This article series is for you if you’re about to start, or have recently started, a new senior job in a large organisation – especially if the role involves major change. Its full of actionable advice on topics that matter most in the first few months of a new job.
It’s a deep dive into the lessons we’ve learned through starting 20+ corporate jobs ourselves, many of which were focused on transformational change. We’ve also done plenty of hiring people into new roles on our teams over the past 30 years, and coaching amazing people as they embark on new chapters.
Congratulations on landing the new role or promotion. No doubt you’ve worked hard to get here. We’re motivated to make sure you get the best start in your new role.
Take a minute to reflect on what you want to achieve in your new job. Fast forward 2 years and imagine yourself super successful in your job. You’ve learned so many lessons, made mistakes and found some formulas that work.
Wouldn’t it be great if you had access to all those lessons and experiences today - but without the pain and passage of time?
That’s what we’re aiming to offer you with this series. We’ll help you harness your excitement and calm your apprehensions. We link to recommended resources and exercises that will help solidify the lessons and you can ask us to cover topics you’d like to hear about or questions you have – just DM us on LinkedIn, or email
In this first article, I’m diving into the 3 common mistakes we’ve made and we’ve seen many other people make when they’re new in a job. If you recognise yourself in any of these mistakes - don’t panic - we’ll be covering what to do to avoid and overcome these challenges.
We’ve learnt these lessons, so you don’t need to - we have your back and we’ll be helping you every step of the way.
You want to avoid crucial mistakes in your first 90 days. But that doesn’t mean you have to perform perfectly - we’re all human. So please approach this learning in that spirit.
So - what are these 3 mistakes often made during the early days in a new role? How can you spot that you might be in danger of making them?
Mistake number 1: Hitting the Ground Running
This is about leaping too soon to deliver, without building real insight into what matters and developing an understanding of how things get done in your new environment.
This mistake comes from a good intention - you’re keen to make a big and best first impression and that’s entirely understandable.
You want to prove to the people who hired you just how right that decision was and you want to repay their confidence in you by hitting the ground running.
The expression ‘hit the ground running’ is used a lot, usually with positive associations. But - what actually happens when someone does hit the ground running? Like Taylor Swift’s spectacular fall off a treadmill in a gym (google it), it can look painful.
Moving too fast in a new role can lead to making assumptions about goals, challenges and logistics that can make your first attempts at delivering something valuable fall flat on its face.
But more than that, it can lead to potential damage to how your new colleagues perceive you - and your potential. You can damage relationships before you’ve even built them, as people see you rushing to grab results or pursue a goal that they may need input to, or that runs contrary to their agenda.
Leaping too soon can be disastrous. It’s essential to take the time first to build real insight into what matters, and to build bridges with the people who need to be a part of your new world of work. This may slow your pace a little in the first few weeks in your new role, and that’s intentional, it’s necessary - so you know the right time to power up and where you should apply the greatest effort to achieve the most impactful result.
Its critical to invest time up front in really getting to know your key stakeholders. That includes the obvious people like your direct reports, senior stakeholders, and customers. Also consider, and explore – who else is critical to the change agenda? There may well be key influencers across the matrix whose voices you also need to hear. Meet them, talk to them - really listen to what they can tell you because it’s likely to be gold dust to you.
And this all means getting really skilled at the art of listening and building conversations with strangers. And this isn’t that common a skill. Not everyone is naturally skilled at listening - it’s actually quite rare.
Think of a time when you felt really listened to. When the person you were with was fascinated with what you were saying, who you are and what you could tell them. They were listening to understand and not to respond. I bet there’s only a handful of examples that come to you mind ...
Deep listening creates magic. When we give all of our attention to someone with the intention of really getting to understand them, their environment and their challenges, not only do we actually learn real meaningful stuff about them - but we also spark an interest in them about us.
You’re going to be meeting a lot of new people, and there will be a lot happening in the early months in a new role that could potentially derail the quality of your listening. If you’re feeling even slightly anxious or excited, or even just keen to impress, your adrenalin could work against your listening. Combined with instincts to go fast, and desire to share your own ideas, and you have the perfect storm for poor listening.
So if those are the problems, what can we do?
Two tips to enhance your listening:
1. Tune into what’s happening to you
- Be aware of your emotions - if you’re feeling keen, anxious or excited you will be able to feel it because they’re powerful emotions - think for a minute - how do you feel them in your body?
- They will stop you listening and will turn on the voice in your head.
- If you’re prone to this - and if you’re meeting people who are important to your role prepare yourself.
- Ensure your schedule has time between meetings to prepare yourself and to capture important notes from the previous conversation.
- The morning ahead of important meetings, make time for movement. Even a 10 minute walk makes a difference and reduces adrenaline.
- Before you go into the meeting, bring yourself back to centre by pausing and focusing on your breathing.
- Insert a gap in the meeting if you feel the adrenalin and need to regroup (water is always a good excuse).
2. Make the conversation about them and not you
- Research the person you’re going to meet.
- Start the conversation by introducing yourself and then move to them.
- Have a list of great questions that will interest you and make them personal to the individual (big ones - about the company, their job, their challenges, their advice).
- Be super curious about their underlying beliefs, and, where they manage a team, the underlying beliefs of the people on their team. Organisational culture is the invisible force that can make or break your change programme. Making sense of it often begins with understanding prevalent beliefs of all the people who you are needing to play a part in the change.
Here are some examples of great questions:
What’s the thing that’s taking all your time and attention right now?
What has worked for you in the past in terms of getting things done and making change happen in this organisation?
