Starting a New Job? Do These 3 Things on Your First Day to Start Right

What can a person do on the first day of a new job that will impress their boss the most?originally appeared on Quora – the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by Shuba Swaminathan, VP Product, on Quora:

What can a person do on the first day of a new job that will impress their boss the most?

A couple of things will impress me:

If you came in and handed me your thoughtfully compiled user guide that helps me understand how I can bring out the best in you and help you blossom to your full potential.
An offer to share your learnings after you have had a chance to meet with your peers and stakeholders, and form initial impressions. This would cover your understanding of each person’s goals, what motivates them, their pain points, and their expectations of your role, and what they need from you in the short and long term. As a manager, this is extremely helpful to me in making sure there were no communication hiccups and reasonable expectations are set all around.
You come in prepared with a set of questions you need answered by me to get you bootstrapped: ask me things like how the success of our team is being measured, what our quarterly and annual goals are, how we are tracking at the moment against those goals, any major challenges you will have to deal with right away/soon, who I recommend setting up 1:1s with so you can become familiar with what we do and the expectations of your role, my preferred communication style (channel, frequency, urgent vs non-urgent issues), whether I have a user manual I can share, how individual goals are set, frequency of 1:1s, what you need to come prepared with and what you can expect from me, what onboarding you can expect, from whom – you get the idea!

If you are a senior person coming into a leadership role on my team, a proposed 30-, 60-, 90-day plan based on your understanding of the company’s needs from our in depth interview process would get us off to a great start. It will form the basis for concrete conversations around goal alignment as well as a discussion on the finer nuances of our more ambitious goals. As you speak with stakeholders, the plan will likely be refined and I appreciate you managing this proactively and keeping me informed.

With this, we will be off to a great start!