The value of a slow first quarter inside a new firm

I joined ST Holdings in April 2023. The first quarter was not occupied by urgency. No restructures were announced. No new policies were rolled out. No one was called into meetings to hear about my vision. Instead, I spent the time reading. I read the standing instructions. I read the previous three years of board papers. I read the management accounts and traced the narratives underneath them. I attended every committee, took notes on the tone, and said almost nothing. This is not how a new Chief of Strategy and Operations is often expected to behave.

The convention in most firms is that a new arrival should move quickly to prove their worth. Speed is mistaken for competence. A hiring decision is validated by visible action within weeks. The incoming leader is supposed to have answers, or at least the conviction to ask questions that rattle the room. I understand the logic. I also believe it misses something important about how firms actually work.

What I needed to understand was not what the firm did on paper but how it believed itself to be. The distance between those two things is where the real work lives. The standing instructions told me the structure. The board papers told me the decisions. The accounts told me what happened. But the tone of a meeting, the hesitation before someone answered a question, the person who did not speak, the paper that was commissioned and never tabled. Those things told me what the firm valued and what it feared. You cannot learn that in thirty days.

I spent the first quarter building a picture of the operating model that had never been made explicit. I identified the conversations that happened in official channels and the ones that happened after, in corridors or in separate emails. I watched how dissent was raised and how it was received. I asked for the regulatory file on every significant decision in the past five years. Not because I suspected wrongdoing, but because the FCA expects an Approved Person to know how governance has worked in their organisation. That knowledge comes from reading the thing, not from being told about it.

By the time the second quarter arrived, I had a clearer picture of where I could actually change something and where I would be pushing against the culture itself. I had also built relationships with people who now understood that I was listening rather than performing. This is not sentimental. It is practical. A new senior hire who acts before she understands is often undoing work that matters to the people who are still there. Speed in those early weeks is expensive.

The case against the slow quarter is that it feels passive. It reads, to someone outside the firm, as though the new person is not earning her place. But the Approved Person regime exists precisely because regulators understand that governance failures are not usually failures of intention. They are failures of understanding. I satisfied myself that the governance structures were sound before I asked to change them. That slowness was not passivity. It was due diligence applied to the firm I had just joined.

What I carried from earlier roles was the habit of reading appendices first, of paying attention to incident reviews, of asking what the rules do not say. That discipline matters more in the first quarter than in any quarter after. The new person is the one who sees what the organisation has stopped noticing because it has been there so long. But that clarity only comes if you have earned the right to comment on it. Slowness earns that right.