How to gain confidence in raising questions in your new job?
Whenever you start a new position, regardless if you have experience in the same industry, branch, or even in the same company, there will always be a degree of unknown in the beginning.
After completing a graduate programme at Vodafone I quickly discovered that, regardless of the onboarding process or my past experiences in the same company, sooner or later questions will arise.
Let’s say you are in your first week in your team, you are reading through the team Wiki, you have meetings with the key stakeholders of your area, and attend 121s with your peers. By the second week, your head will be buzzing with questions coming from all the information from your first days in your new job.
Questions such as: “If this is a known problem, why haven’t we tackled it already?”, “Are we working in the best way possible with our offshore teams?” or even “What do the people in the neighbouring desk do?”
The scale of asking questions goes from: Asking questions as they pop up, to Holding back on asking, until your boss pushes you in the area. Any one of us falls somewhere on that scale and this article will give you some food for thought on how can you use your questions to:
- Understand the details of a given problem, as well as the context in which it sits.
- Initiate a discussion which might have not been had, if people have not been focused on the correct aspect of the problem.
- Make you noticed to people outside your team.
Let’s drill down on each of the points.
1. Understanding the problem and the context
Sometimes when you walk into a meeting, chances are that some discussions have already taken place before the meeting was organised.
Don’t assume you have the complete view, and approach the problem with an open mind. Ask open questions and close in on the issue. This will help focus the team efforts.
Once you have a better grasp of the problem, ask questions to understand how it fits in the wider process and unit. Don’t jump straight to solution mode and reach conclusions quickly, understand the context, options and implications of each.
Let’s say a problem is with an order that has not reached the edge system. A good approach would be to find an order that has completed successfully and trace all the steps to ensure that everyone has a good understanding of the flow. This will help you narrow down the root cause of the problem.
2. Ask others for their view of the situation
Due to the dynamic nature of graduate programmes, I have found myself in meetings where I have joined investigations midway through completion and have not been involved in the kick-off sessions. In these cases suggesting to have an open discussion to summarise the issue and the progress that has been made to date, could help the team in a number of ways:
- There could be other recent joiners that could use with a summary of the issue, and help them set the perimiter for investigations
- If an issue has been open for more than a few days it might be worth to “zoom out” and ask the teams to look up and around. Sometimes the more focused you are on a particular issue, the easier it is to overlook other options that might be obvious when stepping back.
- Hearing out the summary from different perspectives will encourage the collaboration between the teams and might reveal new avenues of investigation. Start the conference call with a roll call. Engage the different teams and hear their view. This is one of the biggest benefits — similar to the previous point, when teams are too focused in their own area, listening to the summary of the other teams, having the external view can bring fresh ideas to the table.
3. Make your voice heard
Last but not least — don’t be afraid to contribute to the discussion. Pick your meetings and conference calls wisely and attend only ones where you can contribute or learn from. Be an active participant when you can — by this I don’t mean to talk about anything, as this can be seen by others as wasting time (needless to say that this will have the opposite effect). The key is — if you have a good idea — share it. If you feel like something obvious to you is overlooked, ask — “Have we thought about this?”. When you hear an explanation that you feel can be too technical to others, don’t be afraid to say — “can I see if I understand this correctly…” and re-phrase the problem statement in a digestible way. Active participants (even if it is active listening) is always seen positively by other participants.
For more information on leading without necessary having the title, refer to
https://medium.com/leadership-101/8-ways-to-lead-without-the-title-618cbcc56bd2
To summarise
The ability to ask the right questions at the right time and achieve the desired outcome is intimidating at first and hard to master, but once you become an expert, it is a powerful skill in your toolset. The first step on the journey is to build the confidence to speak up, initiate discussions and be hungry to learn. When you have mastered all three points in the article, you will be on your way to become a consultant for colleagues at all levels, which will build your knowledge, grow your confidence and increase your visibility.
Co-author: Leo Perrotta
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