#6 📈 Onboarding
This week: ⏳ Getting the most out of your first ninety days, 🩺 diagnosing the situation, 🧠 accelerating learning and why I won't change the website this time.
Two weeks ago I was cramming to finish up a newsletter on 🔥 Burning Out when Olivia turned to me and said: "Hey, do you think maybe you should just give it another week?" It turns out my 'inspiration' to write about burnouts was my subconscious warning me that I was getting close. I took two weeks off, recharged my batteries, and I'm ready to conquer blindspots again!
Hitting the ground. Running.
Every time I join a new company, I get so excited to meet new people, learn new things, and make an impact. I invest a lot during the interview process - my on-site presentation tends to be a summary of my understanding of where the company is at and how someone in the role I'm applying for could support the company's growth objectives - so I usually have a clear idea of what I want to do in my first 90 days before I step foot in the door.
And that’s why Onboarding has been such a huge blindspot for me.
There are so many traps we can fall into during onboarding, it's hard to imagine that I may have been setting myself up for failure with some of the very first actions I’ve taken.
Onboarding is a such a complex Blindspot that almost everyone falls into one of these very familiar traps:
Coming into it with a preconceived notion about what my first wins will be.
Jumping on the first project that feel urgent, important & interesting.
Trying to implement my 'proven strategy'
Assuming what's expected of me and how success will be measured (i.e: not getting a Handshake.
Changing the website. Just kidding - but it's so common that I take that on as an onboarding project that Olivia has explicitly asked me not to change the website in the first six months this time.
I can confidently say that I've fallen into all of these traps, and looking back on my previous experiences, it's hard to imagine how blissfully unaware I was as I blundered myself into checkmate in the first few moves.
The reality is that changes I want to make were irrelevant, the first project is irrelevant, my proven strategy is irrelevant - the website too, as it turns out, is irrelevant. The impact is the same, and it doesn't hit you until 15-18 months down the road, when you've been branded:
If I come in and change everything, I get branded as a change agent. Change has a time and place, and eventually it won't be time for change anymore.
My early wins often come at the price of early blunders (move fast and break things, right?) - colleagues remember blunders more than they remember wins. Like days off, you need to build up a track record of wins before you can afford a blunder, otherwise you get branded a liability.
Because I fail to take the time to understand the history, I often toss out the baby with the bathwater, branding me as someone who doesn't listen or respect others (who put in place the history).
I want to hit the ground running, but what I end up doing is hitting the ground and sending everyone running.
📚 The First 90 Days
I had a few weeks to prepare for my new job - a luxury that I haven't afforded myself in the past - and a fellow leader recommended The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies For Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter. The book is exactly what it promises, but here are four takeaways I had from the book.
Breaks down areas of focus into types of knowledge - technical, cultural & political - as well as departments of activity - HR, finance, marketing, operations and R&D. Identify your natural preference to dive into certain areas and avoid others. This is helpful whether you're playing to your strengths (good for early wins) or looking to identify blindspots that could cause you to miss key insights early on (e.g: not getting familiar with the company culture before proposing a sweeping change).
The objective in the first 90 days, according to the book, is to reduce your 'time-to-value' - that is, the time it takes for you to deliver more value than you cost to the company. It provides a number of tactics, such as accelerating learning, achieving early wins & building your team.
Everyone goes through onboarding or "inboarding" (what they call internal mobility where you change scope, geo, or level) roughly every two years - be mindful of when your job scope shifts, what has shifted, and approach it with the same mindset as you would joining a new company.
When leaders go through their First 90 Days, their reports do as well. Share the 90-days plan you set for yourself with your team, get them onboarding themselves to having a new manager and you'll speak the same language.
🧰 Situations & Conversations
There are two new systems that I'm implementing this week and they are both straight out of the First 90 Days. They represent two broad areas where I previously lacked a consistent plan of action - assessing the state of things and getting on the same page as my N+1/N-1s.
⭐️ STARS model - assessing the situation
When coming into a new company or position, it is important to the get the lay of the land. The First 90 Days proposes breaking out your portfolio of accountability - teams, products, channels, or whatever you might otherwise consider to be a bucket of responsibility - and, for each, assessing what stage they are at:
Startup: getting something off the ground
Turnaround: saving something widely acknowledged to be in serious trouble.
Accelerated Growth: scaling up quickly
Realignment: getting something back on track that was previously successful but has lost steam as of late.
Sustaining Success: inheriting something that has a stellar record of accomplishment
Most portfolios are a mix - few people inherit pure Turnaround or pure Sustaining Success situations, and it's important to get a feel for which is which, as the challenges & opportunities, as well as the resources & support you'll need to negotiate from your boss are different depending on the situation.
As an example, in a Turnaround, the need for change is widely acknowledged and therefore sweeping changes can be put in quickly, whereas in a realignment you likely ned to convince everyone that change is necessary and make minor changes until everyone is bought in.
💬 Five Key Conversations
The book outlines five key conversations that I have seen phrased in different forms in other resources, but I found it particularly useful in that it applies both to the five conversations a leader should proactively seek to have with their boss as well as with their direct reports:
Situational diagnosis: hear in their own words what the current situation is. Share your understandings and seek to get clarity.
Expectations: with the situation clear, define the measurement of success and the time frame.
Style: share preferred communication methods and uncover the frequency, format and form that your working relationship will take.
Resources: negotiate the resources you'll need in order to meet the expectations (or renegotiate expectations - these two go hand-in-hand and can by cyclical until there is alignment).
Development: get/give feedback on performance and establish a roadmap for improvement to become what your company needs tomorrow.
🚦 Conquer Onboarding
🔴 Stop assuming past success factors will work in the new role.
🔴 Stop rushing to act before you've understood what's essential.
🟡 Continue to focus on a few key priorities that can give you quick wins with low risk of blunder.
🟡 Continue running ideas by key stakeholders and getting buy-in
🟡 Continue thinking ahead about what resources will be needed
🟡 Continue making decisions quickly with a bias for action
🟢 Start identifying what motivates you to understand where your attention is naturally drawn.
🟢 Start accelerating your learning by developing hypotheses and asking questions that will help you validate or challenge them.
🟢 Start assessing the state of various buckets of accountability using the STARS model