Owning your Onboarding

A guide as you navigate your first couple of months in a new role.

I am already two months into my new role (and doing well/loving the team so far), and I wanted to share guidance on how you can own your onboarding experience, with some reflections on how I am doing this myself. Of course, it's unrealistic to achieve 100% of these tips; I'm currently applying ~70% of my advice, and that feels good enough!

Ruthlessly prioritize your learning.

It's easy to deprioritize onboarding in favor of "just getting started and learning as you go." At the senior/executive level, onboarding plans are rarely provided; if they are, they are often just a long list of people to meet and documents to read. I suggest setting a calendar block titled "Onboarding/Learning" for 30min-1 hour a day in your first month, every other day for your second month, and once a week for your third month. If you're provided an onboarding plan, prioritize working on it - for items that don't seem relevant right now, you can deprioritize them or ask someone on your team if it's worthwhile. I try to follow the onboarding plan provided, as someone designed this onboarding plan with my success in mind. If an onboarding plan isn't offered, build one for yourself using the remaining tips.

How am I doing on this while onboarding? I had no director-level onboarding plan for my new role, so I built my own, taking pieces from the sales account managers' onboarding plan and supplementing it with the New Executive SkillUp on Coursera. I've honored my scheduled onboarding time in my calendar ~75% so far and am continuing to add things to my list to learn.

Talk with many customers and customer-facing teammates.

It's imperative to build empathy for customers and relationships with customer-facing teammates. It's tempting to shortcut this process by reading documentation or listening to senior leaders' insights on customers. I suggest talking to ~10 customers or customer-facing people at a minimum. If you want to get it down to a science, here's my formula:

• 1% of the customer-facing people at the company. So if there are 500 customer-facing people, start talking with 5 people OR
• Start with five people. Increase up to 10 depending on business complexity. Multiply by the number of customer personas you have.
• The user experience community has excellent advice about defining the correct number of people to generate insights!

Talk to customers worldwide, not just in your region, if you're at a global company. It's typical for teams to get too AMER-focused because, let's face it, talking to customers across time zones can be a challenge. However, if you can work shifted schedules 1-2 days a week during your first 60 days to accommodate more conversations, the empathy gained will pay off in the long run.

How am I doing on this? I've so far spoken with 9 customer-facing people at my job. I've gathered much insight from them, but I need to talk to more people, particularly around the world. So I've been able to scale my observations by watching and listening to 20+ customer conversation recordings between my meetings.

Seek to understand your product/service deeply.

Your ability to understand and articulate the core product/service features, the value proposition, and how the product/service uniquely solves a customer problem is critical in any role. Practice writing, speaking, and answering questions on how your product/service adds value. While meeting with team members, practice explaining the product/service to them in conversation and ask what you're missing.

How am I doing on this? Every Friday, I spend an hour a week learning on Coursera's platform. I'm writing down things I like and don't like about the user experience. I am contemplating the experience of different customers in different contexts. I'm in sales, not product, but I work closely with the product team and believe I can earn trust by not just trying to sell but seeking to understand our product and the vision. I also carry around my Coursera water bottle while out and about, and sometimes people will recognize our brand and want to share their stories about learning on Coursera. I embrace these random encounters with customers!

Seek to understand problems, not to solve problems (quite yet).

There's always much pressure when onboarding to get early wins on the board, make an early impact, and help the team solve some pressing issues immediately. It's essential to take a step back and have the self-awareness that it's doubtful you know how to solve a problem in a new role. I suggest working on the problem only if you understand it. If you can't articulate the problem you're trying to solve, seek to understand it first.

Prioritize 1:1s with colleagues.

Often in an onboarding plan, you'll be provided a curated list of people you should talk to on your first day, week, month, and so on. Often the 1:1 list is unrealistic (mine had a lofty goal to meet 5 VPs in the first week!) Don't worry about executing the onboarding plans timeline for meeting people. Trust your gut if it feels too early/rushed to meet with someone.

Here are sample questions I like to ask:

1. Tell me about your journey to this point in your career & life.
2. Where do you live? What does your community mean to you?
3. What are you curious about me and my role here?
4. How'd you like us to work together?

I try to walk away with one thing we have in common and one thing unique about the person.

How am I doing on this? I prioritized meeting with my direct reports as soon as possible and spending time with my team first. I pushed the rest of my 1:1s forward 2-3 weeks to have more context and defined questions to ask instead of just a simple meet & greet.

Let people get to know you(r vibe)

One of the hardest things when starting to work with new people is how and when to be yourself amongst them, and I believe this is a personal preference. I suggest being self-aware and checking in with yourself regularly. It personally takes me about a month to relax a little and start to share my authentic self with new people. You can fully protect yourself and ease into sharing your authenticity but know that protecting yourself takes a great deal of energy. I believe the quicker you can get there, the better relationships you'll have on your team. Again, easier said than done, and many factors can impair this, like a lack of inclusion or belonging. My advice is: to be reflective and kind to yourself, and it will come with time and relationships made.

First deliverable suggestion: write your observations & insights.

If your manager does not provide a 30-60-90 day success plan with clear deliverables, I suggest you build one and seek alignment with your manager. If you need a place to start, I recommend creating an observations and insights paper or presentation based on the observations you've made so far in the role and focus in on the customer experience. You get to use your fresh set of eyes and observational skills to provide some outside perspective on areas of opportunity for your business. The customer interviews mentioned above could be a strong input into this deliverable.

For my L&D friends: avoid learning and reviewing simultaneously.

When going through onboarding training/plan, it's common to start to review them through our L&D lens, finding ways to improve them, especially if you or your new team owns onboarding. I suggest you don't need to quality check now. Instead, go through the experience entirely, and focus on improvements later. Your job right now is to learn and grow yourself, not to start already finding problems with onboarding. If you're tasked with doing both simultaneously, split your time: be intentional about when you're learning and evaluating the learning.