The
First 90 days at home
in your new (career defining ) role
A guide for women navigating a major promotion, and what it means at home.
There is a particular kind of phone call. You know it the moment it starts, before a single detail has been confirmed. A slightly different tone in the voice on the other end. A request to find five minutes, today if possible. And then the words themselves, however they happen to be phrased: the board has approved it, the offer is made, the role is yours.
For a moment, everything goes quiet.
Then your mind races.
Within hours, your inbox has reorganised itself around you. Congratulations arrive from people you haven't spoken to in months, some of whom you suspect are recalibrating exactly what your new position means for them.
Your diary, which felt full before, acquires an entirely new category of meeting: the ones where people who didn't previously need your time now do. Your title changes on the company intranet before you've had a chance to tell your own team properly. Somewhere in the middle of all this, you notice you're still smiling, and you still mean it.
This is the job you worked for. This is the recognition you earned.
It is also, almost immediately, a great deal more than a new job title. It is a new set of relationships to build, a new level of scrutiny to operate under, and a new version of yourself the organisation now expects to see, starting roughly now.
That vision you had - now it’s yours to shape the way you always wanted.
What the first 90 days actually involve
There is a substantial body of research on what happens to a leader in the first 90 days of a significant new role, notably the work of Michael Watkins, whose research underpins his now-standard text on executive transitions. His central finding is a sobering one for anyone who assumes a promotion is simply more of what they already do well: for a meaningful stretch of those first 90 days, a new leader largely consumes value rather than creates it. You are learning the role faster than you are delivering results in it, even as everyone around you, fairly or not, is already forming a judgement about whether you belong in it.
This is not a comment on capability. It is a structural feature of any significant career move. Watkins describes these early months as a period of acute vulnerability precisely because the working relationships which previously made you effective, the trust, the shorthand, the established credibility, do not transfer automatically with the new title. They have to be rebuilt, in front of an audience watching more closely and judgementally than ever before.
Three things tend to shift at once, and they shift together rather than in sequence. Your relationships change, as peers become reports, reports become peers, and some of your closest professional allies are no longer in the room when decisions are made. Your visibility increases, often sharply, as a wider and more senior audience starts paying attention to how you communicate, not just what you decide or do. And the patterns you establish in these first months, deliberately or otherwise, tend to calcify. What you prioritise now becomes what is expected of you for the years ahead.
None of this is a reason for concern. It is simply what the data says is actually happening, hidden among the words of congratulations.
And what about your first 90 days, at home?
Here is the question almost nobody asks you in the weeks after a career defining promotion like this. And with everything else you’ve had to think about up to this point, is the one question you’ve probably not yet properly asked yourself.
You will take all of the above home with you, every evening, whether you intend to or not. The adrenaline of the day does not switch off at your front door. Neither does the mental replay of a conversation which didn't go as well as you’d hoped, or the twists and calculations around who you can trust and who you still need to win over. And behind it, almost certainly, sits an assumption nobody has actually tested out loud: that your home life will simply continue running as it always has, while you direct everything you have, you energy, your focus, your intellect, into succeeding in the new role.
Your family's first reaction will likely be genuine delight. They will mean it. They’ll high five and celebrate with you. Everyone in your home will benefit from the fruits of your new status. Then, often surprisingly quickly, the novelty will wear, and the practical reality of what has changed starts to surface. More travel, perhaps. Longer hours during a settling-in period which has no clear end date. You’re less reliably ‘there’ for the emotional support role you’ve been playing, the daily treadmill of logistics central to everything running smoothly in a household, the school runs, the calls from other parents, the meal planning and home fixes, continuous decisions being made in the background that, until now, have largely been yours to make.
The question presenting itself is this. Are you expecting the people around you to simply absorb the changes, to be the buffer in this new arrangement, the way you are expecting yourself to absorb everything the new role demands of you? And if so, how will that work, exactly, practically, day to day, given there’s a chance nobody has actually discussed it yet?
What the research says about the personal side of your promotion
This is where the data becomes harder to find, not because the impact is small, but because so little professional research follows people home. What does exist points in a consistent direction.