What advice do you wish someone had given you when you started here?
What’s a personal goal you’re excited about?
In relation to the change agenda..
How do you see the case for change?
How will it benefit you (and your team)?
What might block or delay the change?
How ready are people to adopt new ways of working?
What are people’s underlying beliefs about the change?
For more practical tips on improving your listening skills, we recommend the work of Oscar Trimboli – this is one of his podcasts: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/deep-listening-oscar-trimboli/
We’re currently creating new content on how to avoid hitting the ground running, and rapidly acquire insight in your new role. I’d love to frame it around your questions and challenges with me so that we can make it useful. DM me on LinkedIn, or email
Mistake number 2: Playing it Small
Starting a new job is scary. Full stop. And there’s a danger of the inevitable fear constraining our potential, because we’re scared of making a mistake.
It’s common for our inner critic - that gremlin in our head - to go into overdrive as we encounter new situations, as it tries to keep us out of danger.
We all have an Inner Critic - it’s that voice inside your head which springs to life with little warning and always with a critical, negative point of view.
Our thoughts create our feelings and our feelings drive our behaviour and our actions - and that’s what dictates our success.
If your inner dialogue just before meeting a new colleague goes something like, “I’m going to embarrass myself,” or “He’ll think I’m a fake” you probably won't appear relaxed and approachable.
The good news is that confidence can be developed, and we have a range of free resources to stimulate your thinking and growth in this arena. As a first step, getting control of negative self-talk will be very significant in the early days in a new role. If you recognise the need to work on this, here’s our guide: https://nkuzichange.com/downloads/Taming-Your-Inner-Critic_Nkuzi-Change-Coaching-Exercise-test.pdf
A powerful antidote to the damage your inner critic can do, is to create what we call your Power stories. Your Power Stories are a wonderful tool to have in your armoury as it helps you talk about what you’re really capable of. This stops people who don’t yet really know you, pigeonholing you in a way that holds you back and keeps you playing small. Our full guide to creating your Power Stories is here: https://nkuzichange.com/downloads/Creating-your-Power-Stories---Nkuzi-Change-Coaching-Exercise.pdf
And if you’re keen to further develop your confidence, our self-coaching playlist is likely to be useful – a treasure trove of curated resources that we’ve tried and tested ourselves: https://nkuzichange.com/downloads/Nkuzi-Change-Confidence-Playlist.pdf
Once you’re in your new change leadership role, consider these confidence resources for your teams. Our data from 3000+ confidential coaching sessions reveals the biggest personal development barrier in UK corporate life is (lack of) self-confidence. This is generally invisible to employers, so it’s not being effectively addressed. We’ve been excited to witness that when it is addressed, it has a significant impact on a business unit’s change capability.
Mistake number 3: Narrow Focus
This is such a common mistake in a new role. It happens when we focus narrowly on our own immediate role and colleagues, rather than building bridges and creating influence through an extended network.
No matter what level you’re at or what your goals are, if you are a leader wanting to make things happen, achieving more influence is critical for success. And it’s even more important in a corporate environment that is matrixed and layered with many different stakeholders, and for roles that require you to lead transformational change.
- Gaining influence on a team can help you work together more effectively.
- Gaining influence as a line manager can make you more respected and appreciated by your team.
- Gaining influence across the horizontal and matrixed organisation is critical to making transformational change happen.
- Gaining influence in a meeting can make your voice heard and your opinion acknowledged.
Influence may be the untapped life force behind your career. To influence, you need to have something to say and to convince someone to listen and take action. I characterise influence as the ability for you to get someone to ‘tune in’ to your message in a way that impacts what they do, when they’ve heard it.
It’s a super skill that we may know is valuable; but it’s common to neglect it until we actually need it for something specific - like a career move or launching a critical new project - and that’s a mistake.
We love the saying ‘dig the well before you get thirsty’ and this is exactly the problem we’ll be solving by tackling the issue of influence early in your new job.
The good news is that anyone can increase their influence, it’s not dependent upon hierarchy, experience or seniority, it’s a skill and like any skill you need to intentionally practice it. In a large organisation it can be overwhelming trying to work out where to start with building influence and relationships, so ensure you have a disciplined and structured approach.
It also helps to have a framework to get you started and to guide your actions and that’s where our tool Influence Radar comes in. Influence Radar helps you identify which stakeholders to target. It broadens your horizons to ensure you’re not focusing too narrowly on your own job description or within your own business function and it helps you prioritise individuals based on their relationship with you and the impact they can have on what you’re trying to achieve. Influence Radar isn’t an academic or theoretical model. It’s a practical tool to help you identify important stakeholders and create a plan of engagement to maximise.
your ability to influence them. More on Influence Radar here: https://nkuzichange.com/downloads/Influence-Radar-Guide-Nkuzi-Change.pdf
So that’s our rapid overview of the three mistakes most commonly made when starting out in a new leadership role. We hope its provoked some thought and inspired some action, and leaves you feeling more ready to jump into an incredibly successful start.
And of course you have more questions and this is only the beginning of this series. Please take a moment to engage with me to help me build the rest of this series. We have so many ideas and so much content, it’s hard to know where to begin. So, please tell me what matters to you.
Drop me a quick line to let me know what questions you’d like our next article to cover. And if you have time to answer these questions, even better…
- Tell me a bit about your role and organisation
- What’s been the most useful part of this article?
- What sections would you like expanded?
- What questions would you like me to answer in the next piece?
- What else should I consider to make this type of content even more useful to you?
