The 30-60-90 Day Plan: A Template for New Hires and Managers

Write a 30-60-90 day plan backward. Decide what the new hire should be running by the end of their third month, then fill in a month of learning, a month of contributing and a month of owning, with goals that both the new hire and the manager can check. The 90-day window has a source: Talya Bauer’s 2010 onboarding guide for the US-based SHRM Foundation says research and conventional wisdom both suggest that new hires have about 90 days to show they can do the job.¹ The equal split into thirds is a practitioners’ habit, and we found no study comparing it with any other schedule. Five steps build the plan:

1. Write the outcomes for the end of month three first
2. Give month one to learning, month two to contributing and month three to owning
3. Word each goal so someone else could check it
4. Have the new hire draft it and the manager set the outcomes and sign off
5. Hold a review as each month closes

The plan is one tool inside the wider employee onboarding process, which covers the welcome, equipment and introductions; this guide covers only the written goals.

The 30-60-90 day plan template, section by section

A usable plan fits on one or two pages and has eight parts, from the purpose of the role to the review dates. The Management Center, a US nonprofit that trains managers, publishes a free template that names the three months learning, contributing and leading, and sets each goal beside a tactic and a status.²

In the version below, the new hire’s column is a first draft and the manager’s column turns it into an agreement.

The Management Center’s advice is to define the 90-day outcomes first and work back from them.² A plan written forward from the first day fills up with activities (meet the team, read the wiki); one written back from the outcomes keeps asking what each activity is for. A sales hire whose month-three outcome is running renewals for the mid-size accounts will spend month one learning the renewal process and the people who approve discounts, and skip the tour of every department.

The first month deserves the most care. Watkins wrote in 2019 that managers should reassure new hires that learning matters more than doing in the early days. He split that learning into three kinds: technical (products, customers, systems), cultural (the norms and values) and political (how decisions are made and whose support counts).³ A line or two on the cultural and political kinds, such as “learn who signs off on budget changes”, saves the new hire from finding out the hard way.

Write goals that someone else could check

A checkable goal states the result, the deadline and the evidence both people will look at. Michael Watkins’s 2019 guidance in Harvard Business Review asks managers to set goals with timeframes and the measures used to judge progress, along with the how and the why behind them.³ If a manager and a new hire could disagree about whether a goal was met, it needs another draft.

Goal-setting researchers Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, reviewing decades of experiments in 2002, give another reason to write goals this way: feedback makes goals work better, since people who cannot see where they stand cannot judge whether to try harder or try something else.⁴ A goal nobody can check produces no feedback. The Management Center asks for SMARTIE goalsSMART goals: A checklist for writing goals, most often read as specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound, first proposed by George Doran for managers. The words behind the letters vary between versions, and research supports specific, challenging goals more clearly than the acronym as a whole.Full entry in the glossary, its version of the SMART checklist with inclusion and equity added.²

Each goal in the second column tells the new hire what finished looks like. For more on wording the goal itself, see how to write SMART goals, with examples.

Who writes the plan, the employee or the manager?

The new hire and the manager both write the plan, and the manager has the final say. The Management Center suggests three ways to do it: the manager drafts and reviews it with the new hire, the two complete it together, or the employee proposes a draft and they refine it together.² The right choice depends on how well the new hire can judge the role from outside.

The manager should own the three-month outcomes. Watkins argues that the hiring manager understands better than anyone what a new person needs to accomplish and what skills, resources and connections that will take.³ Still ask for the new hire’s draft in the first week: it shows what they think the job is, and the gaps between it and the manager’s outcomes are misunderstandings to clear up early.

Bauer’s guide adds that a written plan helps because it spells out both what new hires should do and what help they can expect.¹ So the manager’s commitments, such as introductions, system access and reviews held on time, belong on the same page as the new hire’s goals.

Three filled-in examples

These three illustrations, written for this guide, cover an individual contributor, a new manager and a job candidate; adapt the goals to your role.

An individual contributor: a customer support specialist

The first month ends with a list the new hire builds, which doubles as a test of what they have learned. Who decides refunds is political learning in Watkins’s sense: how decisions are made and whose support counts.³

A new manager taking over a team

A three-month plan for a new manager puts the team ahead of the manager’s own output. Watkins’s 2016 advice for leaders who inherit a team runs in three stages: assess the people through one-on-ones, team meetings and stakeholders’ views; reshape roles, direction and ways of working; then build momentum with early wins. He would reserve replacing people in the first few months for dire situations, critical roles someone cannot do, or toxic behavior.⁵

Most of that first month happens in one-on-one meetings, so book them in the first week.

