The 3 Things Leaders Miss When They Start a New Job
Drinking from the firehose of onboarding can distract you from what matters most.
Natalie was starting a job and excited to make impact as quickly as possible.
The pressure was also very real. She had been laid off from her last role and even though she had taken the time to heal from the experience, she still had a small chip on her shoulder that would occasionally grow and weigh her down.
Before she started, Natalie created an onboarding plan for herself with key milestones. She was a human-centered expert operator. She had great confidence that she would quickly learn the in’s and out’s of the organization, culturally, operationally, and strategically.
What caught her off guard was how much information she had to take in and how quickly she was drawn into the minutiae of each day.
While she didn’t make any catastrophic decisions, she unconsciously let the chip on her shoulder grow and she started to prioritize short-term quick wins over more strategic actions.
Sadly, Natalie had done what many experienced leaders do, she had let herself get distracted by the firehose of information that was thrust upon her and lost her focus on discovering what would have had a far greater impact.
Onboarding is a notoriously stressful period for leaders.
I don’t blame Natalie for her choices. But you can learn from them and avoid the pitfalls she made.
As a new leader, you may be tempted to seek out quick wins or meet everyone in the organization. There is value in both, but you will be losing the forest for the trees. Overwhelming yourself with information is a choice and often the trade-off is not understanding what is most strategic and what will move the needle the most.
Leaders aren’t hired to simply execute.
Your highest value is in validating if the current approach is the best one for the goals and the context of the organization. Where the organization is headed when you join might be exactly the right course, but you do yourself and the organization a disservice if you don’t investigate and dig deeper to determine if you believe this to be true.
Even in a hustle culture where speed is highly rewarded, it matters less how fast you work than whether you are working on the highest value initiatives.
So do yourself and your new team a favor. Don’t just jump in. Be selective and thoughtful about what will make the biggest difference.
In my experience, the greatest oversight any new leader and onboarding team makes is trying to cram in everything and the kitchen sink into onboarding, but not going deep enough on what is actually most important.
I admit, it difficult to take in and process too much information, but your goal as a new leader is to arm yourself with information that enables you to be as strategic as possible as soon as possible — not to take anything and everything in.
When you try to take too much in, what matters most gets lost and you don’t have the ability to delve as deeply into those most critical matters.
Here’s where you should focus before you get distracted by anything else:
The strategic direction and why
How the organization makes money
The organization’s decision-making process and players
Let’s take a look at each one and why they matter.
1. The strategic direction of the organization and why the leadership chose it gives you guideposts and critical signals.
As a senior leader, you likely didn’t take the job without discussing the strategy of the organization during the interview process.
But there is only so much you can decipher without being a part of the team. Now that you’re there, you can go much deeper and ask even more challenging questions.
“Why did we choose to pivot when we only had 3 months of data to draw upon?”
“When was the last time we did a landscape analysis?”
“If our top customers are asking for x, why are we choosing to develop y?”
If you are a great operator, you might have a common Achilles heel: zooming in too quickly on execution and driving forward on specific tasks.
Your early days on the job are the best time to pause and ask about where you are headed as an organization and why — before you go too far down rabbit holes. Don’t let your insecurity and need to prove yourself by delivering short-term value cause you to lose your focus on creating long-term strategic success.
The strategy you inherit might be exactly the right path forward or at least the best choice in the short-term. And it is only through thoughtful discovery, you might identify soft spots and potential weak points or key milestones that you will want to monitor and use to help address.
If you feel in alignment with the strategy, understanding it more deeply means that you will be able to work more seamlessly across the organization. You’ll make faster decisions and stay in closer alignment across functions.
If you find that the strategy needs adjustment, it might feel daunting to address this when you are still onboarding. But unless you are OK with heading down a path that you believe won’t work, you need to raise your thoughts now.
It’s far better to make a pivot or adjustment as you realize it’s needed than it is to wait until after you have missed your targets and can only look back and wish you had acted differently.
Remember, they didn’t hire you to be a good soldier. They hired you to be a leader. And if that isn’t what they actually want (or what you want), then you should investigate if the job is really the right role for you.
