How to start a new job

I was talking to a colleague the other day who was about to start a new job. She had been at her previous company for about 10 years and wanted some pointers on how to make a successful transition. We talked for a while about making a strong start and I gave her three pieces of advice. First, spend the first month listening. Take everyone you can out to lunch; your internal clients and partners, your staff, vendors and ask them about how you can help them be more effective. Get invited to staff meetings and listen to the problems people are wrestling with. Just gather perspectives and try to listen very carefully. In every role, there will be opportunities that you can leverage to get a strong start. Try to find those opportunities. Low hanging fruit and all that.

Second, take what you have learned and come up with a plan to harvest the fruit. Talk to your manager about what you are going to accomplish and get her agreement on the plan. You want fast wins here, so try to avoid committing to a project that is going to take two years to complete. Also, be very wary of projects that have been lying around, incomplete. There may be a reason why the "raw data feed" or some such project has made no progress in 6 months. You can take those projects on, but try to push them back until after you have a track record.

Third, and I hate to be this tactical: Don't walk in and say things like "At we filtered our web log data using SAS" or "At we had the data warehouse take care of this problem". These may be true and relevant observations, but new co-workers react funnily to the comparisons. In some ways, talking about your former is like name dropping a celebrity that you once hung out with and irritating for the same reason. Once is interesting, but it gets old fast. You can say "at a previous employer we did x", but don't use the companies name. It sounds trivial, but take my word for it, people get tired of you saying "We used Lotus Notes at Mckinsey."

And on that note, I get a chance to follow my own advice. I am leaving IXI and moving to an [X+1] as the Vice President for Analytics and Data Strategy. I only work for companies that have an X in their name. Look for the blog to be more active as part of my role will be evangelism in the space.