The interview version

An interview version of the plan is a one-page draft that shows how you would learn the role before changing it. You do not know the team’s real problems yet, so list your assumptions, the questions you would ask first and the kind of result you would aim for.

The learning-first shape fits Watkins’s observation that some new hires overcompensate by acting as if they already have the answer instead of asking questions.³ For the rest of that conversation, the job interview preparation checklist helps.

Where the three-month frame comes from

The three-month frame is best known from Michael Watkins’s 2003 book The First 90 Days and the onboarding guides that adopted it; dividing the time into equal months is a practitioners’ habit that nobody appears to have tested.

Watkins, now at IMD Business School in Switzerland, wrote the book for leaders in transition, aiming to shorten the time to what he calls the break-even point: the moment the organization needs you as much as you need the job.⁶ Bauer’s guide, which the consultancy Right Management sponsored, cites the book and suggests checking on progress at the 30-, 60-, 90- and 120-day marks, with later check-ins within the first year.¹

Three months is a checkpoint, and often less time than people need. In a survey of 588 executives at vice president level and above who had recently joined companies in Europe, the Americas and Asia, run by the search firm Egon Zehnder and written up for Harvard Business Review’s May-June 2017 issue, almost 60 percent said it took them six months to have a full impact.⁷ Two of the article’s authors are partners at the firm, which advises companies on integrating new leaders, and the sample was senior. Treat the month-three review as the point to set the next goals, and expect a senior hire to still be finding their feet.

Myth

Studies prove that new hires should hit fixed milestones at 30, 60 and 90 days.

Fact

The three-month frame comes from practitioner books and guides, and we found no study testing the equal monthly split against any other schedule.

Goal-setting experiments lend some support to two things the structure does: it breaks a distant target into near ones, and it puts learning first.

The study

Limited evidence

Early goals on unfamiliar work, in business games and air traffic simulations

Edwin Locke and Gary Latham’s review gathers experiments on tasks that were new and complex to the people doing them. In one business game, when near-term goals were added to a distant goal, players ended up more confident and made higher profits than players given only the distant goal or told simply to do their best. In an air traffic control simulation, a performance target interfered with learning the task; a later experiment found that a specific, hard learning goal outperformed doing your best.⁴

These were short lab and simulation experiments, and none tested a written onboarding plan. They do suggest building month one around learning goals, because a new hire does not yet know how the job is done, and treating each monthly review as a near target.

Reviewing the plan every month

Hold a review meeting as each month closes, starting from the new hire’s status notes. Bauer’s SHRM Foundation guide recommends regular milestones for checking progress,¹ and Watkins suggests short check-ins every couple of weeks in between.³

1. Learn: the work, the culture and how decisions are made; goals are mostly learning goals
2. Contribute: one or two pieces of real work, done with support
3. Own: work the new hire runs alone, with a first result to show
4. Review: a meeting at the end of each month: what is done, what is stuck, what changes next

Each review answers three questions: which goals are done, which are stuck and why, and what should change next month. The third matters most. A plan written in the first week rests on guesses, so rewrite any goal that turned out to be wrong. Watkins also warns against treating struggling new hires too gently in the hope that problems with peers or fit will resolve themselves.³

The month-three review is the natural point to agree goals for the remaining months of the year, and The Management Center suggests using the plan’s goals to frame a 90-day review.² If your contract has a probation period, check how long it runs; it may not match the three months, and probation rules vary between countries and employers.

Before each monthly review

• New hire marks each goal done, in progress or stuck, with one line of evidence
• Manager checks the support promised in the plan was given
• Both name one goal to drop, rewrite or add for the next month
• Book the next review before leaving the room

The evidence, part by part

Most of the support for a 30-60-90 day plan is practitioner guidance; goal-setting experiments back some of its parts.

The bottom line

A 30-60-90 day plan works when the manager and the new hire agree in writing on the same month-three outcomes and check progress against them every month. Have the new hire draft it in the first week, put the manager’s commitments on the same page, and book all three reviews before the first one comes round.