The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Be Like Water: Leadership Lessons for Your First 90 Days in a New Role

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

What should you do during your first days as a leader?Many new managers and executives feel pressure to prove themselves by introducing new processes, reorganizing teams, or making immediate changes. But what if the best first move is something different?Inspired by Bruce Lee's famous advice to "be like water," Kevin Pannell explores why effective leadership begins with observation, curiosity, and trust before transformation.Drawing on lessons from the U.S. Navy, emergency management, healthcare IT, and years spent leading Project Management Offices, Kevin shares how experienced leaders can balance confidence with humility as they step into a new organization.In this episode, you'll learn:Why experience should help you ask better questions before providing better answers.How to avoid solving the wrong problem during your first 90 days.Why every process has a story worth understanding.A practical leadership framework: Observe. Orient. Optimize.How People. Process. Progress. creates sustainable organizational change.Whether you're a PMO leader, project manager, executive, supervisor, entrepreneur, or simply beginning a new chapter in your career, this episode offers practical leadership advice you can apply immediately.Mentioned in this EpisodeBruce Lee's "Be Like Water" philosophyBuilding situational awareness before making changeLeadership transitionsPMO leadershipOrganizational change managementTrust and stakeholder engagementConnect with Kevin: ???? peopleprocessprogress.com |???? Instagram & X: @thekevinpannell |???? YouTube: Own, Move, AnchorIf You Enjoyed This Episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with someone beginning a new leadership role. Your support helps more leaders discover practical conversations about people, process, and progress.

Bruce Lee once said, Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. I've probably heard that quote of 100 times over the years. Like most famous quotes, it sounds great. You see it on posters, social media, maybe even hanging in a gym. But lately I found myself thinking about it differently. I recently stepped in a new leadership role,

and if you've ever started a new job, taking over a new team or been asked to lead a new project, you also know the feeling. You want to prove. they made the right decision, you want to contribute, you want to help. Within the first few days, your brain starts connecting the dots. You notice a process that seems cumbersome, a meeting that feels unnecessary, a report that nobody appears to use, an opportunity to simplify something.

If you spent years leading projects, building PMOs, responding to emergencies, serving in the military, coaching teams, or managing people, those observations happen almost automatically. Mine certainly did. The temptation is to start unpacking your tools. box before you've even walked through the entire house. Welcome to People Process Progress, the podcast where we explore practical leadership, project management, continuous improvement, and the people who make meaningful progress possible. I'm Kevin Pennell. I'm a PMO leader, U.S. Navy veteran emergency management

professional author, a lifelong student of leadership. My goal is simple to share real experience, practical lessons, and conversations that help us lead better, deliver better, and continue growing, whether you're leading projects or your organizations, communities, or simply yourself. You can find articles, podcast episodes, speaking information, and more at peopleprocessprogress.com. If you're interested in some fitness, wellness, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and kind of the mindset that supports leadership, you can also find me on YouTube at Own Move Anchor. And now with over 1 million views, I'm also on X and Instagram at the Kevin Panell. Now let's get into today's conversation. I think we've all done it. I know I have.

Earlier in my career, I thought leadership meant having answers, right? Someone would a problem and I immediately start thinking about solutions. Maybe another tracker, a new process, a different governance model, better communication plan. Those things aren't necessarily bad. It's just sometimes they're exactly what's needed, but the problem was that I was trying to solve the problems before I fully understood them. I've learned something over the years. Every process has a story. When something looks inefficient, there's usually a reason it exists. Maybe a regulatory requirement created it. Maybe a difficult project years ago caused the team to add another approval step. Maybe someone got burned once and this process became the

safeguard. Or maybe everyone already knows it needs to change, but they've simply been too busy delivering work to improve the system. You don't learn those stories by looking at a workflow diagram. You learn them by talking to people. There's a lesson from emergency management. There's one reason I love emergency management. Whether we'd arrived in an incident, nobody stepped out of the truck and immediately started changing the incident action plan. Right? We built situational awareness first. What happened? Who's already here? What's our objective? What resources are committed? What's working? What isn't? Right? Only after understanding the situation, we decide what needed to change. Leadership should work the same way. That some organizations often expect the opposite.

A new leader arrives and almost immediately people ask, so what are you going to change? Honestly, probably not much, at least not yet. Not because they don't have ideas. I have plenty of ideas. I'd actually be concerned if an experience leader didn't. Organizations didn't hire people hoping they'd forget everything they learned, right? They hire us because of our experience, our judgment or success are failures. Everything we've learned along the way. The balance is bringing that experience without assuming every answer from your last organization automatically applies to your new one.

