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Investigate culture and politics
It can be challenging to try and figure out what the culture of an organization looks like before you’re really formally in it. And you’re probably never gonna get a complete picture of what it’s all about until you’re actually there. But there certainly are a few things that you can do to help jumpstart that process. It really begins during the recruiting process itself where you’re engaging with people from the organization. And there you want to be asking questions directly about the culture. What is this place like to work at? How do people tend to show up in the organization? What happens in meetings? What gets people into trouble? Those are really fair ball questions to ask. And if you ask them of multiple people, as you move through the interview process, you’re gonna get a sense of whether the answers sort of line up or not. You always have to be careful, of course because people will often talk about the culture they’d like to believe they have as opposed to the culture of the real organization.
There are also external resources you can tap into. Find people that used to work in the organization and connect with them through tools like LinkedIn. Use sites like Glassdoor that explicitly gather information about the cultures of organizations. It’s not always accurate, but it’s in many cases indicative. And then of course there’s the political dimensions of the organization. Who has power? Who has influence? What kinds of alliances operate inside the place? What mix of that technical, cultural and political learning do I really need to engage in? Armed with that, you can then think a little bit about what are the best sources of insight? Where can I go to get information about that? Is it documents? Is it websites? Is it the people I need to talk to. Who really knows where the bodies are buried? Who really knows who has influence? Who and where are the best sources of insight about the key questions that you’ve identified as your learning priorities? Are there things you can do to really speed up the learning process?
Study behaviors
Are there some systematic approaches, you know, ways of structuring the learning process that are gonna really help you extract the maximum possible insight for the time you’re devoting to the learning process? A simple example is if you meet your new team having one on ones with each member of the team but having a structured set of questions that you’re asking everybody. What’s gone well here? What needs work? If you were me, what would you be focusing in on? And as you ask those questions of the multiple people you meet, patterns are gonna emerge, hypotheses are gonna be developed and new questions will suggest themselves.
The sooner you get a sense of the behavioral norms of your new organization, the better. Because the behavioral norms really define the boundaries within which you should be operating. And typically you’re gonna know pretty quickly if you’ve stepped outside those boundaries but it’s better to be aware as early as possible of what what they are. So, one key part of the learning process is really figuring out what behavioral norms operate.
And my favorite place to go looking for those almost like an anthropologist, is in meetings. Meetings are always an incredibly rich set of interactions. And you should be asking yourself what do people do in meetings and what do people not do? What issues get raised in meetings and what don’t? Are hard issues raised in the meetings or are they really dealt with in an offline sense? Are there meetings before the meetings and meetings after the meetings? When someone speaks, do people’s eyes track to them? That suggests they may have some influence. Do people’s eyes roll? There’s really a set of behavioral observations that if you can tune yourself to do it in the meeting context can yield really incredibly rich insight into the organization.