Onboarding: The first 90 days of leadership

All new members of an organization should start with proper onboarding. Whether that is self-driven or in a highly organized format from your manager and organization, we always need to begin somewhere to ensure we are set up for success.

A 30–60–90 day plan is great because: 1) you have a guideline on what to target and clarity on what to deliver as output; 2) you have focus and do not waste time on unimportant things or goals that do not necessarily align with the organization’s vision; and 3) you know what the expectations are so you can become valuable and impactful as soon as possible.

Note that it doesn’t always have to be 30–60–90 days. Sometimes, the first phase might last longer for 2 to 3 months and you don’t get to the last phase until after 6 months. Having said that, below are what I think should be the important phases that can serve as guidance for onboarding to be successful.

Learning

The first 30 days should be dedicated more to understanding than rushing through execution right away. You don’t want a new leader to change tools and introduce processes right away without identifying what is currently working or being familiar with in-progress initiatives that are in conflict with those changes; Nor, do you want an individual contributor starting new projects with zero context on what the customers want, much less, who the customers are. While some practices like pushing code to production within their first for new software engineers is great, the goal should not be to actively contribute with a high-risk delivery but more so to understand the build and release processes, as well as how cross-functional work is being done with stakeholder partners.

In this phase, it would be very smart to build the relationships with your stakeholder partners by meeting up with them and getting curious as to what their needs are and how you can work effectively together. You would also benefit from agreeing on a set of expectations both with your manager and people you lead.

A reasonable output for this phase is a report on the “current state of the world”. This, not only helps your collaborators see where else they can help you gain a better understanding, it might also help them see the gaps that only a newcomer or someone with less context would be able to observe.

Productivity

The next phase should be dedicated to meaningful contributions. Now that you have figured out what works, you can now introduce improvements so they can work better! In the same vein, after figuring out the gaps and understanding who your customers are, you can now begin to setup processes and workflows that reduce friction (whether that be in providing higher quality and smoother deliveries, or in the delivery of unparalleled customer satisfaction).

A reasonable output for this phase might be one or more of the following: 1) initial development plan / career growth plan for the people you lead; 2) participation in the hiring and onboarding process; 3) assessment reports on operational excellence (including but not limited to cadence and quality of deliveries); 4) documentation regarding project progress, workload distribution and budgeting/resourcing.

Ownership

The third phase of onboarding is dedicated to accountability. With a bit of experience in actually contributing and finding out how different organizations are working together, you are now ready to scale those efforts and have your skin in the game. Instead of just shadowing or conducting interviews, what improvements should be made? Should we standardize the questions and scoring, as well as, putting efforts towards encouraging a more diverse hiring pool? Do we have proper communication protocols for tackling dependencies between teams and ensuring progress for cross-functional work? What are the team’s measures of success and what are you directly and indirectly responsible for?

Beyond the 90 days / initial onboarding

While it is certainly not the final step and this work will continue for several more years, you know you are ready to grow out of the onboarding phase when you start thinking of strategy and innovation. You will start thinking about multi-quarter objectives and key results and multi-year initiatives.

…and that is why focusing on the three phases above should be top priority on your first few months! What else do you think we might have missed?

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Alfred Lotho is an Engineering Manager with over 15 years of software development experience. You can checkout his background at https://www.linkedin.com/in/alfredlotho/ and book a mentorship session with him at https://app.upnotch.com/profile/3jIGIkw0dre3nd64AzMc