Onboard Yourself 1: Listen to Get The Context
Take time to understand the situation before making changes.
The first step to onboarding yourself is to take the time to understand the company and team culture you’ve just joined. We all have biases from our lived experiences, but they often mislead us in new situations.
Before you tell people everything that’s wrong with how they work, listen to understand why it works. Coming in with all the answers can alienate people who could help you learn what’s going on and may dampen your chance at building trust and connections with new colleagues.
You can share your thoughts because it’s great to get fresh eyes on a problem, but don’t be surprised if there are other factors you don’t know of at play. Listening to how the company developed helps you recognize how people communicate and see their shared assumptions and values. This will all help you adapt to the culture.
When you’re talking to people, these are a few things to listen for:
- How is work planned: Do people set up meetings to discuss the options? Are there goals and a vision? How do they use Jira?
- How do initiatives get support: Do you need a leadership sponsor? Support from peers? Does the solution come from a lot of discussions?
- How is work communicated: Are there fixed deadlines? Do people set safe or ambitious goals? What happens if you don’t meet a goal?
The following sections discuss how to talk to three specific groups of people, including some example questions. You’ll notice that the last question is the same for all cases: If you were me, what would you focus on? I think asking what others think you should concentrate on gives a great insight into their priorities and helps you identify where people are aligned, or in fact, not.
Meet with your team
The team is your home and will likely form your strongest support for what you want to get done. Everyone will have different skills that you can learn from. The most senior may become a mentor, while the most junior member might have the best writing setup. Just know that there’s a lot of expertise that you can make the most of. And remember, sharing knowledge brings everyone up.
When talking with your team, ask:
- How did the content come to be?
- Who works on it?
- How is the content organized?
- What’s working well?
- What issues do you see?
- What are the next projects?
- If you were me, what would you focus on?
Meet with your stakeholders
It’s good to understand the expectations of your role from an outside perspective. You might think they’re wrong, but at least you’ll know where you’re starting from. When onboarding to my last role, I met with researchers, leadership, engineers, and designers. Once you’ve built these relationships, you can also look to them for support with your initiatives.
When talking with stakeholders, ask:
- What goals are you working on?
- How are those goals going?
- How do you work with the documentation at the moment? Have you contributed to the documentation?
- How do you think we should work together?
- If you were me, what would you focus on?
Meet with the leadership
This could be your direct management chain or other key leaders you know of in the business. The purpose is to understand their expectations and how they see you fitting into the organization.
When meeting with leadership, ask:
- What do you think the biggest opportunity for me is?
- Do you know of any similar content initiatives? If so, how did they go?
- Who do you think my stakeholders are?
- If you were me, what would you focus on?
Next steps
This is part of a series of posts explaining an approach to onboarding yourself in a new role. After listening to get the context, the next step is to Understand the area (link to come). If you want an overview, see Onboard Yourself.
Michael Belton is a Technical Writer at Carted, a software company seeking to empower the future of eCommerce. He’s interested in helping people through content, explaining complex things simply, and making good food. Find him on his Twitter, @mykale37.