Jennifer Petriglieri, a professor at INSEAD who has spent years studying dual-career couples, has identified that such couples pass through a small number of genuinely high-risk transition points across their working careers. A major promotion, particularly one which changes hours, location or profile, is reliably one of them. Her research is clear: the couples who come through these moments well are not the ones who avoid disruption and difficult conversations. They are the ones who renegotiate explicitly, naming what is changing – or could change - and what it will require of each of them, rather than letting the new arrangement establish uncomfortably by itself by default while everyone is too busy to think about it fully.
That last point matters more than it might first appear. Research published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in 2025, from academics at the universities of Bath and Melbourne, found women in dual-earner households carry between 67-71% more of the mental load associated with running a home than men do, especially when children are involved, with the unseen layer of noticing, anticipating, planning and remembering everything which sits behind almost everything happening in the home falls to them. Crucially, the researchers found this load is rarely renegotiated at moments of professional change. It simply continues, regardless of what else has altered, unless someone deliberately decides it should be renegotiated.
Indra Nooyi, who led PepsiCo for 12 years as one of the most senior women in global business, has written candidly about exactly this gap. The day she was promoted to President of PepsiCo, she came home to share the news, only for her mother to ask her to go out and get the milk first.
"So you leave that crown in the garage."
The lesson buried in this story is not that ambition and home life are incompatible. It is that nobody else in your life automatically adjusts to your new altitude. If anything is going to change at home in step with what has changed at work, someone has to decide that deliberately. It will not simply happen on its own.
67%-71%
Married Women carry
more of the mental load associated with running a home than men
especially when children are involved
Why this isn't really a separate question
It would be convenient to treat the previous section as a parallel concern, something worth managing for its own sake, running alongside the professional uplevelling rather than inside it. That isn't quite accurate. Given what Watkins's research shows about how those first 90 days actually work, credibility forming fast, scrutiny at its highest, every early signal weighted disproportionately, what happens at home during this exact window doesn't sit beside your professional success. It’s at the very heart of it.
Consider what an unmanaged or chaotic home life actually costs you in this context. A stakeholder meeting moved at short notice because a childcare gap opened up with no backup plan, in the precise window where reliability is being silently assessed by people who don't yet know whether they can count on you.
A board presentation delivered on three hours' sleep after a night spent managing a parent's medical crisis alone, the content as strong as ever, the delivery noticeably not and live responses in the room not as sharp as they could be.
A genuine stretch opportunity, the secondment, the high-visibility project, the trip that would have put you in front of exactly the right people, postponed because the logistics at home simply had no capacity to flex that month.
There's a more elusive version of this too, harder to name and just as costly. Being technically present in a critical negotiation while a part of your attention is still on something unresolved at home, a call you couldn't return, something waiting for you. Nobody in the room can see it. They simply experience your performance as slightly less focused than usual, at precisely the moment your reaction is being noticed and remembered.
None of this is a comment on resilience or capability. It's a structural fact about how the two halves of a demanding life actually intersect, particularly in a window where you are being stretched to capacity and so much is being decided about you at the same time. Here’s the thing. You cannot build sustained credibility at work from a foundation at home which is less than solid, because the strain doesn't stay contained to evenings and weekends. It surfaces precisely and possibly unexpectedly where you can least afford it to.
Success at work depends on success at home.
Not as a balance to be found eventually, once the new role has settled. As the actual cornerstone the next 90 days are being built on.
Strategies for the first 90 days, at home
To be clear about what follows and what doesn't. This is not a guide to managing your new role. Plenty exists on that already, and we wouldn’t pretend it’s where our expertise lies.
What we do know, after 22 years dedicated to supporting senior professionals at exactly this kind of inflection point in their career, is the half of the equation almost nothing is written about: what a significant promotion actually requires of your home life, and what can genuinely be done about it before the gap becomes a crisis.
Seven strategies for success01 | Name it
02 | Talk about it
03 | Divide and conquer
04 | Look more broadly
05 | Create a back up solution
06 | Protect non-negotiables
07 | Review and refine
01 | Name it
Map what currently depends on you, comprehensively, before the new role absorbs all your attention. We find most senior professionals have never stopped to think much about it, far less written down the extensive list of home life logistics that only work because they are seamlessly holding them together.
