platforms or other agency relationships — tend to offer the most neutral read on where the company stands in the market. Ask them directly what your reputation is, when the market turns toward you and when it turns away, and how your leadership team is perceived. If they aren’t familiar with the brand at all, that’s useful information too. Sales teams in particular tend to trade in this kind of intelligence, so it’s worth building a relationship with them early.

Conversations with recently exited clients and recently lost pitches can be uncomfortable, but they’re often the most revealing. Ask open-ended questions, avoid leading the witness, and cast a wide net.

Set aside office hours where any employee can reach out directly. Enthusiasm is often the earliest signal of a change agent, and new CEOs need to find the people who will carry energy and momentum through the organization.

Gathering information is a critical step, but knowing how to read it matters more. A few things to watch for as the picture comes together:

• The faster-horse instinct: Notice where executives and employees are more attached to the familiar process than to the outcome it’s supposed to produce; that reluctance is often mistaken for institutional knowledge.

• Patterns over volume: Weigh the themes that repeat across departments more heavily than whatever the loudest person in the room is pushing.

• Cross-functional friction: Ask specifically where the bottlenecks occur and where processes break down for customers. Friction between teams is usually a structure problem — think unclear ownership or roles — not a personality one.

• A scorecard, not a gut check: Build one early, based on real KPIs, and go in with a hypothesis to test rather than a blank slate.

• Earned authority: People follow leaders they trust. Restructuring or criticizing too early risks alienating a team before you’ve proven you understand their day-to-day work.

Go in with optimism — that energy is real, and people can feel it. Above all, close the loop and tell the organization what you heard and what you learned.

None of this replaces the strategic work ahead; the plan, the team, the go-to-market decisions still must get made. But that work is only as good as the picture it’s built on, and the picture is only as complete as the range of people a new CEO is willing to sit down with.

According to Equilar, between 12 and 13% of CEOs are new to their position in any given year, and roughly 28% of those new CEOs are being hired externally. That means a significant share of CEOs start the job with no real feel for the culture they’ve inherited, let alone the strengths and weaknesses of the business itself.

The first 60 days are when that gap either closes or hardens into blind spots that can follow a CEO for years, making this early window of listening and assessment one of the highest-leverage periods in the entire tenure.

Yet new CEOs often overlook key stakeholders during onboarding, and that mistake could mean missing out on crucial information that should inform strategic planning, the skills and structure required to build a leadership team and how a company refines its messaging and go-to-market approach.