Be Interested: Thriving in Your New Role

🌟 Strategies for Success in a New Role 🌟

 Starting a new job or transitioning into a new role can be both exciting and challenging.

To thrive in your new position, embrace continuous learning and approach your role with curiosity.

* Be positive, take initiative, and celebrate small wins to build credibility.

* Focus on building strong relationships by actively listening to your colleagues and understanding their perspectives. Seek feedback and support to improve and grow.

* If you're a manager, understand the current situation, develop a learning plan, and establish clear alliances with stakeholders.

Embrace new challenges, build connections, and pave the way for long-term success!

#NewJob #CareerTips #SuccessStrategies

Book reference: The First 90 Days - https://thepracticingleader.com/first90days

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Transcript:

Using this as a source, please write a blog article about the same topic with the same breakdown of sections --

Welcome back Practicing Leaders. Today we'll talk about a new, exciting topic, which is about what do you do when you start a new job, where you take on a new role into transitioning out of an old job and transitioning into a new one. Today we'll talk about strategies that'll help you build positive relationships, as well as create positive sentiment with those you speak with and make the most of your new role.

I'm your host, Parul Bhargava. This is the Practicing Leader Podcast and let's discuss.

We will be covering four major topics. One of them is being new, the second is being positive and taking initiative. The third is building relationships and creating a positive sentiment. And then finally, what can you do to apply these things if you're a manager and as well as a leader. Let's go ahead and get started and talk about being new.

Because you're new. One of the things I could probably offer you is give yourself time to be able to learn all the new things you're about to discover. You don't quite know what you don't know yet. There's a tremendous amount of things to go learn. I think about it from a purely technical perspective and programming languages perspective.

Every single week, every single month, every single year, brand new technologies come out. There is no way for somebody to be able to learn all the things. Just like in medicine, just like in construction, just like in everywhere else, there's always something new to learn. Make sure that you're not walking into your new job or your new role and bringing in your previous experience with the bravado of, oh, I've seen this before.

So you then miss an opportunity to be able to learn something new. Walk in with your previous experience, but walk in curious. Now let's jump into being positive and taking initiative. Show excitement for your new role. This in this in itself will generate a positive impression for those that you meet.

While I get that your primary focus are gonna be the responsibles you've been given, as you become more comfortable in your role, look for opportunities and new points of view from those who've been there longer. This may give you an open, an opening to help people where they need help the most. Being able to offer that help will help you generate small wins.

This reminds me of a time where I, I went up to a colleague and I asked her, how can I help you? And her response was, you know what? I'm trying to figure out how to get my people promoted. I can't seem to make any progress in that. Could you go fix that for me? And to be honest, I think she was being flippant and just trying to get rid of me.

So I think she tried to get me this thing that she didn't think I, I'd be able to do. So I went and had a conversation with her manager and her manager, manager. We, I was peers with her manager, and I went and had a conversation about what do we believe the progression of careers ought to be? And I had a conversation with them about what do we think we should do in order to be able to help people grow, in order to build, to build themselves up, to be able to move into new and more exciting things over time.

It took about 30 to 45 minutes, but it removed the obstacle of, we didn't think that certain people should be promoted or certain disciplines should be promoted, and instead went into a conversation of who's ready and what kind of opportunities should we make available to them. When I brought this back to my colleague, she kinda looked to be dumbfounded because it had only been an hour, and the fundamental conversation I ended up having with her is, Now the now it's now the obstacles have been moved.

Now it's up to you and your team to be able to showcase why it's important, simply offering that single opportunity to be able to help somebody. One helped her be able to build out her team more effectively. But additionally, it started off a years long friendship with that individual to that continues to this day.

Let's jump into talking about how do you start building strong relationships and create positive sentiment with the people you're about to meet. If there's one piece of advice that I could offer you, and I don't know where I heard this, it's be interested more than interesting. Spend more time listening to people rather than spending time filling the air with you talking.

Taking the time to actively listen to what people have to say and what is important to them is gonna help you start building stronger relationships with the people you've just met. If you spend time talking about yourself and yourself only, you're not likely gonna build strong relationships in the long term.

What you want to do is take the time to be able to understand other people's perspectives about the challenges you're about to go take on, and then find out more about the role that you're joining and seeing if they have additional feedback they could provide you. Some great questions you could be asking are, what sessions do you do, do you have on what should be done?

Who else should I plan to meet? Are there any suggestions that you might have? And taking the time to hear more about where exactly they're coming from and 'cause you might hear an opportunity while you're having those conversations of a place where you might be able to offer assistance. While you, yourself may not be able to offer help directly, there may be somebody in your network who may be able to help them and make sure you're taking the time to broker an an introduction so that way they can get to know that other individual to help build connections for them as well.

