Five tips on starting a new job as a mid-career professional

The first weeks in a new job are when you make your first impression, and it’s hard to change people’s perceptions once they’re developed.

Here are five tips on how to transition into a new job, especially if it’s been a long time since you’ve made a move.

This is the most important priority when joining a new company. If you’ve been in a job for a long time, you may not realize how your relationships had a direct impact on your success. When building relationships, you’re building trust, and you can move faster when people trust in your decision-making.

First, be as curious about others and their work as they are of you as the “newbie.” Understanding your coworkers’ needs will start the relationship-building process, because your interest alone will leave your them feeling good about your entry.

When you enter a new company, you probably don’t know much about it except what you’ve read to prepare for interviews. Your new colleagues will view you as someone who knows nothing about the business. Spend time learning about the company and its culture.

Find out: How does the company make revenue? What products does it sell? How do the products work? What are the quarterly and yearly goals? What metrics are used to measure the company’s success and substantiate its growth? Where is the company headed in the next three to five years?

While building relationships and learning about the company, also ask questions about how others perceive your job to understand their expectations of you, your role, and your overall function.

Often, in a Company every one of your stakeholders have a different expectation of your role, and one leader had no idea how he viewed your role or how you could use your skills to bring value to his organization.

You would have to spend time aligning everyone on what your role is and isn’t so you could meet their expectations.

Understand dependencies and cross-functional workflows to determine who needs something from you and what you depend on to be able to provide it.

Who are you providing work output to, and how do your cross-functional stakeholders use it?

Ask your manager who are the top 10 cross-functional people your team interacts with.

Then, spend time understanding how they view the workflows between the functions and what they need from your role to be successful. Understand the timing of workflows so you can meet deadlines and provide the most value with your work. 

People take jobs and want to feel connected instantly, but that doesn’t always happen. It’s hard to onboard in any new company and can be even harder to onboard remotely.

Give yourself grace to move through the Kübler-Ross change curve — at first you’ll be excited, then shocked at what may be different or harder in the new job, and then in denial that it’s that different, which can quickly turn into frustration.

Each person moves through the curve at a different pace, so be patient, breathe, and try to find one person to connect with if you’re not already paired with a mentor.

The best way to work through all of these steps is to listen more than you speak and phrase every thought in the form of a question. For example, if you’re in a meeting and you have a great idea, you could say, “I think we should do this.”

Instead, phrase your input in the form of a question, like, “I’m curious, have we tried to do this?” If you’re wrong because it failed in the past, you’ll be educated on history and viewed as someone trying to learn. If it has never been tried before and could work, your curiosity makes you a hero.