Ensuring New Job Success

You can also connect with people through some of the major social-networking sites, like Facebook or LinkedIn, says Challenger. But, be sure you clean up your profile before connecting. You don’t want Suzie from HR showing your boss the pictures from your trip to Cancun.

New Job, New Boss, New Rules

Seeing eye-to-eye with your boss is crucial in the first 30 days of starting a new job. You need to make sure you are both on the same page from day one, if possible.

Get off on the right foot by having a meeting with your boss to discuss his or her expectations. You want to keep your boss up on everything you are accomplishing in your first 30 days, even if you’ve simply learned a new computer program. It’s also important to connect with your boss on a personal level. Perhaps you can do this over coffee or tea.

In the first 30 days at your new job and beyond, you’ll want to exceed your boss’s expectations consistently. And, figuring out how you both like to communicate will allow you to update him or her without being a bother. “It’s important to communicate with your boss in the method the boss finds easiest,” says Pamela Mitchell, CEO and chief vision officer of The Reinvention Institute, which is dedicated to helping successful professionals and corporations transform their businesses. “Some like written reports and others like meetings. Provide what they need in the format they want.”

Ruth Roberts, a human-resources manager at the Big Brothers Big Sisters in Philadelphia, completed a lot of online training before getting started and had a feel for how to communicate with her boss. “In the first week, my boss checked in on me a couple of times,” she says. “I met with my boss once a week and called with questions, as needed. I had a three-week orientation plan. It was almost too much direction.”

Not all new job experiences go as smoothly. “I actually had very little personal communication with my boss in the first 30 days,” say Melissa. “It is very busy in our department and we only had time once to sit down for 10 minutes and talk. And, that didn’t happen until my fourth week.” She did find communicating with her boss via email to be very effective, and her office mates and the school secretaries filled in the rest.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make at a new job is not keeping your word. “Don’t be someone who over-promises and under-delivers,” says Mitchell. “If you say you are going to get a report done by Tuesday, then you get it there on Tuesday.”

Coupled with that, though, is managing your boss’s expectations. You have be honest with what you can do in a given time period. Jennifer admits that it took some time to manage her bosses’ expectations. “I needed to be quicker to say that I would not be able to get something done that day or even that week because another attorney had given me an assignment that for whatever reason was going to take precedence,” she recalls. “There are, after all, only 24 hours in a day.”