Your First 30 Days in a New Role

If you're about to take on a new role, congrats! You've made it through. Outshining the rest to come out on top. Celebrate, you earned it.

As your start date approaches, the descent from cloud nine begins and you're back down on earth (and maybe a tad nervous). It's showtime but where to start?

We love ambition. Your bias for action is why you got hired. We want to hit the ground running and show our worth right away. However, rushing in and imposing yourself is a sure-fire way to become alienated. Burning bridges before they're raised.

Your experience and skills are invaluable, but to leverage them you need a strong foundation. Your first 30 days should be focused on building relationships and a knowledge base (learning all you can).

Work with your manager and get a list of folks to have 1-on-1s with. Identify the key stakeholders. Understand their background, their challenges, working style, and your relationship with them.

Learn as much as you can. Understand the customer, the product, the company. Our strengths, our gaps, your place in it all. The good, the bad, the ugly.

Once you have a solid footing. Take your theoretical learnings and apply them with a "starter project". Something that adds values, allows you to learn how the company works on a deeper level, but low stakes enough to limit risk while you're still learning/experimenting.

You won't change the world in your first 30 days, but you can set yourself up for game-changing opportunities. Connect and learn.

Comments

The Art of Giving Feedback

Constructive feedback is an awkward affair. You don't want hurt feelings, but recognize the importance of honesty. You've tried the classic "hoping things will get better on its own" and unfortunately it hasn't played out. When giving feedback, here are a few things that I try to keep it mind. Start with empathy. Step into their shoes and understand their story. If you don't know, ask. Be genuinely curious. Feedback is a dynamic affair. Shared communication with a shared goal towards progress. Take the emotion out of it. Focus on the situation, not the person. Focusing on the person adds unnecessary weight to an already emotionally-bloated event. Be specific. Give clear examples. Vague feedback equals dismissed feedback. Doing above won't de-awkward things fully, but it will dampen it and increase the chance of better outcomes.

Bias For Clarity

Bias for action. Gets things done. Go-getter. Traits companies big and small look for. And for good reason, you're being hired to do things! However, action is a secondary step that often overshadows the primary step, direction. Clear direction is the foundation that enables our actions to takeoff. Without it, we're stuck in the mud. Striving for clarity is an underrated skill. Having the courage to ask ( seemingly ) obvious questions, and to check in, making sure we're all on the same page. "O bvious " questions are a low risk, high reward way to add value. At worst, you'll add confidence to our actions. At best, you discover a misalignment that saves us from a dead-end. The more people, the more clear we need to be. The bigger the initiative, the bigger the risk of reaching the finish line, only to realize expectations were off. Success is always uncertain. But we can be certain about what we want and what everyone's job is. Things that can be clea...

Negative Feedback, Positive Lessons

In the battle against plastic bags, a five-cent tax was shown to be much more successful at deterring usage than a five-cent credit for bringing your own bags. Carrots satisfy but sticks sting, and they sting hard. So we default to the less painful choice of avoiding loss. Loss aversion impacts the way we process information. A 2019 study invited participants to learn through a series of multiple choice questions. Each question only had two options to choose from. Whether guessing correctly or not, they would still learn the right answer. Despite the identical learning opportunity, participants were much more successful at recalling the answers they guessed correctly than those they got wrong. "You're right!" feels good. We savour the moment, analyzing every detail. "You're wrong!" stings. We want to quickly forget, dismiss, and move on. When we succumb to loss aversion, we miss opportunities to learn. Failure is part of the process. We'll experie...

Herman Ye

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