The Biggest Secret to Starting a New Position
When you get a new job and step into a new position, one of the greatest temptations is to feel the need to prove yourself. It can be so easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you need to prove to everyone around you why you were chosen for the position. And while you absolutely should feel confident in your new role because they did choose you for it, there is also another crucial element to your initial and long-term success. In fact, there are three things you can do to set not only yourself up for success, but also set up those around you for success, and create the kind of culture you hope to establish in your new role.
#1 PLAY THE NEWBIE CARD
Unless you’re starting a startup, one of the things you need to do in your new role is to learn the ins and outs of the current systems being used, the values in use, and politics at play. One of the best ways to find out “how things are done around here” is to play the newbie card. Use your new position as an open door to set up a time to meet with the people you work with to find out how they currently do things. While you may feel like you already know how things are done, and you can’t wait to change them, if you just barge in and start changing things, you are not going to get buy-in from those who you need to actually make the changes. In fact, you’re setting yourself up for an uphill struggle when it comes to not only implementing changes, but also to developing trust with people, which is essential for short and long-term success.
When we’re excited about our new ideas and the changes we want to make to genuinely make things better THE thing we have to remember is that CHANGE IS HARD. It doesn’t mean we don’t do it, of course we need to engage in change, it’s how things get better. But if you don’t first convince people that you genuinely want to serve them and make their lives, and work, better before you start implementing changes, you’re going to create a lot of hard work for yourself. And frustrate people in the process. So, play the newbie card and find out everything you can from the people you are now working with in your new position. And do it right away—the first week, if possible. Even if you’re at the same organization, but in a new position, your relationship with most people has changed in some capacity. So use your new position to find out how everything works from their perspective, not yours.
#2 ASK LOTS OF QUESTIONS
While you’re playing the newbie card and meeting with people, ask lots of questions. My dad was one of those people who knew something about everything. I’m not kidding, there wasn’t a topic he couldn’t talk to you about. And yet, one of the things my dad loved to do was ask lots of questions. Honestly, it’s probably why he knew so much about everything. If we were working on a house project and my dad knew the part we needed to pick up at the hardware store, he would still walk into the store and ask one of the people working there what they thought he should do. Why did my dad do that? Because he wanted to validate his ideas or learn something new. He never wanted to assume he knew the right answer, even if he was 99.99% sure he did.
When we find ourselves in new positions, asking lots of questions helps us validate our ideas about the changes we hope to implement and discover our blind spots. Whenever we’re in a new position there will be things that we didn’t realize we didn’t know or understand. There’s a design process activity that uses a square divided into 4 quadrants with the four labels:
- Things we know we know,
- Things we know we don’t know,
- Things we don’t know that we know, and
- Things we don’t know that we don’t know.
Asking lots of questions helps us validate what we think we know and discover our blind spots: the things we don’t know that we don’t know.
#3 REMAIN TEACHABLE
Perhaps the third most important thing you can do to set yourself up, and those around you, for success is to remain teachable. Ideally, by playing the newbie card right away and asking lots of questions, you will realize that there were actually things you weren’t aware of coming into your new position. Certain politics at play, systems being used because that’s just the way things have always done, or even values in use that don’t actually reflect the culture you hope to foster. And in the process of learning that there are things we didn’t know we didn’t know, we better appreciate the value of remaining teachabe long after our newbie status has expired. Studies show that organizational cultures that value learning are the best prepared for engaging in innovation when it’s needed. So, if you remain teachable, the likelihood that you’ll foster the value of teachability to those in around you increases significantly!
It’s not that you can’t change things when you find yourself in a new position and change is desperately needed. It’s that you’ll have the greatest success doing so when you genuinely engage those around to be part of the process. The best ways to do this are to play that newbie card, ask lots of questions, and remain teachable going forward. I was just talking with my husband the other day about his favorite manager and he said it was the manager who had just stepped into his first management position (a position my husband also happened to apply for…so not necessarily the first person you’d expect him to say). What made this manager his favorite to work for? He asked lots of questions, he wanted to learn as much as he could about the department, and he wanted to make sure everyone was part of the process as they moved forward with necessary adjustments.
So be confident in that new role, you got it for a reason! Tap into your humility and learn as much as you can from those around you! Don’t get stuck trying to learn everything, but you do need to figure out your blindspots! And get ready to succeed with your new team long into the future!