How to be a Great New Employee (#221)

In this podcast episode, we discuss the types of things a person should do to be successful as a new employee. Key points made are noted below.

Help Your Boss

It is too easy to give a new employer the wrong impression. You could start working on activities that your new employer doesn’t care about all that much, or make some key mistakes and end up having your employment terminated within a few weeks.

The key to being successful as a new employee is to help your boss do his job. Or, stated another way, the supervisor has a lot of work to do and wants to reduce his work load by hiring you. So ask yourself, completing which specific tasks will make his job easier?  For example, a controller needs to complete an inventory valuation faster at the end of each month, so that he can close the books faster. This is because he’s under pressure from the CFO to issue financial statements to the management team as soon as possible.

If you know this, then all of your efforts should go toward that specific task. It does not mean creating a cool new financial analysis system for the controller, who doesn’t need it as much as a prompt inventory valuation. So, don’t try to implement something that you think is incredibly neat. Just do what your boss needs. This may sound boring, but it is how you can be successful in your first 90 days.

Take the Time to Do it Right

Another major issue is to do it right. It always takes a lot longer to correct a mistake than to do it right the first time. So, if you start a job with a series of mistakes, your new boss is not going to want to keep you around. Instead, he’s going to want to kill you. What this means is, focus very hard on avoiding errors on any tasks that you’re assigned. This may mean asking for instructions several times over, which you might think will make you look like an idiot. It’s much better to look like an idiot than to make mistakes. So in short, figure out what your new boss needs, and focus very clearly on how to do just those tasks perfectly.

Interrogate Your Boss

To make sure that you engage in the right tasks and do them correctly requires some social skills. You cannot walk into a new job and be amazing at it if you’re working in isolation. Instead, interview your boss – several times – to be absolutely certain about what it is that you’re supposed to be doing.

And, to make sure that you do it right, interview him again, or whoever the resident expert may be, to verify how to do a task. And this will require some iterations. It’s almost impossible to do something right the first time. Instead, ask to have someone sit and watch you do a task, and provide a critique right away.

And in addition, write down the work instructions. If there isn’t a procedure in place already, then make one. It takes time to memorize how to handle a task, and when you’re starting out in a new job, you shouldn’t rely on memorization. Instead, have a detailed procedure for everything.

By taking this approach, your boss will get the impression right away that you care about what you’re doing. Trust me, you will not be giving him the impression that you’re clueless. For a new employee, being clueless is a given. By asking for help, you’re giving the impression that you’re aware of your cluelessness, and want to improve the situation as soon as you can.

I’ve just stated that you need to question your boss intensively to make sure that you’re doing the right thing, and doing it in the correct way. This does not mean that you should be bugging your boss forever. As I also mentioned, you are trying to help your boss do his job, and you’re interfering with his job if you bug him too much. So the trick is to spend the time with your boss up front until you’ve completely figured out what you’re supposed to do, and then quit bothering him. After a while, your boss will see that a good chunk of his workload has been passed over to you, so he will most definitely be happy.

Ask for More Work

So let’s say that you’ve made a successful transition into a new job, and you understand the core activities. Now what? What makes for a really successful new employee? You can address this from two directions.

One approach is to go back to your boss to see if there’s any other work to take on. This approach has a couple of advantages. First, you’re offloading even more work from your boss.

And second, your boss knows what needs to be done, since he has a much greater knowledge of the business, and so is in the best position to recommend what additional items to work on. On the downside, you’re putting yourself at risk of taking on some pretty tedious work. Nonetheless, that’s the nature of a job. Not everything is fun.

An alternative approach is to dream up some entirely new activities to do. By doing so, you’re showing a large amount of initiative, and it might result in working on some really interesting projects. However, there’s a large downside, which is that your boss may not see the value of the new activities, and starts to think that you’re getting diverted on personal projects that aren’t helping the organization very much. And the boss might be right. A new employee doesn’t know enough about the company to understand which new projects are actually useful.

On the whole, I’d say a new employee should take the first approach and just ask the boss for more work. Once you’ve really settled in, it might be time to suggest projects that aren’t currently being worked on by anyone.