The Mistake Most Make When Taking on a New Role or Job

The simple summary of this lesson is ‘the six month rule.’

Throughout your career, you will find times where you are entering a new role. Usually, it is a new job and job title with very new responsibilities. This can of course occur with the same employer or with a new employer if you switch companies. But sometimes, it can be some new responsibility within the same job you already have. For instance, your manager might inform you that they are restructuring the work in the department, and they want you to take on a task or responsibility that had been held by someone else.

The ‘six month rule’ just states the fact that in most cases, you have about six months to ask all the questions about this new job or new role that you want and need to ask.

It is human nature, when placed into a new role or new job, to take an introspective view of what is happening and to think that everyone is watching you, everyone is talking about you, and wondering why you were promoted into this job, or transferred into this job. You just assume that if you do not demonstrate your expertise, skills, and knowledge about your new job, that others will see this as a sign of weakness, especially your boss that had the confidence to place you into the role.

This base of incorrect assumptions can set you up for failure and, actually, is detrimental to your performance in that job longer term.

From my experience, both in learning new jobs I have had and in watching others take on new roles, you have about six months in a new job to ask all the ‘stupid’ questions you can. By ‘stupid,’ I mean those sort of questions that, if you asked them after one year or two years in the job, others would look at you as if you were stupid, that you wouldn’t know the answer to that question after that long in the job.

During your first six months in a new role, others will readily accept you asking those stupid questions because they understand that you are learning the new job and are coming up the learning curve.

If you do NOT ask all those stupid questions in the first six months, you likely will NEVER ask them due to fear of what others might think.

In the middle of my career, I was promoted into a new leadership role, which was very visible in the company. I was a bit of an outsider, in that there clearly were other candidates with more direct experience in that part of the business, that had years of experience in operating in that business and understood the customer issues, business processes, etc. Since I felt like the outsider, I wanted to very much prove how quickly I could learn the business and to master what went on inside the business.

What I did not understand was that this leadership role had substantially more responsibility than any I had ever been in before. It was my first true role where I had profit and loss responsibility and had ultimate control over every aspect of this part of the business. In short order, I needed to understand all the products we sold, understand the needs of our customers, get to know most of our sales personnel, understand our customer service processes, understand pricing processes, learn how our supply chain worked in this business, understand our financial statements and inventory processes, and develop relationships with our key customers. I also needed to understand where and how our products were manufactured, since the manufacturing responsibility lied outside of my responsibility.

In the first three to six months, I did ask some of those stupid questions, but as is the case in most new jobs, you get thrust into the problems of the day/week/month very quickly, and self-training was not at the top of my priority list. When a customer had a major issue, I booked a flight and flew down to meet the customer to help solve the problem. When a big annual meeting with a large customer was coming up, I tried to coordinate the entire meeting and made sure I developed key messages so that our customer would understand where I wanted to take the business. When a sales leader told me about a pricing issue, I invested the time to get involved to help solve the problem.

As a result, I did not focus as much as I needed to on learning the basics of the business.

In hindsight, I should have sat down with my boss within the first few weeks and asked, “If you were in my shoes, how would you spend the first ninety days to make sure you were learning the key parts of the business?” That question would have helped me immensely and sent the message to my boss that I clearly understood how little I actually knew about this business given its size and scope.

Instead, when the leadership team of the business would sit as a group in performance reviews, when something was mentioned by someone else that I did not understand, I just let it go, acting as if I understood. I did not want to ask all those stupid questions because I had this ‘normal’ human belief that asking those questions would send the message that I was weak, and that I should not have been put into this job in the first place.

I had been in the job about nine months and had my first performance review with my new boss. In the review, he did a nice job summarizing his thoughts about my performance, and he did recognize my time investment in work hours, the time I had invested traveling to visit customers, and in my ability to quickly learn. At the end, when I asked him how well he thought I was doing in learning what I needed to know, he said, “Well, I was telling James (his HR leader) just the other day, that in your nine months, your ignorance doesn’t show.”

He said it in a way that seemed positive and not negative. But after I left his office, that statement stuck with me. Did he mean that he was not sure I was learning the business, but that at least it did not appear that I didn’t understand? Or did he mean that I was not asking the questions that he thought I should be asking?

After a lot of thought, I concluded that what he meant was that he knew how difficult and broad my job was, and that my normal six months of ‘dumb questions’ would likely need to extend longer just because there was no way to master the understanding of all aspects of this role in six months. When he used the phrase ‘your ignorance,’ it was clear that he was just stating that there was no way I could be an expert in ANY part of this business, and that in nine months, I was doing a fine job hiding that ignorance! (And not asking enough questions.)

After that, I made an attempt to plan for my training and prioritize that training throughout the next year. And if something was stated in a meeting that I did not understand, I tried to stop and get clarification on what was meant and to gain a better understanding.

As just one an example of ‘time well spent,’ I blocked out an entire morning one day to put on headphones and sit in on dozens of customer calls to our customer service desk. Now THAT was a good investment of my time, because I learned so much about the kinds of problems customers had, how our customer service reps used our computer systems to solve those problems, and how fantastic a job our customer service staff really did, day after day, week after week.

One side benefit was that on one call, the customer complained that they had checked our inventory on our ‘customer-facing system,’ and that it showed we had twenty-five of a certain part number in stock, and that they ordered ten of those, but now his order status showed as those parts being backordered. The customer service rep checked our ‘internal’ system that customers were not allowed to see (due to cost information and other proprietary information being there) and told the customer that indeed, his parts were on backorder and we had zero of those parts in stock. The customer asked, “Why would the system we use not match your internal system?”

“Well, I am not sure, but I do get calls all the time from customers where they see one number and we see a different inventory level on our internal system, and I can tell you that our internal system is always right.”

Once the rep hung up, I asked her what was really going on. She said, “Well, sometimes the customer doesn’t enter the right part number, and they get confused.”

After listening to the customer, it sure seemed to me as though they knew what they were talking about. So I said, “Let’s log onto the customer system and check that stock versus what you show on our internal system.” Clearly, this was something that the rep had never done because she had to go find her password for the customer system. But once we checked, sure enough, the customer system showed twenty-five in stock when in fact we had zero. Clearly, this customer service rep did not have the time to fix a serious system issue such as this, but I did!

I immediately went to our IT leader who had responsibility for the customer system and told him about the mismatch of inventory. He was shocked, to say the least, but after a few hours, he came back to me and told me that there was an error in the inventory loading program, and that we had all sorts of mismatches in our customer system. The good news is that he got it fixed by the next day.

I was incredulous that the company had invested a lot of money to develop this customer system to enable our customers to self-service by checking inventory before they ordered, and that for months it was in error, which caused all sorts of problems for the customer and for us. How could it be that nobody in our organization discovered this problem other than me?

That is when I realized that we needed to continue to focus upon listening to the customer and the customer’s problems in a more formal way. And I realized that if I had not invested the time in my education and learning, that this problem would have likely festered for a long time!

In summary, when in a new role, take advantage of those first six months (or longer) to ask as many of those dumb questions that you can! Do not follow your natural human instinct to suppress those questions!