Start with Self-Reflection

With an honest, full understanding of your personal strengths and weaknesses, you will be much better equipped to observe the places you can create the most impact with the greatest ease in your new role—and where you can seek opportunities to take on more difficult challenges to learn and grow in specific, measured ways.

Carefully consider these questions, taking time to write these questions and your answers on paper. Once you have considered the questions and documented your thoughts, leave them for a few days, and then revisit them by reading your responses. As you revisit your responses, consider your initial reactions, and how your perspective changed or gained clarity once you sat with the questions for a few days.

1. What has made you successful so far in your career? Can you succeed in your new position solely by relying on those strengths? If not, what key skills will you need to develop?

TIP: Need help answering this question? Complete this exercise to gather input from others and organize your ideas about your personal success drivers.

2. Think hard about your personal vulnerabilities in your new position. What experiences or skill requirements will be new for you, or will be much larger in scope than your previous experiences? How will you compensate for those gaps?
3. Are there aspects of your new job that are critical to success but that you prefer not to focus on? Why is that the case? How will you compensate for your potential blind spots?
4. What stressors do you anticipate that you will encounter in your new role? How will you maintain your energy level to prevent and manage stress?

Define Your Learning Agenda

What do you most need to learn? Early on you will learn mostly by asking questions, but as you learn more you will start to form ideas and hypotheses about what is going on in your new team or organization and why. Increasingly, your learning will shift toward fleshing out and testing those hypotheses, perhaps by assigning specific work to new members of the team to assess whether your view of their capabilities is on target, or sharing information with a co-worker with whom you have built rapport, to expand your professional trust.

NEW PEOPLE AND CORPORATE CULTURE

You will formulate opinions about people throughout your career, but especially when you are new to an organization, team, or role. Remember to turn those “stories” into a hypothesis to be tested against a fact to ensure you minimize bias, false assumptions and premature conclusions. For example, if you recognize you have formed an opinion that an employee is always late, try tracking their arrival times daily for a period of time, to ensure you keep a full view of the times they are punctual—not just the late arrivals that prove your original theory.

As you develop a plan for learning about your new organization or team, consider these questions:

1. How will you learn about the culture in your new organization?
   (Be intentional about discovering what is important to you, pertinent to your job, and suggestions from managers and peers.)

TIP: Reading relevant information (such as financial and operating reports, strategic and functional plans, employee surveys, media coverage, industry reports and web research) can accelerate your learning.

2. Who are the key stakeholders for your new role? Who has influence and why? Who do you need to meet and talk to and get to know in your new company? What can you learn from each of these people?
   (Think broadly here. Along with bosses and managers, also consider peers, cross-functional professionals, paraprofessionals and others.)

TIP: Once you cultivate a few key stakeholders with whom you can meet for coffee or lunch, ask them who else you might want to know in order to gain additional unique insights. In this way, let one referral lead to another as you widen your network.

3. How will you plan to spend time with each of these people (e.g., one-on-one meetings, lunches, observation)? Do you need to meet with them only once, or should you try to schedule regular meetings?
4. Ask these questions of each contact you meet:
   • What one thing do you wish you had done (or are glad you did) to speed your learning when you joined the organization?
   • What do you wish you had known earlier?
   • What is the most pressing issue you face right now in your job?
5. How will you gain access to the people you need to talk to?
   (Again, think broadly. The answer may involve anything from building rapport with executive assistants to using company calendar/scheduling technology.)

TIP: To get a full view of the organization and industry landscape, seek to learn from co-workers and direct reports (not just managers and bosses). You will gain a more holistic view of your role.

Build Personal Credibility

Your early actions will shape others’ perceptions (for better or worse) of your skills and compatibility with the group. Just as you will be forming impressions of your colleagues during the first 90 days, they will begin drawing conclusions about whether you are someone with whom they want to work. In light of this reality, consider:

1. How will you build credibility as the newest person on the team?

TIP: Establishing yourself as a capable, reliable, trustworthy team member and leader is a process that begins with your first day on the job. These early perceptions are often among the most helpful—or difficult to overcome—in your leadership journey. Be deliberate about establishing your personal credibility early, not just your technical capability.

2. Who are the key influencers in the organization, and how do they influence others? How will you discover this in a “neutral” way, without forming early alliances before you understand the landscape?
3. What do people in your organization value? How can you be part of that value proposition?
4. What potentially damaging cultural or political missteps must you avoid making? How will you discover what those potential pitfalls are?
5. How will you set the stage for getting feedback over the long run, especially if you are not in a feedback-oriented culture?

Prioritize

You cannot do everything. The more you try to do, the less you do well. Develop a clear sense of your priorities and stay on point, pausing periodically to reflect on what you spend time doing and how you get things done.

• How will you devote time each day to the most important work that needs to be done, to avoid getting caught up in the flow of transactions and fires? How will you plan time for unforeseen tasks, so you process those interruptions in batches as much as possible, rather than dealing with them piecemeal?
• What tools will you use to help allocate your time effectively? How can you keep track of your schedule (phone calendar, app, online calendar) to devote time daily and weekly to plan and to evaluate which projects and life events are capturing most of your time?
• What methods do you use to approach work—including existing/standard processes, new/blue-sky projects, or collaborative efforts? How might you approach these efforts differently than in the past, looking for ways to streamline your approach?
• How will you make changes week over week to stay on track with your stated priorities and to challenge yourself to improve your efficiency in tackling the work?
• How often and when will you pause to test your hypotheses about the company, culture, and people you meet—to re-assess your assumptions, and identify how you will continue to capture new data?