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 when you switch roles in your existing company. First impressions last, and many people will be watching you. They’ll try to understand what kind of performance they can expect from you, how 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 set yourself up for continuous advancement. In other words, to create a platform for long-term success. 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 get the wheels spinning as quickly as possible, as soon as possible. In the end, most employees who take this approach only cement their junior performance. 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 behaviors that aren’t serving us and that we’d like to change. But change can be difficult to achieve when we’re a couple of years into a job. Our colleagues’ expectations and perceptions of us are settled and 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 changing to a new job in the same company because your colleagues will view you with fresh eyes. That’s why 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 why you reacted the way you did in those situations. But also, don’t forget to reflect on the behaviors that have contributed to your successes. There are good reasons why you landed that new job! Your first 90 days aren’t just a chance to fix what isn’t working. It’s also a chance to uplevel 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 expects you to hit the ground running and be productive on day one, least of all your new manager. So take ownership of your onboarding and get the buy-in and support you need from your new boss.
You should treat your first 30 days as your learning phase and schedule 1:1s with all your new stakeholders. Use this time to focus on 3 things.
Firstly, make sure you understand your new company’s strategic objectives. Find out how the different functions and teams - especially yours! - are expected to contribute to those objectives.
Secondly, learn about the culture. How things get done is often as important as what gets done and adapting to those cultural norms will help you grow your executive presence faster. 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 your strategic outcomes. You don’t want to be seen as just another reliable Workhorse. Strategic outcomes are deliverables you can produce on your level that will have a direct impact on the company achieving its strategic objectives. This is the difference between junior performance and executive performance.
In parallel with your learning phase, you’ll ease into your new tasks with “ease being the operative word. No one gets to spend a full month only learning but make sure you don’t overcommit and end up in a situation where you deprioritize the learning.
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 30-45. During this time, your goal should be to break down the strategic outcomes you’ve identified into smaller initiatives, come up with a plan for delivering them, and get buy-in from your manager.
To be super clear - you need to own this process! Many people fail in their first 90 days because they are reactive and wait for their managers to tell them what to do. Most companies don’t have structured onboarding processes. So you should bring the structure. This will ensure that you don’t end up bouncing between stakeholder meetings, reacting to opinions on what you should do, and getting stuck in busywork.
By taking ownership, you’ll demonstrate executive performance from the beginning and establish a reputation as someone with a strategic mindset.
4. Execute
The final 45 days of your first 90-day period should be all about execution. While learning and planning should still be a natural part of your day-to-day, you should spend 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 strategically important to the company. But to really set yourself apart as an employee with executive performance, you should prioritize those that will get you 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 do it in less than 90 days, you’ll stand out as a great hire.
5. Communicate
If you’ve done steps 1-4, you will have done enough to ensure a good onboarding for yourself. You’ll be seen as someone who is capable of executive performance, and that’s very important. But if your goal is to use your first 90 days to create a platform for long-term success, you shouldn’t stop there.
You should start your first 90 days with a comprehensive communication plan to lay the foundations of how your new colleagues will perceive you - i.e. your executive presence.
During your learning phase, as you’re getting to know your new colleagues and having 1:1 with your stakeholders, you should have a clear idea of how to present your background and experience. The key thing to avoid is being too task and responsibility-oriented. Instead, identify strategic outcomes you’ve delivered in previous jobs and practice how to talk about them while focusing specifically on your contributions as an expert and a leader.
As you start racking up your quick wins, you need to communicate those too! In the end, it doesn’t matter what you do if no one is aware of it.
And as you exit your first 90 days, make sure to do two important things.
Firstly, set up a first 90 days review with your manager to really drive home what you’ve achieved during your onboarding and get their feedback.
Secondly, set up recurring 1:1s with your key stakeholders. If you’ve done your learning phase the right way, you will have gotten to know them already. Those relationships will be important for your ability to continue delivering strategic outcomes and creating awareness that will be helpful when it’s time for promotions and raises.
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.