3 Keys to a Succeeding in a New Job
Getting started in a new job is never easy. What are the keys to success?
As I prepared to leave consulting and join the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Peninsula I asked a few people for advice, and here’s what they said:
- Put relationships first
- Don’t make any significant decisions in the first 90 days
- Identify the home run and knock it out of the park!
Great advice. Now I’m six months in. Time flies. So how did it go?
Put Relationships First
Absolutely essential. Coming into a new organization from the outside is never easy, especially in a leadership position. Those of us who lean toward the introverted side of the spectrum can get comfortable interacting only with the people who we see day to day. Yet our effectiveness requires a much larger reach.
I benefited from having on my 90 day agenda an expectation to spend time at every site building relationships with our staff. It was a relief to have our executive director prioritize relationships as I got started, and it made it easy to do from the outset. If your manager doesn’t do this — put it on the agenda!
Lesson learned: Keep prioritizing relationship building after 90 days. Once execution on a vision and plan came into the picture, it has been easy to get distracted by the seemingly urgent demands of work day and neglect the relationships that had been seeded early on. I need to continue to carve out time to meet with staff with whom I have little day to day interaction, but who help me understand how my team’s work contributes to the success of our entire organization.
Don’t Make Any Significant Decisions in the First 90 Days
Ha! This one was hard to stick to. As a former consultant, every conversation led to a set of potential actions. In order to try to be patient and get to know the organization before making major decisions, I created a running set of slides titled “Impact & Evaluation Overview.” Having this tool allowed me to actively and deeply listen without problem solving. I got to know the organization better before starting to shift course. The slides now archive my early thoughts related to vision, priorities, opportunities, and gaps. Now that I’m setting goals and priorities for next year, I have come back to these slides and found them to full of valuable insights for long range planning.
One of the most significant slides in the deck is based on an activity I did with my team in the first week. We used ecocycle mapping to reflect on the breadth of Impact & Evaluation activities across the organization. (FSG has a great guide to ecocycle mapping). We plotted activities written on post-its on our whiteboard to coincide with the four quadrants of the ecocycle framework. This helped us get aligned on activities to stay the course on during a busy season, which to migrate to other teams, and which to let go of.
Lesson Learned: Have a mindset of actively listening without jumping to problem solving, and take advantage of clear opportunities for value add when they emerge. I didn’t seek to disrupt our Impact & Evaluation efforts in the first 90 days; yet, I did make a major decision to pursue a partnership I believed would accelerate some of the internal conversations. This has helped create alignment and norms which will help us execute on a long-term plan evidence plan. Knowing when to act and when to wait is key to a successful start.
Identify the Home Run and Knock It Out of the Park!
When I started in my new position, I received a list of expectations for the first 90 days and a description of what success in my role would look like. There were about 20 items on the list ranging from maintaining a thriving team to building a data-informed culture. Some items were readily accomplished, while others were long-term, multi-year endeavors.
I had to separate what others expected me to focus on from what was in the best interest of our organization’s vision to deepen our impact and use data to improve our programs. For example, soon after I started, a colleague hinted at a possible home run saying half-jokingly, “Whatever you do, just don’t screw up the Annual Report to Stakeholders.”
But the truth is, focusing on our annual report early on would have been a mistake. It likely would have reinforced norms around the use of data that I was keen to evolve. Our department needed to shift from being a data unit focused on collecting and analyzing data for monitoring and external reporting to being a strategy-oriented team that collects and uses data to support continuous learning and ongoing program improvement.
My first order of business was to ensure that our systems, processes, and infrastructure for performance measurement and monitoring were strong — and to ensure the data reported is useful first and foremost to our program teams on the front lines of change.
Lesson learned: Hitting a home run may not be easy to identify or achieve when the goal is changing the way that people in an organization operate. I found it useful to check in regularly with others in the organization to keep a pulse on whether I was meeting or exceeding expectations, and how my work could improve. I still have time to learn whether I’ve hit a home run or not in the first year. And I’m hopeful the annual report will be better than ever!