2. How the organization makes money sets the drumbeat for the entire team.
I can’t tell you how many leaders I’ve worked with who have ignored the critical path of how the organization makes money. This is how any organization stays afloat. Perhaps more optimistically, this is how you self-fund an organization and create maximum freedom to experiment, innovate, and takes.
Ignoring how this works is almost too ridiculous to contemplate.
But it happens all the time.
Why?
Why does anyone not do the right thing?
Fear and ego.
Leaders don’t want to look stupid and ask basic questions. Leaders make assumptions because they think their years of experience mean that they know it all or at least much more than they actually do.
After you’ve been in an organization for some time, you might be able to cut corners and make assumptions, but in your early days, even if you’ve worked in the same type of business in the same industry many times over, don’t assume you know how your new organization functions.
When you make the wrong assumptions, you will inevitably make the wrong call and create disruptions that waste time and energy:
One leader misunderstood a pricing element only to realize later that they now have to pay the sales team 20% more than they had budgeted because they didn’t understand the rationale behind the original model.
Another leader changed the service delivery design without understanding what it takes to operationally make good on the promises they are selling clients. The result? Disappointed customers and stressed out internal teams because the new standard isn’t based in reality.
Perhaps the most unfortunate example was a leader not understanding what customers valued and where competitors were headed. Historical revenue growth was strong, but it had started to slow and churn had inched up. The change was almost imperceptible. But if had looked more closely, she would have seen the tea leaves. She could have shifted product strategy earlier in order to stay ahead of customer demand instead of falling behind and letting competitors take share.
In addition to making poor decisions, when you don’t understand your revenue engine, you won’t be able to effectively support and develop the teams who keep it running smoothly.
It might be that you don’t review requests in a timely enough fashion because you don’t understand the urgency. Or you might be swayed by one part of the organization more than another incorrectly and not properly weigh the inputs you are receiving. You need to know how it works so that you can ask the right questions to get to the best answers.
Lastly, there are many ways of driving organizational financial and cultural health, but one of the most effective is ensuring a strong flow of revenue. Investing in your understanding means that you will be equipped to make strategic decisions that have cross-functional impact.
3. The organization’s decision-making process and players determines it’s success.
How decisions come to be determines everything from how strategy is set to how budgets get allocated to how the organization is structured. This includes who has authority, what information is utilized, and how decisions get assessed and adjusted as needed.
Too often, leaders take this for granted.
But if you don’t know decisions are made, you won’t know how to guide your team or navigate the system. If the system isn’t optimal, you won’t know how to change it for the better.
You can’t change what you don’t understand.
What do you need to learn?
Examples include:
When do you make a proposal for a change and who do you make it to?
What do you need to prepare to make a strong case?
Who needs to be informed and consulted and who is the ultimate?decision-maker?
Why is the decision process the way it is?
What is the nature of the decision process:
Is the process ad hoc and inconsistent?
Is it rigid and rigorous?
Is it something in between?
Who drives the decision-making approach?
What impacts what approach is used?
As a new leader, you need to understand what the existing process looks like.
When leaders are not intentional about their decision-making approach, their teams are left guessing how to get buy-in, approvals, and help problem-solve.
The worst outcome? You waste your time and your team’s and you make decisions that are suboptimal.
Get clear on the existing decision-making process and players and you can not only expedite critical initiatives and workstreams, you might even be able to improve decision-making for the organization as a whole over time and generate better outcomes as a result.
Key Takeaways
For most leaders starting a new job, you’ll find opportunities abound to make an impact, to improve the organization. That’s why you were hired after all.
Just make sure you don’t sit passively during your onboarding and instead take control of the information that will come your way. Filter and prioritize so that you can focus on what matters most.
There might be multiple areas you need to investigate, but don’t lose sight of the 3 that I have found to be universally critical to leadership success and to ensure that you are not missing the big picture:
The strategic direction and why
How the organization makes money
The organization’s decision-making process and players
You were hired because of your strategic and operational prowess. Make sure you understand the lay of the land before you get too deep into taking action. Your team will appreciate it and you’ll generate far greater and lasting impact if you do.
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