Joining a new company as a Manager? Simple Tips for success
Simple tips for getting started as a Manager in a new company.
When you join a new company in management role, there will be eagerness to prove you are good. This pressure makes some managers go in wrong direction. This in-turn leads to “low confidence” from peers and senior management.
In my opinion, the reason for not having a good start is when manager attempt for a big win in an unknown eco-system and culture.
Understanding how the new company operates and how you can align is more important rather than showing that you can make a dent. Sometimes completing simple tasks and activities itself could result in starting strong.
In this blog, I will provide few tips which will help you to get started by understanding the eco system and focus areas for gaining trust and confidence for yourself and from others.
Preparation
First step is to prepare yourself for joining a new company. Don’t become restless and pressurised for doing great things from day 1.
Have an open mind about the team and the organisation culture. Don’t make any assumptions.
Before joining the new company, have a casual meeting with your supervisor or manager to know more about the following.
- Culture about the company and team
This will help you to get a fair idea of the culture and how you can align to that kind of a culture. - Technologies that are used by the team
This will help you to understand and familiarise with the tools and technologies used by the team. If you don’t know something, reading introductory materials available in internet will help you. - Some information about a typical day
When your manager talks about a typical day in the team, it will give an idea of how things could be working and are there any adjustments you might have to do - number of meetings or multiple timezones etc.
With above preparation, you can mentally be prepared for what come next.
Tips
Here are the tips that you can consider.
▸ Agree on 30–60–90 day plan
It is important to agree on a plan for 30–60–90 days. This will clearly help you to understand where to focus.
By structuring the onboarding focus areas in the form of milestones, will help to clear the path way to success.
Some companies do this by default, in case the company you are joining, does not have this, create your own in collaboration with your manager.
▸ Listen more and ask questions
Don’t try to prove existing approach or design or implementation is incorrect, it will lead to conflict.
The existing things may be wrong, but in a particular situation and with available information, it would have made sense. So ask question about the situation that was created in the past.
Collect information by listening more, so that you can build a fair idea of the situation on the ground or about team members thought process or the experience levels of the team.
This information can be presented to your manager as possible improvement areas. If there is acknowledgement to your observations, then it is a win.
▸ Collect reading or recorded material
Create your own collection of all the reading and recorded material. This will help you to organise the information and also track completion.
If you see the reading and recorded material are all scattered and each one of them are giving some link to read, then centralising it at one place will help the next one joining.
This is another win - you have suddenly created a central knowledge base which can used by anybody who is new to the company.
Note: Try to filter the information that you collect - not all information may be needed. This will avoid you diving in to a sea of information overload.
▸ 1on1 meetings
Schedule few meetings with your peer managers, team members. This is an important step to build the rapport.
The topics you should touch upon are,
- What is their role in the team?
- What is their view on the team?
- What is their 1 biggest strength?
- What is their 1 biggest problem?
During these 1on1s, don’t brag about your experience or anything like that. These meetings should be used purely for building rapport.
The information about strengths and problems will give you a feel of the ground reality.
You should document all the strengths and problems that you hear and summarise to your manager. Use the current strengths and problems to identify long term goals with your manager. Another win.
Conclusion
The above tips will help you to build a strong foundation to get started by structuring information, centralising information, observing patterns and agreeing on immediate focus areas.
When you are getting started in a new company, it is important to build a strong foundation and rapport with the existing members.
Instead of bragging about your expertise on technology, listen and understand the history. This will help you visualise of how it was in the past.
By capturing and presenting information will open up opportunities to build confidence among others and helps you to validate your understanding.
This will in-turn helps you to go in the right direction leading to a successful onboarding.
Happy management!
