How to make an immediate impact in a new job
Meta's CTO algorithm to make a fast impact in your new job.
đ Ciao, itâs Giacomo. Every Sunday I share evidence-based insights (from science and experience) to help you grow your career and get better at life. Check out the most popular posts here.
Starting a new job can be overwhelming.
Youâre not only building new relationships with your team, diving deep into the business, and meeting partners and clients. Youâre also facing the pressure to make an immediate impact.
Itâs like a job within a job.
As a matter of fact, October is one the best months for job hunting.
After summer, companies are re-energized and eager to fill open positions before the year ends.
With that in mind, now itâs a perfect time to share the strategy developed by Metaâs CFO, Andrew âBozâ Bosworth, to help ramp up quickly in a new role.
He labelled it as the âcareer cold start algorithmâ, and it is designed to help you hit the ground running and make an immediate impact in your new job.
The piece comes from Andrew Bosworthâs blog Boz.com, where he shares some of the lessons he has learned in his career.
The first step is to find someone on the team and ask for 30 minutes with them. In that meeting you have a simple agenda:
For the first 25 minutes: ask them to tell you everything they think you should know. Take copious notes. Only stop them to ask about things you donât understand. Always stop them to ask about things you donât understand.
For the next 3 minutes: ask about the biggest challenges the team has right now.
In the final 2 minutes: ask who else you should talk to. Write down every name they give you.
Repeat the above process for every name youâre given.
Donât stop until there are no new names.
1. Everything they think you should know
The sum of the answers from the first 25 mins will not give you a complete picture of the teamâs work. That will take months to develop. But they will give you a framework for integrating new information more quickly, which will speed up how fast you ramp.
It will also heavily over index on the areas of work under active discussion, which will help you dive in productively to the most critical discussions immediately.
The nature of what people choose to discuss is a very valuable signal about the problems the team face, as it may be about the work, the organization, or process.
Finally, it will give you a sense of the language and terminology that can very often be a barrier to working smoothly with teams.
đ Are you job hunting?
Read here the tips to make your CV stand out, from a former Amazon VP.
2. The biggest challenges the team is facing
The answers from the second question give you a cheat sheet on how to impress the team with early positive impact. Some of the things youâll hear will take time to fix, such as âwe need a bigger teamâ or âour infrastructure isnât scalingâ.
Those are important and it will be good for the team to hear you internalize those challenges. But a surprising number of the issues youâll hear repeatedly will be things you can easily help with, like âwe waste a bunch of time in meetings every weekâ or âwe need a dedicated conference roomâ.
I start with the latter as quickly as I can because those are the types of things teams often neglect to prioritize, in spite of a compounding negative impact on progress.
3. Who else you should talk to
The third question will give you a valuable map of influence in the organization. The more often names show up and the context in which they show up tends to provide a very different map of the organization than the one in the org chart.
For all the value I just described, the greatest value in this process isnât in the answers - it is in the asking. Taking these meetings and listening shows proper respect for the team thatâs in place.
It can be hard to remember, but while you may be insecure about taking a new role because you feel like youâre at a disadvantage, the people youâre speaking with may also be unsure about you taking that role and what it means for them. Demonstrating mutual respect builds the trust required to make progress.
Hereâs what you might have missed recently on âGetting Betterâ:
See you next Sunday đď¸
Thanks,
Giacomo
Just started a new job! Timely article