Starting Strong
3 weeks ago I embraced a new professional challenge.
Recency illusion, all I could see during the first week was articles and posts on how to act during your first days.
Prescribe notions of how to act are wrong. Nobody likes the guy who’s following a script in real life.
Starting strong is all about empathizing with the moment and the people you are getting to know. It’s about flow.
Starting in a new company is almost as sitting in a new poker table. Your experience will tell you the queues of how to act, you’ll be reading. Still, is all about reading the table and understanding how to act in accordance with the situation at hand.
Following a playbook will make you stiff, you’ll end up doing the wrong things. As in the poker example, you do all the strategies you read in a recent hype article. Do you think you’d be successful? Think again.
What actually works?
The right mix is flow+empathy+listening. Then taking decisions.
Like sitting in a new poker table, or going into a war zone for the first time. It is all about gathering information first and based on the urgency starting to act. (Why prescriptions don’t work, if it says do nothing in the first 4 weeks, you’d die in the battlefield.)
Do it the military-style. Understand the field, understand the dynamics, act as needed without a timeframe. But take this time to empathize with the company, with the struggles, with the people.
What works well for me:
1. Understand the key dynamics of the company: What are the more popular departments? How do colleagues mention your department? How do they perceive your role?
2. Work on positioning: I didn’t get this at first if they hire me the positioning should be there by default. Wrong. Work on ensuring they understand who you are and where you want to go. Build the notion of who you are and what’s your mission. Missionaries win.
3. Map what’s wrong: Good strategies start with real problems, followed by a coherent set of actions and policies. Start by mapping the problems you saw, it is a statement, and you have work to do from now on.
4. Be candid & Question: Do not sugarcoat things. Go deep on the root causes. This is the time for it.
The true advice here is doing it in a way where you are not fixed to anything. Rather, as in a military operation, you Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.
