In the first month, the things you do could lay down the foundation for years of success or lead to a downward spiral that is difficult to climb out of. Especially if this new job is in a new company, for a new product, reporting to a new leadership chain, and taking over a new team. Everything needs your attention, and they need it now!
After going through the process myself while observing my colleagues, I notice a few strategies that might help us establish as a strategic, adaptive, and aspirational newcomer. This is not a task list such as meeting new people, understanding your key metrics, etc. Those should all be in your 30–60–90 day plan. Here the suggestions are more on the strategic level.
Create a 30–60–90 day plan
Setting the right expectations are the first step toward success. This plan should be set up together with your manager on day 1, and it should be communicated clearly to all stakeholders repetitively.
It is quite common that people around you have all sorts of crazy expectations starting on day 1. They will most likely ask you to contribute to key decisions while you feel like you are fumbling in the dark. This kind of excitement and energy is great, but the outcome is less so. You will lack the context and domain knowledge to contribute meaningfully if not onboarded systematically.
Hence the importance of a plan. On one of my colleague’s onboarding doc, their manager clearly called out that “Partners should not ask them to make progress on any main issues in the first month. They are expected to watch and learn first and for most.” This type of plan, also the communication of it, made their onboarding experience much more efficient and organized.
Write a strategy doc for your role
The first month is the perfect time to meet your leaders, partners, and teammates while thinking systematically and strategically about your role. Most people will treat these 1:1s as a way to introduce themselves and establish personal relationships. This is great, but we could add more. A better way to utilize these rare meeting opportunities is to first create a strategy doc, then use these meetings to improve it.
This strategy doc could start with anything. It could be your vision for the role, your past experiences, and expectations, or even your product ideas as an outsider. Through the meetings and observations, it could turn to focus more on current problems and solutions or deepen the discussion on any focus areas. Either way, with this document, you not only present yourself as a thought leader that brings in new ideas but also showcase your strategic thinking and problem-solving skills immediately.
The best part is, at the end of the month, you will have a well-written strategy doc that could guide you and your team for the next few months. And since it is written, you could share this vision with teammates and partners easily. It tells your partners that you heard them, and you have a plan to fix their burning issues. All they need to do is wait patiently for you to execute, instead of keeping escalating things.
Do Team Assessment
Taking over an existing team start with understanding where the team currently stands. Is the team in good health or in crisis mode? Is the team losing talents or growing? What skill sets do they have and what needs to be added? Who are the high performers and who are the low performers? Those are likely the first things you notice and are relatively easy to figure out.
Team culture, however, is an area that is equally important but could be easily overlooked. Teams could be at different stages of their forming process, have different decision-making cultures, or have drastically different confrontational styles. Disregarding these subtle but fundamental differences could lead to very unexpected pitfalls.
Take my own experience as an example. My old team is very well-formed and has worked together for a long time. It is widely accepted that if needed, the manager could serve as the tiebreaker to make a swift decision after hearing both sides. However, my new team is just forming and people are less trusting of each other. Serving as the tiebreaker made one of them really resentful about the decision, and hence started disengaging.
Fixing this kind of issue takes real effort. There are many tools available online to help teams self-identify their culture and their forming progress. After understanding the culture, the team could finally start meaningful dialogues to understand and adjust to each other.
Communication! Communication! Communication!
It is impossible to exaggerate the role of communication during onboarding. It is not the icing on the cake, it is the cake!
For both your team and your partners, you need them to understand why they could trust you. One way to achieve that is to over-communicate your rationals, i.e. why you are asking them to change, or why you prioritize one thing over another. It might include communicating your vision, your expectations of the DS role, your evaluation process, your promotion philosophy, hiring philosophy, or prioritization framework, etc. As a seasoned manager, you probably have been refining them continuously and have most of them written down. Now you just need to communicate to your team and make sure they truly understand it.
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. — George Bernard Shaw
There are countless books on what true communication looks like and how to avoid the illusion that it has taken place. One of my brilliant colleagues taught me a rule of thumb: if they haven’t internalized the idea, and start to repeat it to you, then the communication is not done. Take the team vision for example, until the DS in your team starts quoting your words to justify their choices, the communication has not finished. Same as your prioritization framework, if your partners are not actively using it to negotiate priority with your team, the communication is yet to be done.
Create Small Wins ASAP
Sometimes it is hard to imagine what small wins look like for a manager. Hiring takes forever, performance management is not visible to outsiders, and you are not supposed to work on projects hands-on! From what I observe, some possible small wins for managers early on are things like solving small XFN collaboration issues, hands-on involvement in the communication of a key project, resolving small leadership inquiries, lead a small cross-team effort around org health (goal setting, hiring, promo, etc).
Beware that these should not be big decisions that need domain knowledge and context to make the right judgment call, i.e. org restructure, the launch of a big bet, etc. Small wins should be something with minimal risk and a predictable effort level.
As with any individual experience, these are what mattered in my circumstances. Please comment if you have other suggestions!
