Your first year is critical. Establish yourself quickly.
Guidance on how to settle into your new job
There are whole books written on this subject, and I cannot replace them. However, I want to give you a starting point for thinking about your first six months in your new role. For more, read my professional notes on Medium.
It may have been a long time since you've moved employers, so you'll be out of practice. Starting a new job, particularly as a Secondhalfer, is challenging on two counts:
First, you're likely not the young Millennial or Gen Z'er who will go out after work with the crowd, so you need to find different ways to fit in, make friends and build networks;
Second, you need to throw out much of what you know about work — the culture, the movers and shakers, how decisions get made, how things get done, and re-learn them, fast.
It's useful to think about your new job as having two distinct activities — related but very different.
First, the onboarding process, which gets you physically started and operating in your new role and
Second is the integration process, which makes you effective with a strong network.
Both are critical processes, but the second process is unlikely to be formally documented at your new workplace, meaning you must take control quickly.
Your need for Notes is stronger than ever now, so get prepared.
Before you start
Some employers will be willing to share information with you as soon as you've signed your employment contract. If they are, then use that time to understand the business better, learn about the issues you'll be facing or about new software, processes, hardware or industries you'll be moving into.
Anything you can do before you start will be appreciated and will give you a head start before you have to deal with new challenges.
Onboarding
Onboarding is the formal process that you will go through at your new employer and covers things such as:
Introductions to your team, your manager and key stakeholders. Take plenty of notes and quickly build a diagram of the key people you need to know. Make notes of who you need to go back and see and have coffee catch ups.
Getting your IT equipment, ID and phone. Once you have them, use them — set up meetings with the people you need to know.
Getting paid and paying the right tax. The sooner you can do this, the better. There will often be tax implications for changing jobs, particularly if you've received a package from your previous employer. Unless you have a seamless transfer between jobs, you must account for a monthly salary drop, so be prepared and discuss it with HR as soon as you start.
Initial training will likely be required for health and safety or compliance reasons. Be sure to take notes, particularly as procedures that are second nature to you may be different — and so cause you embarrassment if you make an error without thinking about it. The training will be mostly online, so make time and space to do this. You don't want your first meeting with your manager to be about why your name is on a non-compliance list. If your new employer offers a face-to-face option, take it as an opportunity to build your network.
Your initial to-do list. This is the most important onboarding item, so take lots of notes and be prepared to ask lots of questions about the initial set of tasks given to you. Depending on the organization's politics, they could have all sorts of banana skins to slip on, or they could be a starting point to get you going in the first few days, so quickly work out whether your to-do list is the right one. It will most certainly draw upon the notes you made earlier regarding stakeholders. Make time each day to review your progress.
An induction course. At one of my employers, induction courses could happen up to three months after starting. It's on the first two days in my current employer — much more sensible. If you have the opportunity to discuss this, try to get it as soon as possible after joining, or the benefits of it will wane quickly. Don't be tempted to skip this. Prioritize it so that you get settled in quicker, understand the organization's context and make your network of fellow people in your position.
Mentors. If your organization has a mentoring or buddying system, use it fully.
Remember, onboarding is about introducing you to your new employer, not about making you successful. That's the job of integration.
Integration
Once you have your work equipment, know the key people and have a to-do list, your real work starts. The integration process can take up to a year, so don't take your foot off the gas. What you'll need to do for your integration process is the following:
Listen
Listen, observe and avoid making diagnoses quickly. They will almost certainly be wrong, and if they do happen to be right, nobody likes a smarty coming in and diagnosing in 10 minutes what your colleagues have taken months to understand. You need to be one of the team, whether you're an executive, a manager or a team member.
I once worked with a senior manager who came into the business with lots of great ideas on how to make improvements based on the wins she had in her previous role. She quickly started to put many small changes in place, but after three months, the team felt like they had lost direction. Rome was burning, and they were fighting it with buckets of water. By the time she had the tough conversation with her manager, she had already damaged her reputation, and it took a lot of effort to start to make the more wide-ranging (and more difficult) changes needed for the team to win.
Equally, I have worked with a different senior manager who, after starting, devised a plan to change how we did business from the ground up. After six months of talking to stakeholders and slowly being worn out, he hadn't achieved anything and the benefit of the doubt given to him quickly ebbed. He left shortly afterwards.