Half Term to organise. An ageing parent to support. Birthdays. Monitoring school emails. Meal planning. Homework after school. Dry cleaning runs. Dealing with the solicitor.
Before the new role's demands peak, it is worth investing real time mapping this fully and honestly, not to build a handover list, but to surface exactly what you are working with.
02 | Talk about it
Have the conversation before the gap appears, not after it has already caused damage. Mary Barra, chief executive of General Motors and one of the most senior women in global industry, has spoken about exactly this kind of deliberate redistribution.
"Everybody does a better job when they're able to balance."
Balance rarely happens by accident in any partnership. It is built through an explicit conversation with the people closest to you, ideally before the new role is even confirmed. It should be about what is going to change, what support you will need, and who is realistically going to provide it. Waiting until the new position is in play and the strain is showing is avoiding it too long.
03 | Divide and conquer
Reallocate deliberately, rather than letting things default to whoever is least busy that week. Carve out actual roles and responsibilities so everything to do with (for example) the dentist, or tennis coaching, is owned by someone to take away multiple micro-conversations as you go along.
04 | Look more broadly
Not everyone has the luxury of a willing partner alongside them, someone who also has capacity and sees themselves as pivotal to your success.
If you're the primary provider or sole carer, the previous strategies don't disappear, they have to find somewhere else. Which makes this step even more important. The mapping you did still needs sharing, even without a co-parent sitting across the table from you.
Look to extended family who have offered before and meant it. A close friend prepared to take on one genuine, named piece of the load rather than something adhoc or general. The school's wraparound care and after school clubs. Services such as Consider it Done’s home life executive assistants engaged as a deliberate success strategy rather than a last resort at crisis point.
For a lone parent or homeowner, home life support like ours can be as extensive as cover a partner would otherwise have provided. Well defined elements of full home life management, picked up in a structured and intelligent way by our high calibre team restore exactly the kind of balance achieved by two people in the home.
While there is likely to be additional cost in drawing on many of these options, there is a clear ROI in the long term sustainability and viability in taking up your highly demanding role, and of your ability to succeed and thrive in it, as well as in the health and wellbeing of you and your family over time.
“I’m a full mum, a full professional, and I’m not burning out because of this service alone. It’s the best investment I’ve ever made.”
- Crystal Danbury, Director of Group Safety, Insurance and Occupational Wellbeing, Sainsbury's05 | Create a back up solution
As well as the elements of your mapping exercise which can be clearly defined and known in advance, there will also be unforeseen firefighting to do when the pressure peaks and inevitable rocks-in-the-road come along. Decide how best to handle these now – as far as you can - while you still have the headspace to think clearly, not three weeks into a punishing new schedule when every decision feels urgent and nobody has the capacity to negotiate calmly.
Who is going to A&E? Who is staying up late when there’s a stomach bug? Who is staying in for the engineer when the dishwasher breaks down.
06 | Protect non-negotiables
Protect a small number of non-negotiables for yourself. Not everything you enjoyed in your life before the big job arrived has to be sacrificed. In fact some of these will become even more important to you because they’ll protect your performance.
A yoga class, lunch with girlfriends, a book club, weekends away, date nights, take-out Fridays, making a school performance.
Identify the things which are important to you personally and hold onto those firmly while everything else is changing around the new demands
07 | Review and refine
Build in a genuine 90 day review, at home, not just at work. Most senior professionals will have some version of a formal check-in at the 90 day mark in their new role, assessing what is working and what needs to change.
Almost nobody builds the equivalent conversation at home. It is worth setting that date deliberately now, make time for a proper conversation about what has actually happened to your home life over the same period of time, and what needs adjusting. Revisit the 7 steps, and continually look to improve the lives of everyone impacted by your new work life.
A bigger role changes more than your job title.
It changes the shape of your whole life, for what might be an unknown length of time.
It’s likely to be immensely demanding before it settles into something more sustainable. None of the strategies above remove the demands and expectations you’ll face. But with the support you need at home, they will allow you to perform at your best, give you the freedom to focus, and achieve everything you’re setting out to do while also being the parent and partner your family deserves.