Your Crucial First Days As a New Hire - A 30/60/90 Plan

More than 25 million people have quit their jobs so far during 2021’s Great Resignation, and the snowball job market keeps on gathering more “sayonaras” in a giant game of musical chairs. Which, when you look at it another way, means 25 million new hires undergoing a Great Onboarding, all at once.

Chances are that you’re either one of the new hires, you’re related to one of them or you’re working with one of them (or all of the above). There’s a heck of a lot of “hit the ground running” going on right now, and many folks are diving in to new roles without a clear onboarding plan or a take-charge roadmap.

If you just started in a new role, you have an incredible opportunity in front of you if you’re interested in making your mark in a short amount of time. In a November 2021 Harvard Business Review article about getting up to speed quickly in a new role, the authors observe:

In our collective study and analysis of networks, collaboration, and transitions in organizations, we noticed that 10% to 15% of movers became well-connected in a quarter to a third of the usual time, even if they started with few or no contacts, and were reaping the benefits: rapid productivity, innovation, higher engagement, and lower risk of departure.

Presidents are judged by their first 100 days in office, but you may actually get less time than that to set the tone for your tenure at a company. During this time, managers listen more receptively to ideas you bring to the table, as they’re giving more stock to what you bring from the outside.

I frequently hear new hires say “I’ll take the first 30 days to listen” – which is fair, of course you should listen – but that’s actually a laid-back, reactive approach. What if you can come into the new job ready to take bold, creative action right out of the gate, and establish a reputation as a collaborative, thoughtful, “pinch us that we landed this person” kind of hire?

Contrast the new hire window with a year into the job, where you’re seen in a “lane” that might not allow for as much ingenuity and change. This first 90-day time frame is short, but it offers a unique opportunity to enact career-defining personal brand-building that may not come again.

Why You Should Absolutely Speak Up Right Now

When you’re new, you hold the possibility and promise of recombinant innovation, which is to say you have the combined benefit of the experience of every role you’ve ever held, in every business model you’ve ever operated in, across every industry in which you’ve ever been employed. Unlike people who’ve been in-house longer, you don’t have a “this-is-how-we-do-things-here” mindset because you simply don’t know how they’re done yet. While that may seem stressful, you can—and should—use it to your benefit.

You may have had as many as three or more interviews before you received your job offer, which formed the early part of your “listening tour.” You got an audience that gave you valuable insight - information that most employees don’t regularly get - about the strategic decisions in front of your management team, your boss’s biggest problem right now and the biggest impact you need to make. While you may not have the data you need yet, you have the problem, and it’s up to you to form a hypothesis about where to go from here.

As you get up to speed, your fresh eyes will notice things that more experienced hires don’t, because they’ve become accustomed to workarounds, clunky process, gaps in information and inefficiencies. If, as a new hire, you find yourself missing a big piece of information, others will miss it, too! Your own experience as a new hire can serve as a ripe opportunity to document the information and workflow and design something to better support your coworkers and customers.

Gather Intel Like a Boss

You’ll never have more leeway to meet with a wide variety of stakeholders for open-ended conversations than when you’re new to the organization. Although on the face of things, these early chats may seem like casual getting-to-know-you meetups, you’ll want to come extra prepared to glean critical information that can help spur you to action. I have some thoughts here on how you can Own Your Own Onboarding, but in short, try to learn:

·     The current state of and pain points within the organization, teams, processes, workflows, skillsets, projects, expected deliverables, etc.

·     Every piece that’s documented – and what isn’t yet documented - about projects and opportunities that could benefit from your leadership.

·     The goals and values of leadership, your peers in the office, as well as customers and clients.

·     The data that exists within the organization, both the KPIs against which you’ll be measured and data sources that could be more effectively leveraged. Don’t underestimate the role of data in driving decision-making and allocating organizational power.

·     External and industry trends that are affecting your company, your market, or your customers.

·     Every single person you meet’s pet initiative or key metric, so that you can find ways to add value to them as soon as possible.

As you meet with people across the organization, you will find that in addition to the official information they provide, there are hidden agendas and unexpected people who really hold the influence. If you can keep a first-90-day journal of key people, projects and data, you’ll have a rich treasure-trove of information that you can mine for months and years to come. The ultimate goal here is Create vs Consume - you need to quickly consume information but not sit on it – the faster you become a creator, the better.

Create Your Killer 90-day Plan

The 90-day mark has long been ingrained in organizational culture. Earlier in your career, it may have meant the end of your probation or training period, but most companies have moved away from that model. Now it’s the point by which people have made up their minds about your potential, and whether they’ll listen when you suggest something, or not.

