Starting a New Job? Here's a 90-Day Plan from Harvard

the goal for new hires is to get to the break-even point as quickly as possible and according to Dr Michael Watkins former professor at Harvard Business School and author of the bestseller of the first 90 days the break-even point is when you have produced as much value as you have received from your new team or organization this concept was new to me because I've worked five six different jobs in my career and I've always wanted to objectively measure whether I was onboarding better than the losers I mean um my colleagues in the same batch in this video we'll go over four actionable tips from the first 90 days designed to help new hires build credibility in their first three months and to reach the break-even point as quickly as possible so let's get started

right off the bat Dr Watkins shares the most common traps we fall into when starting a new job or a role sticking with what you know trying to do too much too fast and setting unrealistic expectations these pitfalls lead to something he calls a vicious cycle you make bad decisions leading to colleagues not trusting your judgment making it harder for you to learn what you need to know and the cycle repeats instead we

need to kick off a virtual cycle as early as possible where even though you're new you make good initial decisions leading to people trusting your judgment and your ability to learn accelerates which begs the obvious question how can we guarantee virtual Cycles every time and while Dr walking covers a total of 10 strategies in this book here are the top four I found to be the most actionable and relevant for the everyday working professional first up

understand your own blind spots and the majority of studies he conducted Dr Watkins found the single biggest mistake new hires make is thinking I got the job because of my skills and accomplishments so I just need to do the exact same thing to succeed this mindset is a problem because the new hires might not realize they need new skills to succeed in their new job and they can't just rely on tactics that have worked for them in the past to address this Dr Watkins created a simple two-minute exercise to help us find our blind spots and I've replicated this table in a Google sheet link down below for you to make a copy and follow along basically you want to give a score between one to ten for each one of these business areas based on how intrinsically interested you are in solving problems in that area for example although I'm in marketing and I need to be very cost conscious I'm not interested in coming up with processes to cut costs and manage Financial Risk so my scores for those two areas are very low on the other hand I'm a self-improvement productivity nerd and I really care about building relationships at work so my scores for those related areas are very hot once you complete this table go to the next preferences Tab and you should see your scores automatically summed up across five rows and three columns the rows represent five business functions and a low total score here means you have a blind spot when dealing with issues in that functional area for me that's dealing with a finance team which makes sense because I'm in marketing and I like to spend money and it's their job to make my life miserable the column totals represent your preferences among the technical political and cultural problems luckily for me these are all pretty balanced but if you scored high on Technical and low on cultural for example you're doing your core job well but you might be pissing off your colleagues along the way so knowing our blind spots is one thing the finance team sucks but more importantly we need to know what actions to take so Dr Watkins shares an onboarding checklist we can go through to minimize the negative impact of our potential blind spots in particular I really like this framework for identifying hidden cultural norms basically if you can find the answer to these six questions you can figure out how things really work for example n versus means do people care more about the outcome or how you get there once you know adapt your behavior by the way this video is not sponsored by Dr Watkins but it is supported by those of you who subscribe to my paid productivity newsletter on Google workspace tips Link in the description if you want to learn more

lesson number two accelerate your learning systematically the key question here is when you're overwhelmed with new information as a new hire and faced with a pressure to do something right away how do you know the top three to five areas to focus on Dr Watkins shares a framework he calls the learning agenda that includes a list of standardized questions to ask during the onboarding process that tells you what you need to do next these questions are broken down into questions about the past questions about the present and questions about the future and this kicks off a virtual cycle of gathering information hypothesizing and testing your hypothesis for example when I transfer from the sales team to the marketing team here at Google I hadn't read this book but I did ask one of the questions listed here what are the key processes I should know about and I was told there were three I should learn as quickly as possible the budget forecasting process the event management process and the creative review process they're all pretty complicated so I hypothesize AKA guest I should learn how to forecast budget for first since as due with money and to test that hypothesis I shared an action plan with my new manager during our one-on-one my manager ended up telling me to prioritize event management first since we had an offline event coming up but she was impressed I had a plan meaning less decision fatigue for her Dr Watkins also mentions the people in the best position to answer these questions are mentors who are one step ahead of us in our career Frontline colleagues who work with external clients or vendors and integrators who are basically project managers who work with lots of teams and therefore knows a

lot about everything moving on to strategy number three negotiate success with your boss so we talked about how the quicker we can get to the break-even point the more successful we are at the transition process but it's important to remember our manager has a huge influence on where that break-even point lies for example when I was in the sales team I saw new hire number one missed the sales Target and even though new hire number two overachieved by five percent number one received a higher rating in their performance review how did this happen because number one set the right expectations with their manager and that's what negotiating success is all about the first step is to use this prompt in Chachi BT to give you a tailored 30 60 90 day plan based on your role with quantifiable metrics of success for example first 30 days complete training and get a certain score on product knowledge assessment then get your manager to agree these are the metrics you'll be measured on Dr Watkins says to see this as a contract between you two revisit these religiously every week and pro tip it definitely doesn't hurt to under promise and over deliver now that we've set the right expectations with our manager strategy number four is to get everyone else to Like Us by securing early wins

with our colleagues this was super interesting to me because according to Watkins an early win is not directly tied to your core success metric because it's just not realistic for example it's hard to expect a brand new salesperson to hit the revenue Target in their first quarter that's why the concept of training quarters exists for most companies instead Watkins defines early wins as actions that help us build momentum right at the beginning and sets us up for future success and because our colleagues will play an important role in this journey we need to make a good first impression as early as possible based on his research Watkins says impressions are formed by our teammates within the first 30 days and are centered around these three questions do you have the same values as a team you join do you have the right kind of energy do you demand high levels of performance from yourself interesting side note this is actually in line with other scientific research that found we evaluate each other based on two general Dimensions how interpersonally warm we appear to be and how competent we seem to be correspondingly these are the actions to take number one ask thoughtful questions about the past present and future number two observe visible and hidden cultural norms and adapt your behavior accordingly people seem to care way more about the outcome I should have more of a bias towards action number three make realistic commitments and Achieve them hit the metrics you create upon with

your manager for example it's no coincidence each one of these actions are tied to the lessons we just covered which in turn ties back into creating virtual Cycles to reach the Breakeven Point as quickly as possible if you enjoyed this book review you might be interested to see what actually makes a great manager in the workplace see you on the next video in the meantime have a great one