What's the lesson? Whilst a few quick wins are important to give confidence that you were a good hire, just focusing on quick wins is a very bad idea because:
They are addictive. Like any addictive substance, the impact of small wins gets smaller and smaller with each dose.
Your reputation will quickly become the 'small win person', which doesn't help you later.
It's not the quick wins that senior leaders will judge you on; it's the big ones. That's why they hired you.
So, start with a few quick wins to test out the processes and the culture and gain confidence in you, but then begin to plan the big wins, where you will make giant strides towards meeting your objectives.
Teams
If you're leading a team, then lead from the front. If you're a team member, become a lynchpin — the person people tell others to go to to get things done. Your boss needs to know you're getting things done, and your team need to know you're looking out for them and they are succeeding, or if not, why not?
Understand your objectives, your team's objectives and most importantly, your boss's objectives. As you understand these, ensure your work is aligned vertically above and below you, particularly if you have a team to manage. Understand how you'll be measured, what 'good' looks like and what 'great' looks like. Write these down, as you'll need to refer to them often.
Related to your own team's objectives are the ones of the teams you interact with. If you understand their objectives well, you can interact more fruitfully with them and know how you can help them help you achieve your objectives. In today's world, few organizations operate in silos — working in a matrix organization requires you to understand both the vertical and the horizontal teams.
Goal Setting
Build a picture of the goals that will help you reach your objectives. This picture is important because objectives are binary — you either meet them or you don't — but goals are more granular, allowing you to show progress towards your objectives. So, agree on these and work to meet them.
By working towards smaller goals, you will get practice at decision-making and getting things done. It's much better to make mistakes on the small stuff than the big things, so make them quickly and learn how to do things properly. Remember, though, that you can't just work towards small goals. Sooner or later, you need to get to the big ones.
Networking
Build a coalition of colleagues that you get to know well and get to trust — they will be critical in guiding you and helping you avoid as many mistakes as possible. As a Secondhalfer, your boss expects you not to make mistakes like more junior staff members, which is a critical part of securing your position in your role.
Don't fall into the trap of finding people who agree with you. Diversity is important in building your 360° view of the organization, so actively seek out people with different opinions. You will better understand the organization's competing views and tensions. You may even learn something!
Learn and map the white space in the organization — these are the important bits between the jobs in the formal hierarchy where, in reality, most of your work will get done. 'Talk to her' and 'meet him' are things not on the organizational chart but are critical for you to know, document and use.
You used to know all this in your previous role, so try to re-learn.
Culture and Strategy
Understand the culture of the organization. We discussed this briefly in the interview process, but now you need to put it into practice. You will find cultural variations at a team, departmental, regional and national level and understanding the flow of communications, relationships and decision-making between groups, as much as within groups, is critical to your success. Consider, for example, whether the culture should be the same in a safety team compared to a sales team. What's important is learning how to engage and change your approach to each culture and subculture you encounter. Make notes and map out the key players in each culture.
Understand the strategy of the organization. In the absence of concrete direction given to you, the strategy serves as a good general guiding light for you. For example, if the strategy involves increasing sales to a new market, taking action to understand that market is unlikely to be a bad choice. Likewise, if you know the company's top competitors or partners, reading about them and following them on social media will likely be wise.
Feedback
Ensure you get feedback from three angles — your boss, peers and team. You need to use your honeymoon period to get that feedback without any awkwardness. If you can do this effectively, your honeymoon period will be extended.
Summary
Spending time on each of these areas will quickly augment your 'official' to-do list with your 'real' to-do list. This list is the one that helps you reach your objectives and splits those objectives down into manageable goals.
By focusing on these smaller goals, you can then prioritize them and create a series of wins that start to cement your success into place.
Then, as soon as you can, focus on the bigger goals because these will ultimately make you succeed or not.
Your notes are your friend — make sure you allocate time each day to work through your to-do list and learn the lessons from the day.
Weekly, review your progress, just as you did in the job hunt phase, asking the following questions:
How well am I building my network?
How well do I understand the 'real' job I'm here to do?
How well do I know my objectives?
What progress am I making towards meeting them?
Am I building the right relationships with the right people?
Your first year is critical for building your reputation, relationships, and a strong foundation for your future job. But what about the big picture? In the final step, we'll return to the beginning to round off Project Job.
Navigation
Here are all the Project Job posts in order:
Comments