Establishing credibility in a new role

I am pretty sure that everyone has had self-doubt before starting a new role.  It could be a position in a new company, a move to a different department or line of business in your current company, or even a promotion.  When you look through a formal job description that includes absolutely everything that the hiring manager could think of in a perfect candidate, there will very likely be gaps in your experience and knowledge.  There are times when employers want a candidate who can just do the role, but in most cases some growth or development is ideal to ensure the candidate will want to do the job for a few years before thinking of their next career move.  Therefore, most candidates starting a new role are not the finished article and will not be able to do everything from day one.  It’s also necessary to layer on to this the cultural and business norms that are unique in most organizations.  The purpose of today’s blog is to provide suggestions for how to quickly establish credibility, build confidence and bridge the gap in time to when confidence has been earned with key stakeholders.

My first employer was a firm of chartered accountants.  I joined with a large cohort of graduates and the first three years of work was a mix of on-the-job training and classroom training until we qualified.  In the UK, unlike most other countries, the large accounting firms preferred their graduates to have not studied accountancy at college.  The main reason is that they feel they are better able to train new recruits as a blank canvas rather than having to “correct” any previous college-based training that doesn’t meet their house style.  As a result of this we all walked into client engagements after the first fourteen days of basic training knowing next to nothing.  Much of the work involved shadowing senior team members and basic administrative tasks.  At some point we were thrown into a meeting with the client on our own to do some audit testing.  Our credibility with the client was next to zero, the tasks assigned were usually not critical and often box-ticking exercises, but frequently a client would ask us a simple question and often we wouldn’t know the answer.  The rate of learning from this experience was very quick.  The experience of not knowing something forced us to work harder, ask more questions and assimilate knowledge.  Once the formal classroom training kicked-in, we were given many of the missing pieces and a logical framework to organize our knowledge.  I am sure many first experiences on the job involve a similar lack of knowledge, confidence and credibility.  Therefore, most of us know what zero credibility feels like, it isn’t comfortable and is something that we would ideally avoid for the rest of our careers.

One of my fellow cohort members in that first job, and a good friend, joked with us about his next job.  He left and joined an in-house accounting team.  On his first day he took out a Mont Blanc pen and put it on his desk in full view of his colleagues.  He then went to the company bookshelf in the middle of the office and picked up an accounting standards book and flicked through a couple of pages as if looking for some specific information before putting the book back and returning to his desk.  In his own words, and with a twinkle in his eye, he said he wanted to portray himself as a “big hitter”.  Over drinks we all laughed at his anecdote.  The beauty of what he had done and what he continued to do was to portray himself as not overly serious, but rather as a fun colleague to work alongside in a reasonably uptight company.  Not long afterwards we got to meet his colleagues.  They all confirmed that they had been a quiet and siloed team before my friend joined, but that he had quickly pulled them together and made working in that business enjoyable.

I wouldn’t recommend this approach to anyone.  In an increasingly paperless environment, a flashy pen does not convey anything other than your love of expensive writing equipment.  What is recommended is a high degree of self-awareness.  Here-in lies the first challenge.  Confidence, or lack of confidence, can have an over-sized bearing on how you think about yourself and can obscure your rational self-awareness.  If I am unable to lean heavily on my skills and experience where they are strongest, because I lack confidence, my performance is going to be negatively affected.  If we can rely on self-confidence in areas where we have proven experience and focus our self-awareness on our genuine areas of weakness, we can shape our approach to new roles and jobs and communicate our value more effectively to new colleagues.

