Are you new here? Lessons learnt from many new starts

I joined Google on 7th September 2020, so I’ve just celebrated my six month Google-versary! As well as being a fascinating experience at a very strange time, passing this milestone prompted me to reflect on my experience in other new roles and new companies. I’ve changed jobs many times in my career and, although Google is different from most companies I have worked for, I have been through many of the same thoughts and feelings, highs and lows as I have experienced in other places. I thought that it might be useful to share some of the lessons I have learnt, in the hope that they can help other people moving into new roles.

In over twenty roles working for over a dozen organisations, I think that I have learnt three big lessons about starting a new role. None of these are particularly profound or novel, but I haven’t always remembered them from job to job, and have sometimes had to learn them all over again.

First, it takes time to build genuine, human relationships with others. I must admit that I originally wrote that it takes time to build a network, but then realised that that doesn’t do justice to the importance of our relationships at work. Building a network implies that we have lots of connections to people who can help us get things done: it is an essential part of being successful in any organisation. But building genuine, human relationships means understanding each other as people, learning to trust one another, coming to rely on each other - and seeing those relationships as important reasons to come to work in the morning. When we have genuine relationships, we are engaged in a shared endeavour with others and we don’t want to let each other down. That does not come from filling up our contact list.

Second, it takes time to calibrate experience. In any average day at work, we will experience a mixture of successes and challenges. A meeting goes well or goes badly. A deployment succeeds or fails. Our colleagues give us warm feedback or cold silence. In our first days in a new job, especially if in a role we are unfamiliar with, it can be hard to know how important each of these successes or challenges are. Was that bad meeting a relationship destroying catastrophe, or will it be forgotten by the end of the day? Should that successful deployment be celebrated, or regarded as routine? Is the silence of our colleagues meaningful, or is this simply an undemonstrative culture? It’s a common tendency - certainly for me - to dwell on the setbacks and forget the successes, and wonder whether you really belong here. It’s important in those early days to remember that we are still forming our yardstick of judgement - and that it’s okay to ask others what matters and what doesn’t matter.

Third, it takes time to feel at home. And, by feeling at home, I don’t just mean that you know where the coffee machine is, or what day the team meeting is, or where to go for lunch. Feeling at home means that you feel comfortable enough to genuinely be yourself: to speak your mind and express your preferences - and to do so in a way which fits the people around you. I think that I have known the moment when I started to feel at home in all the jobs I have done (where this was possible - in a few, I never quite got to feel at home): I could hear the change in my own voice, in what I was saying and writing, and in how I was interacting with others.

One of the things I have valued in my time so far at Google has been carrying the status of Noogler: this is that status that all new Googlers have for their first period in the company (no set timeframe, but roughly six months). Carrying the status of Noogler gives you a licence to spend time building the network from which relationships will grow, it helps you ask the questions to figure out what’s important and what’s less important, and it recognises that it will take you time to feel at home.

The first few months in any job will always feel strange, no matter how experienced, confident or successful you are - and they are even stranger in our current circumstances. It is hard to build relationships, calibrate experience and feel at home when we are all working remotely. For any new starter, it is important to recognise that this strangeness will pass, but it will take time, and for that time we will be in a state of learning. For leaders and employers it is important to recognise that giving new starters space and time to build relationships, figure out what’s important, and feel at home will make them more successful - and happier.

(Views in this article are my own.)