Since you're new, you probably also wanna take a time to ask a couple other direct questions of the individual you're speaking with. Like, how long have you been here? What do you wish you had known when you'd started? What do you enjoy most about your job? What are you currently working on? Or even things like.

What excites you most about the future of the organization? Trying to get a, a understanding of, of what the norms are within the organization or within the team that you're in will help you set yourself up to show up as your best self each and every day. Now, let's take a look at what do you do if you're transitioning into a new role where you're now also a manager?

As well as a leader within your group. These are some things that I've done in the past When I'm, when I first start out, one of the first things I I did was understanding the situation. This is where I actually lean back, lean on my Six Sigma background, and I thought about it from the perspective of what's the voice of the customer?

What's the voice of the process? What's the voice of our stakeholders in order to be able to figure out what exactly is the current state of the organization and what are the team dynamics in order to understand what are the challenges I'll be facing in this new role? The next thing I also wanted to consider is how do I accelerate my own learning?

How do I develop a learning plan to quickly gain the knowledge about a space that where I may not be the domain expert? How do I work with the team I have in order to be able to understand what exactly the challenges they're facing? What are the skills and skills and knowledge I'll need in order to be able to succeed?

As well as going out there and seeking feedback and asking questions, I can't emphasize enough the importance of curiosity and actively listening to our key stakeholders. Now that I've learned about what exactly the situation is, and I've now begun learning what kind of information I'm gonna need. I look for opportunities to be able to find small early wins.

How do I start making a, a direct impact within the first 90 days if possible? That way it helps me build credibility with the organization as well as with my stakeholders. The idea is if you can build momentum and also to build positive feedback coming in about the work that you're doing, it's gonna lend additional credibility to you to be able to make future bigger decisions.

Now that I've got my feet underneath me and I'm now beginning to get some small wins, one of the things I wanna do concurrently in all of this is also assess my team to understand what are the strengths, what are the weaknesses? To understand what are the blind spots where, where are adjustments necessary so I can provide clear direction and provide clear vision of exactly what things need to be done and how they should be done.

One thing, I will emphasize that while we're providing that shared vision that aligns everyone towards a common set of goals, make sure it's not just about results. Make sure that it's also about the manner in which they're delivered. There are too many situations where people will deliver great results, but at the expense of others.

It's important to be able to focus on how something is being done as much as what is being done. If you focus on just the results. It's at the expense of others. You're going to end up in a situation where you're gonna have negative feelings of how things were delivered and then questioning about, well, why am I investing the time here?

If the how doesn't matter. Then everyone giving and trying to support one another breaks down rather quickly. The last thing I I've done when I've joined organization, where I've been the manager is I've started to build strong relationships and establish clear alliances with key stakeholders. How do you make sure you're all in lockstep in terms of what the long-term goals are and how do you ensure that delivery is something that we all are aiming for?

Making sure we're doing it together. This is where trying to deliver results where you're not in agreement with your stakeholders, you're not delivering the results that are necessary, and this is where making sure you've got locks up agreement with all of your stakeholders is absolutely critical. By investing the time building those relationships with your stakeholders, with your customers, with your team, you're gonna help yourself navigate any organizational landscape issues or obstacles that may arise because you'll be able to gain support for your initiatives because you're maintaining those relationships in the long term.

If you'd like to hear a little bit more about this topic, there's a great book you could read called The First 90 Days. I'll put a link to the description in YouTube on the YouTube video, as well as put it in the show notes in the podcast if you're looking for that book. Those are the main strategies about how I deal with when I start a brand new role.

Remembering that when you're new, you're new. Give yourself the opportunity to be able to learn. Next, be positive and take initiative where the opportunity arises. Be sure that you're helping others where you have a chance to do so. Next, build relationships for the long term and understand exactly where people are coming from.

Learn who your stakeholders are and do your best to be able to learn from them. Be interested, not interesting. And then finally, as a manager, there's some additional steps you can take in order to deliver your on your role as strongly as possible. If you have any questions about this podcast or any other, you can always feel free to go ahead and drop me a line.

You go ahead and gimme a call at (206) 651-4312 and leave a message. Or alternatively, you can send me an email at [email protected]. I'll go ahead and weave it into whatever conversation we have in the next podcast and make sure that your question gets answered. This has been The Practicing Leader Podcast.

My name is Parul Bhargava, and I'll talk to you next week.