Some companies will ask you either in the interview process or in week one if you’ll make a 30/60/90-day plan, but I suggest still making one even if they don’t. And rather than keep it under wraps, it will showcase your initiative if you proactively schedule presentations or check-ins at the 30-, 60-, and 90-day marks, so management knows to expect your ideas.

At 30 days

This first check-in is a wonderful time to present the data streams you’ve identified that matter for your organization. Metrics, workflows, tech stacks – what big-picture map can you gather and capture in a Miro board or PowerPoint deck? Can you take, or make, a workflow for your group or role that shows the pain points you’ve identified so far (without pointing fingers, of course)?

Once you start talking about pain points, your boss may ask you, “So, what do you have in mind?” You’ll need to be ready to counter with some follow-on strategic questions that need to be explored before recommending a specific solution. Behind the scenes, you can always prepare for this question by conducting research both internally and externally—call on your industry peers, consult conference tracks, and talk to clients if you can —to determine best practices outside of your company to inform the next step in your plan. At this stage, however, you’re mostly focused on data capture, pain point identification, and getting buy-in to look at the problem more closely.

Additionally, you’ll begin to win hearts and minds if by the 30 day mark you’ve delivered a few “quick wins” to your team. In your 30-day recap, make sure to mention those to your boss, and ask for feedback about other areas that the boss would like to see improved.

At 60 days

Here, you come back around to your boss with your “deep dive” results about the areas you’re eyeing for transformation, along with a suggested framework for the improvements. You’ll want to strike a delicate balance of communicating the urgency of the deficiencies without criticizing the work that was done before you. Now is the time to emphasize those external best practices that you’ve been researching on the side. Since you’re just came in from the outside, you have some authority to “lift and shift” great ideas and best practices from competitors or even other industries and apply them to your own situation.

Also, at 60 days, you’ll get huge brownie points for some significant improvement in an important department metric (for example, a KPI such as time-to-fill). Since you – hopefully – started focusing on the department metrics walking in, you can focus your efforts on finding the single KPI that you have the best chance of influencing within a 60-day period. This midpoint read-out gives you the opportunity to show you’re an impact player, right out of the gate.

At 90 days

Here’s where you walk your boss through your role (and your team’s function, if you have a team) with an expert eye, as if you’re a consultant. By now you’ve been slowly teeing up your reputation as an innovator by taking your boss through the current-state workflow, the future-state possibility, all with a focus on metrics that inform success for your team. You’ve identified areas of business process improvement and have gotten initial buy-in for the solution. What’s left? Now's the time to make the official ask that you take on one or more of the improvement initiatives under the tutelage of your boss, for the benefit of the whole team.

In this meeting – or series of meetings – you can walk your boss through your entire suggestion with the data, problem, and solution, incorporating as many stakeholders’ interests as you can. Inspire the group to consider where the team or company could go from here and tee up a future pitch for the exact resources you may need. (See this article for best practices on how to pitch transformational initiatives.)

One Note of Caution

Often, people hold back their opinions a bit in the first 90 days out of fear. Some of that fear may stem from impostor syndrome, or PTSD from a micro-managing prior boss, and may not serve you well in this new environment. Some of that fear, however, is well-justified: You don't want to come across as the annoying new hire, entering with guns blazing and criticizing everyone within the first few weeks. You can't be seen as throwing anyone under the bus, nor can you say "my last company used to do X" more than once or twice, or folks may want to tell you to head back in that direction.

Therefore, your tone needs to feel supportive, curious, and professional at all times, and you'll need to walk with caution through the minefield of key players, politics and your boss's true management style and agenda. You'll need to balance getting your day job done with alacrity while also thinking about how you can add value on top of what's expected of you. You can absolutely find a way to be a change agent, diplomatically and collaboratively.

Take Hold of Your First 90 Days

You have a choice: You can focus on “getting up to speed,” which means by definition that you’re aiming for average performance to your peers, or you can focus on “setting the pace.” Go with the flow and you will almost certainly spend your time serving someone else’s vision, but hit the ground running with a 90-day plan and you will find yourself with many more opportunities ahead at this employer. These precious first 90 days on the job are your best opportunity to form your reputation at a company, set your own projects, and pave the way for future growth and promotion.

Your new leaders have made a major financial and resource commitment to hiring you, an investment that would be difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to reverse. Their hopes that this role will bring about meaningful change are riding on you.

In the first 90 days, you have their full attention. What will you do with it?