Your First 90 Days in a New Job

New starters are hired for judgement and then spend their first month demonstrating speed instead. The reorganisation proposed in week three is the classic example: technically sound, warmly received in the room, and quietly fatal.

It fails because it is an answer produced before the question is understood. Every odd process in an organisation is odd for a reason — a regulator, a large customer, a failure two years ago, a person who will not tolerate it. You cannot see those reasons from the outside, and the people who can see them will not volunteer them to someone who has already decided.

The useful posture for the first month is deliberate slowness on changing things and unusual speed on learning them.

Week one: the meetings that matter

Book short conversations, twenty to thirty minutes, with more people than feels necessary. Aim for eight to twelve in the first fortnight, weighted towards the people your work touches rather than the people who share your job title.

Cover four groups:

• Your manager, more than once, and not only about tasks.
• Your team and immediate peers, individually rather than as a group.
• The functions you depend on and who depend on you — the team upstream of your work and the team downstream of it.
• One or two long-tenured people anywhere in the organisation. They hold the history that explains the present.

Ask the same small set of questions each time, because the variation in answers is the actual information:

1. What does good look like in my role, from where you sit?
2. What has been tried here before and did not work?
3. What do you need from me that you are not getting today?
4. Who else should I be talking to?

Take notes in the meeting and say you are doing so. Nobody has ever been damaged by visibly writing down what a colleague said.

Find out what your manager is measured on

This is the single highest-value piece of information available in your first month, and almost nobody asks for it directly.

Your manager has a small number of things they are accountable for — a number, a delivery date, a quality measure, a relationship that must not break. Their assessment of you will be shaped, mostly unconsciously, by whether you make those things easier or harder.

Ask plainly: what are you judged on this year, and where does my role sit in that? Then ask what would have to be true in six months for them to consider the hire a success. The answer is often narrower and more specific than the job description, and occasionally different from it.

The first visible win

Pick one thing, deliver it inside the first six to eight weeks, and choose it for visibility rather than ambition.

Good candidates share three traits: they are small enough to finish without permission from three people, they solve something a named colleague actually complains about, and they are legible to someone outside your team. A tidy report that someone was building by hand every week, a documented process that existed only in one person's head, a backlog cleared.

Bad candidates are the big obvious ones — the thing everyone agrees is broken. It is usually broken for structural reasons, and a new starter attempting it burns credibility slowly and then all at once.

The first win is not there to impress anyone. It is there to buy you the standing to attempt the second one.

Document while you are still ignorant

You will never again see the organisation as clearly as you do in month one, because in month three you will have stopped noticing what is strange.

Keep a running document. Put in it: the things that confused you and what the explanation turned out to be, the names and who owns what, the unwritten rules, the systems that nobody has documented. Write down the questions you were embarrassed to ask, and the answers.

This has two uses. It becomes the onboarding material for the next person, which is a cheap and genuine contribution. And it is the record you draw on when someone asks, in month nine, why a thing works the way it does.

The probation conversation

Probation arrangements, notice during probation and what an employer may do at the end of one vary substantially by country, contract and employer — check yours, and take questions about your rights to a qualified employment adviser or your national employment body rather than to colleagues.

What is within your control is the conversation. Do not wait to be assessed. At roughly week four and again at week eight, ask your manager directly: is there anything in how I am working that you would want done differently, and is there anything you have heard from others?

Ask it in that form. "How am I doing?" reliably produces "fine". The narrower question produces the one piece of feedback that would otherwise have surfaced first in a formal review, when it is much harder to act on.

If you get something, act on it visibly within a fortnight and say that you have. Feedback taken up quickly is remembered far longer than the problem that prompted it.