After our initial roles, where we are likely to have nothing other than our wits, common sense and anything relevant from college education to rely on, subsequent roles look very different.  What we want from any new job is a high proportion of that role to utilize our existing strengths and experience, and a smaller proportion of that role to be a development stretch (happily mirroring the requirements of most hiring managers).  If we jump too high too quickly, we usually find ourselves out of our depth and failing.  Sometimes the pieces all fall together, and we succeed, but often they don’t.  My Godfather always spoke of becoming a Finance Director before the age of thirty.  As a result of the respect and affection I have for him, that became my ambition too.  Through a degree of luck and being in the right place at the right time, I achieved that ambition.  I was proud of myself, but there were challenges.  I usually run on the side of over-confidence rather than under-confidence.  I was successful for the first couple of years but hit a bit of a wall when the next promotion opportunity came up.  I began to realize that I had missed out on some important development opportunities by rushing to become a director.  This impacted my confidence levels and created a bit of downward spiral where the loss of confidence affected my self-awareness.  I ended up spending a few years shifting sideways, back into a business and a department that I knew well and filling in some of those the gaps through reflection and experience, whilst at the same time gathering new experiences.  In the end the experience turned out to be positive, but it didn’t feel like that at the time.

Some other interesting dynamics are at play as we move through our careers.   We often experience a shift in our development needs from specialist knowledge to management and leadership skills.   The development opportunities are also likely to become progressively smaller as we gain more experience and take on more senior roles.  Exceptions to this include significant promotions and career changes.

Once you have picked the right role and can focus on the areas of development, the next step is to address how to bridge those gaps.  The rule of thumb for new government ministers is that it usually takes 6 months for them to get on top of their brief.  If we consider a similar timeline on new jobs, I always expect to feel fully comfortable and in control of my job within six months.  I want to project a heightened level of comfort and control to my line manager ideally within three months.  I want to establish myself within a team and with colleagues within a month.  Finally, I want to use the first two weeks to dispel any concerns or doubts as to whether they hired the right person.  The only way I know to satisfy these timelines is to act like a sponge, observe as much as possible, intelligently question anything that doesn’t make immediate sense, and validate any early assumptions.  Specialist knowledge acquisition is the easiest and quickest to pick up.  Management and leadership experience takes longer and is more trial and error.  For this reason, if you get the chance to step up as manager for the first time within your existing company, this will be an easier option than making the same move in a new company.

One of the oddities I witnessed earlier in my career was when junior colleagues got annoyed when they would need to bring their newly hired manager’s up to speed, as if they were teaching them the whole job.  This would only ever be a legitimate complaint if the new manager coming in didn’t have any management experience.  This sends back the rather harsh message to existing staff that they weren’t ready for a promotion and that the company would rather take a chance on someone new without the necessary management experience.  In most cases the new manager had some experience of management, and the company had taken the view that it was easier to teach someone about the industry than it was to develop the existing staff into managers.  In most situations the junior colleagues had a blind spot about their own development.  Their reluctance to reflect on their development needs and their ambivalent support of their new team manager would often stall their careers for longer than necessary. 

One final comment.  In the gap between starting a job and mastering that job, be very careful when you try to bluff your way through something.  If a piece of information is important and you don’t know it, it is nearly always better to admit the gap in knowledge and follow-up quickly after the meeting.  You should then debrief why you didn’t know this information.   Was it something that you didn’t reasonably know you needed to know (i.e. a unique situation that you would only have known if someone had told you)?  In which case give yourself a pass but ask if there are other similar situations you should know about.  Was it something that you should have known and was a logical question that you should have asked?  In which case you need to tighten up your knowledge gathering and make sure there aren’t similar misses.  Was it something that your team should have pointed out?  In which case provide feedback to the team to establish expectations.  Was it something you knew, but forgot in the moment?  This happens, but if it reoccurs frequently then consider carrying discrete memory aids with you to meetings.  You can make a play of this by saying something like “hold on let me give you the exact information as we were just discussing it in our team, and I have it written down here".  This demonstrates you know which bits of information are important and are starting to get your arms around your portfolio.  The main point is to ensure that you build other people’s confidence in you quickly.  Bluffing or making up an answer will likely do the exact opposite, and I know that I quickly lose confidence in people who I suspect of doing this.

Next week is appraisal season.  The first part will be on self-appraisals.  The second part is on giving a manager’s appraisal.