Its been just over six months at my new role and wanted to share what my approach was. It can be extremely daunting when starting a new role within a new company or a new project with a new client. Developing and executing a game plan during the first 3-6 months in my opinion are critical in ensuring success. I identified 3 simple objectives, where the first 2 I believe can be applied in any situation, whilst the third should be bespoke to your personal environment.

 

Credibility

Being new and an outsider, amongst veteran team members and colleague, building a solid credibility is the first step to enable any hope of doing what you were hired to do. The pitfall is to steam ahead thinking you know what to do but quite easily damaging any sense of credibility you could have hoped to attain. The approach I took was simply; listen, learn, network and apply. Listening is one of those skills that sounds obvious but incredibly all to often overlooked. How can you hope to build respect if you don’t listen first? This then enables the learning phase, not just technical knowledge, but also culturally. Combining this with networking, truly not only enables a decent understanding of the business but critically, also the stakeholders involved. Armed with all this information, apply by acting upon it and to some extent with speed. This breeds a sense of passion as well as pulling the hidden expertise within you.

Deliver

The natural flow is to actually deliver. Do the job tasked of, hold that call, conduct that meeting, have those hard discussion, push the people you need to push, use the credibility you have built, sometimes you may need to eat the humble pie. Just get it done. Whether it is realised or not, many eyes and ears are focussed on you to deliver.

Bespoke

As stated, the third objective should be bespoke or personal to your growth and placement in the long term, start planting those seeds now, passive, start to build the framework. For me was to truly understand how the financials were derived for this company. A wise man once told me, “understand the financials, you understand the company!”

In addition, I had one overarching theme which I strive to adhere to. Following Amazon’s mentality – always Day 1, there is no Day 2. Day 1 you go that extra mile and you do what you need to do. Repeat. It’s a great ethos to have!

So what’s the next step? The same, why change. Follow the same process to ensure you set yourself something to keep you planted and in the game and towards the vision you have.  As always would love to hear your thoughts and experiences!