CONGRATULATIONS! You got the offer! You accepted! Woo Hoo!!!
Ready to fling yourself headlong into the new work and show them how awesome you are? Not so fast, Buckaroo! While most of us overachievers can’t wait to get our greedy little schedules booked up with onboarding, meet and greets, department overviews and project ramp ups, the very best thing you can do right out of the gate is SLOW DOWN!
Counterintuitive? Yes. Counterproductive? No. Go SLOW (at first) in order to go FAST (when it counts). Check out these three tools to see what I mean.
Schedule Self Care
You KNOW yourself. You love your work, you love helping people and you love being busy so you are going to say “yes” to every single request that even thinks about coming your way. You will be woefully overbooked by day three, the dog will be whimpering to “please for the love of all that is good and right in the world let me out” while you “just wrap this one more call up”. You’ll be mere steps from your own refrigerator in your own kitchen in your own home and you will be relegated to snacking on crumbs picked from the couch cushions in your “home office” because this particular colleague is in really desperate need of specifically your advice for just a little while longer. Self care is necessary. Powder room visits are necessary. Your brain needs time to recoup and refresh. Strategic leadership takes time and space and thought. Slow down and schedule time for self care NOW before your schedule gets so tight you need WD-40 in order to get up and get the mail. And by self care I mean a daily bathroom break, some lunch, a vacation and a weekly 30 minutes for you to think strategically about your work, your role and your contribution.
Prepare to Speak “CEO”
You were selected because you ROCK. You said all the right things, had all the right creds and wowed them with all your innovative ideas. Now, you need to put all that awesomeness aside, become an empty vessel of nothingness and prepare to receive enlightenment. It’s all very Zen. In order to prepare to speak CEO (or whatever you feel comfortable calling your leader) you must lay aside your assumptions, lay aside your ideas and put on your listening ears on. What are the top challenges facing the org (team) right now? What one thing, if changed, would make the biggest positive difference? What have they tried so far to address the challenges? What do they want to try next? What’s their favorite part of leading this place? What parts do they hate? What kind of support can they rely on for the parts they hate so they can do more of what they love? Slow down and ask some questions. Listen to the answers. See the world from your leader’s point of view. Prepare to align your awesomeness with your leader’s world view so you can speak her language when it comes time for your proposals.
Set Strategic Goals
You already know how to do long term planning. You likely have a sense of what your role or department or function could look like a year from now based on what you know so far about the place. I’m not talking about those goals. I’m talking about YOUR goals. Who do YOU want to be? Why is achieving that important to you? What are the implications of achieving it? Are you willing and able to make the tradeoffs? Slow down and give purposeful thought to how you want to show up in this world, in this new organization in this new role and in your life.
Enjoy the ramp up of your new gig. I don’t know about you but every time I start something new I tend to want to fling myself into it. I hope you can take it slow and steady. Preserve time for strategic thinking and planning and for taking care of yourself. It matters. Not only for your wellbeing but for the folks who depend on you so they get the best you. Be Uncommon.
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