Experience should help us better ask questions before it helps us provide better answers. Here's how my leadership has changed. This has become one of the biggest shifts in my own mind and the way that I lead. Years ago, I measured success differently. If projects were green, schedules were updated, templates were complete, status reports look polished, I figured we were doing pretty well. Today, I asked different questions. Do people understand why we're doing this work?

Do project managers have time to actually lead projects, or are they spending all week updating reports? Do stakeholders trust the PMO? Are we removing friction? Are we making people's work? easier because they've seen organizations deliver projects perfectly that nobody wanted. I've also seen organizations implement technology exactly as planned while completely missing the workflow problems users dealt with every day. One of the biggest lessons from healthcare taught me

exactly that, right? Technology rarely solves people problems. People solve people problems. Technology simply supports them. That's why I've come to believe something I wish I'd understood sooner. The first responsibility of a PMO isn't governance. It isn't reporting. It isn't methodology. It's understanding how work creates value for the organization. Everything else supports that mission. So let's talk about the theme of this episode. What be like water looks like. For me, it starts with listening. Not listening so I can respond. Listening so I can understand. When I meet someone new, I don't want my first conversation to be about what I think. I want to know what they think. Tell me about your team. What are you proud of? What slows you down? If you could improve one thing tomorrow, what would it be? Those conversations accomplish something no dashboard ever will. They build trust. I've learned that people rarely resist change because they dislike improvement. They resist change because they don't believe the person leading the change understands their reality. That's a leadership problem, not a process. problem. So let's think about the oot loop. I think a lot of folks have heard about. Observe,

orient, decide, and act. But instead, let's do the triple O, observe, orient, and optimize. So let's get into this. One practice I found helpful, right, is whenever entering a new organization or a new team or a new project is thinking through these phases. So observe. First, build situational awareness. Meet the people. Watch how work actually gets done, not just how the documentation says it gets done. Second, orient. Right. Take everything you've seen and combine it with your previous experience. This is where experience does become valuable. Patterns begin to emerge.

You understand which challenges are unique and which ones you've successfully solved before. Now let's optimize, right? Only after understanding the people, the culture, and the purpose behind the work do begin making meaningful improvements. Notice that optimization comes last, not because we're avoiding the change, but because we're trying to make the right change. So what's the real meaning of water? Water doesn't become weak because it adapts. It becomes effective.

Water flows around obstacles. It fills empty spaces. It takes the shape of whatever contains it. But over time, it reshapes mountains. Leadership can work the same way. Right? Sometimes people confuse adaptability with indecision, and they're very different. Adaptability is intentionally learning before acting.

Indecision is avoiding action altogether. There comes a point where listening becomes leading, right? Where relationships become trust. where trust becomes credibility. Where credibility gives you permission to improve the system. And that timing matters. If you're too quick, people see someone trying to prove themselves. If you move too slow, people wonder, why are you there?

Leadership has to live somewhere in between. So let's bring this back to people process and progress, right? People first, always. If we don't understand the people, we won't understand the process. If we don't understand the process, our progress is probably luck. So yes, bring your experience. That's why you were hired. Bring your ideas. Bring your lessons learned. Bring the mistakes you've made and everything they've taught you.

Just don't bring the assumption that you've already figured everything out before you've met the people doing the work. So closing, Bruce Lee wasn't telling us to become passive. He wasn't telling us to forget everything we've learned. I think he was reminding us that the strongest leaders never stop adapting. Like water, they learn the landscape before trying to reshape it. And when they finally do make changes, those changes aren't about proving how smart they are. They're about helping people do their best work. That's leadership worth following.

People process progress. Thank you for spending part of your day with me. If today's conversation gave you something to think about, I'd appreciate if you'd share this episode with a friend, a colleague, or someone stepping into a new leadership role. Those conversations are how we'll all get better. You can find every episode, articles, leadership resources, more at People Process, Progress. If you'd like to connect, I'm at the Kevin Pennell on Instagram at X, where I share leadership, project management and everyday lessons from work and life. For fitness, wellness, Brazilian jiu-jitsu and mindset, go to Unmove anchor on YouTube,

where communities grow to more than a million views and continually growing. Join me and the other couple thousand followers there. Until next time, keep putting people first. Keep improving your process. Keep making progress. And as always, Godspeed, y'all.