Hey folks, welcome back to my weekly newsletter.
I had a thought as I sat down last night to write a probation review for someone on my team.
It's a short form that HR sends you over, you fill it out, a recommendation goes in, the person continues or doesn't.
I usually do these in fifteen minutes, but this one took me almost an hour.
I knew what I was going to recommend the moment I opened the form.
What slowed me down was trying to articulate, in the comments box, why I had reached that conclusion.
Because when I tried to write it down, I realised that most of what I was evaluating had nothing to do with what was on his job description.
I was thinking about a meeting in week two, where he asked if he could support something that had nothing to do with his function.
And the small piece of analysis I had thrown at him in week three, which came back finished on a Sunday evening, with two questions I hadn't thought to ask.
None of this was in his KRA but yet this was, in fact, what I had been measuring the whole time.
I closed my laptop and sat with it for a few minutes.
This is what I want to write about this week.
Because if I have been evaluating this for three months, then so has every other manager that anyone reading this has worked for in their first ninety days.
And almost none of us are telling you what we are looking at, so I’ll try.
Michael Watkins, who wrote the original First 90 Days, once surveyed 210 CEOs and presidents about how long it takes a new mid-level manager to start contributing more value than they consume.
The average answer was 6.2 months.
Which means even on the friendliest math, your first ninety days is half the runway, and most of that half is supposed to be spent listening.
Start learning who drives the decisions on your team, what your manager cares about that she hasn't bothered to spell out, what got tried before and why it didn't work.
Just learning this is key to making the next sixty days possible.
If you have joined an EY or an Infosys or a Goldman, you are getting the easy version of month one because the firm has built the structure for you.
This is more applicable when you join a smaller team or a Series A and nobody is going to do month one for you.
The people who ask, win.
I have come to believe this is the single most underused piece of leverage available to a new joiner.
I notice this in myself as a manager.
I am intensely involved with my new joiners in week one but by week five I have assumed they are fine, and I have moved on to whatever is on fire.
If they don't pull me back into their work, my attention drifts, and once that happens, their reputation stops getting shaped by me at the speed it should be.
The ones who drag me back are the ones I find myself trusting with bigger work in month four.
Not the big ambitious project you imagined when you joined but at least something smaller that anyone in the team can attribute to you.
In India this matters more than people realise as probation in most companies is three to six months, and day ninety, which was the day I was sitting at last night writing that review, is when your manager decides whether you continue with conviction or with a shrug.
Infant attrition, the polite term for people leaving within their first six months, runs at 10-15% of all annual labour movement in this country.
Most of those exits are not as voluntary as the resignation letters make them sound.
So here is what I would do, if I were sitting where you are.
If you're in week two, you are learning.
Resist the urge to flag the inefficiency or pitch the fix you have already half-drafted in your head.
The single best thing you can do in your first month is ask questions sharp enough that the people answering them have to stop and think before answering.
The one I keep coming back to: "Walk me through how this got decided here, and what got tried before."
It’ll help add a lot of context for you to succeed.
Three lines:
1. What you worked on this week.
2. What you are stuck on.
3. What you need from them next week.
I have a few people on my teams who do this.
It takes them maybe 20 minutes on a Friday evening, and helps me understand where to place them during the week and helps me understand their strengths.
The new joiners I trust faster are the ones who, by month two, have figured out who to call for what.
A 2023 meta-analysis of 11,508 new joiners backs this up.
The two behaviours that most predicted later success were how constructively the person framed early setbacks, and how deliberately the person built relationships beyond their immediate team.
When the new joiner stops sending basic context questions by week four, it's a signal that tells the manager they have an organizational context and can work autonomously.
This builds their confidence much faster.
I read every email.
Swati