Your New Role: How to Drive Alignment in 15 Days
This article is part of Dare Be's Leadership Handbook, a guide to help people lead with impact and heart
In our last article, we learned that 46% of new hires fail within their first nine months on the job. There, we focused on the hiring end, and how to bring on talent who will excel.
What if you’re not the hiring manager, but the new hire? How can you not just stay out of that unfortunate 46%, but go above and beyond in your new role?
Having experienced great and difficult transitions myself, coached many clients on their new roles, and done research on the topic, I’ve noticed that there are two common pitfalls people fall into: retreating into uncertainty, or attacking it with overconfidence.
Instead, I want you to get clarity on your first steps, avoid premature decision-making, maximise your learning, and build trust with your key stakeholders. Here’s how.
On managing the unknown
There is a great deal of tension between managing the uncertainty of a new role and your desire to add value and to appear in control.
Uncertainty can affect your confidence, and it’s best to recognize and accept that instead of trying to ignore it. Because once you do, you can put into place a few practices that will help.
First, lean on your strengths: list them (try this questionnaire) and make a conscious effort to use them every day. Here’s a guide to help you use your strengths.
Second, make time in your schedule for pauses and reflection. Use them to list 3 successes at the end of every day, no matter how small they appear to you.
Finally, frame this change as an opportunity to grow. Aim to maximise your learning, instead of hitting home runs right off the bat. In addition to the successes you list at the end of each day, write down at least one thing you’ve learned.
For more help on calming a busy mind and reducing stress, take a look at these articles:
Your 90-day plan
Here’s what your 90-day plan could look like.
1. Contract Stage (first 15 days)
Contract with your manager, team, and stakeholders
Success = everybody understands your mission and objectives, you understand theirs, and everybody knows what to do next
2. Inquire Stage (15-60 days)
Build trust with your team and stakeholders and collect information
Success = team and key stakeholders collaboratively sharing data and opinions. You know the important questions and what decisions to make.
3. Diagnose / Design Stage (61-90 days)
Set your long-term vision of success and objectives, as well as your short-term objectives - all of which should address the important questions brought up in the previous stages
Success = You have medium term goals aligned with stakeholders, a strategy to get there, your team is rowing together in the same direction, and you start making important decisions with the right information.
This process is inspired by the work of Peter Hawkins, a leadership and coaching expert.
In this newsletter, we’ll focus primarily on the Contract stage, as the first 15 days are by far the most important time in your new role and the one that people new in their role overlook.
Days 1-15: The Contract stage
Let’s jump into your first days on the job.
Day 1: Contracting with your manager
There are three goals to this part of the process:
Gain clarity on your mission, as well as your short term and long-term objectives
Establish how you want to work together and what you need from one another
Build mutual trust
First, ask your manager about their objectives, priorities, recent successes, and main challenges. Clarify together your mission and objectives.
Have a discussion about what each of you needs from the other. You should ask your manager about their needs (e.g. being informed as early as possible when there’s an issue), and share your own (e.g. being informed on how the business as a whole is performing).
Once you’re on the same page about your mission, objectives, and needs, tackle how you want to work together. Be thorough: how will you engage with each other and with what frequency? For instance you can decide to have weekly 1-1s and informal touch points via video calls along the way. What is the best way to share information with each other? Which decisions can you take independently, and which ones require your manager’s approval? Agree when you will review this mutual contract.
Finally, agree that you won’t be taking important decisions until you get to the Inquire and Diagnose phase. You and your manager should be aligned on what constitutes an important decision (e.g. people, strategy, significant process changes, or anything that is difficult to reverse).
Once you’ve discussed and reviewed all of the above, you should be able to exit the contracting phase with your manager with a 90-day plan you’re both aligned on, including milestones and clear metrics.
Days 2-15. Contracting with your team and key stakeholders
Once your 90-day plan is set, share it with your team and stakeholders.
Have 1-1s with your direct reports and key stakeholders, to build trust and agree on how to work together (not yet to collect data!). The meeting should be about them, not about you.
Keep the trust equation in mind: Trust = [Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy] x [Care for Others]. To build credibility, share your plan, and build reliability by referring to it and adjusting it as needed. It is difficult for many to develop Intimacy in a work environment. Share more about your personal life, what’s important to you. As shown in the article How to handle difficult conversations: try COIN (4 min), sharing your feelings builds intimacy too. Finally, show you care for others by first asking them about their goals and dreams, then helping to achieve them.
You will have to build on the different factors over time, and it starts with these initial 1-1s. Just like with your manager, you should agree on common short-term and long-term objectives, as well as how you want to work together to achieve them.
You’ll also need to manage expectations so that you will not be rushing important decisions. For example, some may be eagerly waiting for an investment decision or promotions in their team.
Once you have learned and sown the seeds for strong relationships with your manager, your direct reports and stakeholders, well done! You have accomplished the most important step in this process. The foundations are laid for a highly collaborative and co-creative space.
Inquiring, diagnosing, and onward
After the contracting phase, you are ready to move forward with data collection (Inquire), and later to create solutions (Diagnose & Design).
Here is a high-level summary of these phases, to help you understand what comes next. We may dive deeper into the Inquire and Diagnose & Design phases in later newsletters.
Inquire (days 16-60):
Approach this phase with pure curiosity, like an alien who’s just crash-landed in the office. You’re exploring a new land, not drawing immediate conclusions. Be a learner, not a knower.
Collect data and opinions from various sources: your manager, team, your team’s teams, etc.
Your goal is to identify the key questions that need answering, and to establish hypotheses that you will test as time goes on.
Diagnose & Design (days 61-90):
Here’s where you can draft your vision of success: where do you want to take this team?
Share the key questions and data you’ve uncovered in previous steps, and work collaboratively with your team to flesh out the vision.
Your goal is to move forward on days 90+ with full alignment on mission, values, short-term and long-term values, and the milestones to reach them.
These two last phases must take place after you have well and fully contracted with your managers and stakeholders.
Your team must know you, and you must know your team. Then, once everyone is in the same boat, you can all row together.