2-3-4 Friday - 11 Feb 2022
‘Seeking to spark the most potential within you per word of any online newsletter’
1 thought
If you’re transiting to a new job, here’s something you may not have realised. Your first 90 days sets the tone for the rest of your time at the company. Much more than you think. I remember coming into my first job, depressed, sad and disinterested. I ate lunches alone. I had no structured plan to approach my transition. I made mistakes. Even though I spent the next 6 months doing well, the first 3 months had set the
tone.
How do you better structure your transition? My article describes 4 ways.
No time?
1. Learn to plan.
Set down a plan whereby you state the things you want to learn by the end of each week. Don’t know what you should learn? Ask your boss what his top priorities for you are and what he thinks you should know.
2. Next, plan to learn.
Have a structured learning plan where you speak to key stakeholders in your team, and with other teams you will collaborate with about
- What the challenges are
- What they think you should focus on
- What they think you should know
- What are the unwritten ground rules (or culture) of the work environment
Schedule chats with them weekly.
1 talk
The president of the United States gets 100 days to prove himself; you get 90. The actions you take during your first few months in a new role will largely determine whether you succeed or fail.
- Michael Watkins, The First 90 Days
1 tip
Think talking and listening is a waste of time? In my previous board, when we onboarded our new CEO, he spent his first 90 days being very clear that he was not going to take any executive decisions. He told us clearly that these first 90 days would not come again. He would never again be in a position of a newcomer, fresh, and unencumbered by the previous experience of the
organisation.
Stepping deep into doing immediately would stop him from having the full learning experience.
That position of humility and openness to learn built great rapport amongst the staff with him. It showed that he was not coming in with the answer, but willing to understand the problem, before co-creating an answer together with the staff.
For the first 90 days, he had more than a hundred conversations with stakeholders, writing down everything in his notebook.
Try the same. Don’t have time?
Ask for time. State how you will use the conversations to share an ‘observations’ exercise at the end of your first month, to show that you will have at least a work product at the end of this.
Plan to learn, and learn to learn.
P.S. I speak to those who struggle at work. Let's chat.
John