How To Nail Your First 90 Days
The first 90 days in a new job are critical for your future success. This applies to jobs at new companies as well as if you’re promoted to a new job in your existing company. First impressions last, and many people will be watching you. They’ll be trying to understand how you’re coping in the new job, if you’ll you’ll improve the team, and if you’ll be a good colleague. That first impression is an opportunity to position yourself as a top performer, and immediately set yourself on the path to promotions and raises. But most people let that opportunity pass them by.
The new employee is usually eager to prove herself immediately. She bounces between meetings looking for things to do. She says yes to every task and does it diligently. She does her best to make sure that the wheels are spinning as quickly as possible, as soon as possible. In the end, most employees who take this approach to prove that they are top performers only achieve the opposite. They get perceived as average performers and the new job becomes just another uphill battle against that perception.
If you’re about to start a new job, keep reading! In this article, we’ll go through the 5 things you should do to make your first 90 days a resounding success.
1. Reflect
We all have some behaviors that aren’t serving us and that we’d like to change. But change can be difficult to achieve when we’re a year or two into a job. Our colleagues’ expectations and perceptions of us are settled, and they result in relationship dynamics that keep playing out like a movie we’ve seen 10 times before.
Starting a new job is an opportunity to reinvent yourself. You’ll get a natural break from the person you used to be in your old job. This is true even when you’re promoted to a new job in the same company because your colleagues will view you with fresh eyes. Which means that this is the time to reflect on the behaviors you want to change and create a plan for how to do it.
Ask yourself if there are any limiting behaviors that you’re struggling with! Think about the times you’ve experienced stress, friction, or discomfort in your last job and try to pinpoint what you could have done differently in those situations. But also, don’t forget to reflect on the behaviors that have contributed to your successes and fill you with energy. There are good reasons why you landed that new job or promotion, right? Your new job isn’t just a chance to fix what isn’t working. It’s also a chance to up-level by emphasizing your strengths more clearly.
2. Learn
Starting a new job gives you the luxury of learning, and you should grab it! No one is expecting you to hit the ground running and be productive on day one, least of all your new manager. On the contrary, coming into a new job with a learning mindset will get you more trust and goodwill from your colleagues. At some point in our careers, most of us have experienced a new person joining the team, thinking that they have the solution to every problem on day 1. It rarely ends well so don’t be that person!
Instead, treat your first 30 days as your learning phase. Use this time to focus on 3 things. Firstly, make sure you understand how the company or organization creates value. Find out how it generates money and what the most important costs are. Secondly, learn about the culture. How things get done is often as important as what gets done. So make sure you understand how people interact with each other, how decisions are made, and who the formal and informal leaders are. Thirdly, identify the key initiatives. It’s not enough to be a hard and reliable worker to be successful in your career. You also need to work on the things that matter to the company or organization.
Once you’re through your learning phase, it’s time to move on to the planning phase.
3. Plan
Once you know what makes the company tick and how your new job fits into that, it’s time to plan how you can have the biggest impact possible. This should be a big focus for you during days 30-60. During this time, your goal should be to identify projects and initiatives that are important to the company, come up with a plan for how you can contribute, and get buy-in from your manager.
To be super clear - this is your responsibility! The reason why so many people fail their first 90 days is that they are reactive and wait for others to tell them what to do. However, most companies don’t have structured onboarding processes. New employees end up bouncing between introductory meetings where each person they talk to has an opinion or a suggestion for what they should work on. So they end up with busywork that’s not meaningful.
By taking ownership of this process, you’ll be able to work on important initiatives from the beginning, put yourself on the path to success, and avoid getting caught up in busywork.
4. Execute
The final 45 days of your first 90-day period should be primarily about execution. While learning and planning should still be a natural part of your day-to-day, you should be spending most of your time getting stuff done.
At this point, you make sure that you’re prioritizing the right things. If you’ve done your planning, you should have a backlog of initiatives that are all important to the company. But in order to really set yourself apart as a top performer, you should prioritize those that will get you some quick wins before your first 90 days are up.
Every hiring manager wants their new employees to become productive as quickly as possible. For many people, it takes upwards of 5-6 months before they are producing outcomes that are meaningful to the company. If you can do it in less than 90 days, you’ll stand out.
5. Communicate
If you’ve done steps 1-4, you will have done enough to ensure a good onboarding for yourself. You’ll likely be good at your job, and that’s important. But if your goal is to position yourself as a top performer, it won’t be enough. As you start racking up those quick wins, you need to communicate them! In the end, it doesn’t matter what you do if no one knows about it, right?
If you’ve managed your learning phase the right way, you will have a clear sense of who your most important colleagues and peers are. Setting up recurring 1:1 meetings with them will give you an opportunity to keep them in the loop on your progress and outcomes. It’s also good practice to set up a first 90 days review with your manager to really drive home what you’ve achieved during your onboarding.
If you’re about to start a new job and need support, book a free 30-minute call with us to explore how we can be of help.