The first week in a new role

Roughly half of the people I work with are new to a role, and the first week is the part they most often spend entirely on their own. This is a short list of things I have watched make a noticeable difference. None of it is exciting, and all of it is cheap.

Ask how decisions get made

Not what the org chart says. Ask two or three people, separately, the same question: “When something needs deciding here, how does that actually happen?”

The answers will differ, and the difference is the interesting part. It tells you who is genuinely influential, which conversations matter, and which approval step exists only on the org chart. There is no faster way to become useful in a new team.

Write down what you are told

Not to catch anyone out — to hold it. Your first week is a firehose of information you will lose most of within a month, and you will not be able to go back and ask a second time without it being strange.

Keep a document. Names, preferences, how they take feedback, what they actually care about. Nobody expects you to have this, and everybody finds it useful later.

Make one thing smaller than you planned

Pick a task that is genuinely low-stakes — a small fix, a tidy-up, a draft of something nobody is desperate for — and turn it around quickly, properly, and a day earlier than required.

The purpose is not the task. It is establishing, in the first week, that delivering on what you said is what happens around you. That reputation is cheaper to earn now than at any point afterwards.

Do not perform confidence

The instinct to appear settled is strong and almost always counterproductive in week one. People are far more comfortable helping someone who visibly does not know something than advising someone pretending to.

The questions that make you look like you have been there a year are not “what is the plan”. They are “what would you do in my situation” and “what would you have done differently”. Same knowledge, much better received.

Find out who decides about you

Somewhere in your first month, work out how performance and progression decisions actually get made in this place. Who writes the review, who reads it, whether anyone ever has a proper conversation about it or it just arrives.

This is not cynical. It is the same instinct that makes good coaching useful: know how the thing actually works before you try to change it. It also means you can ask for the conversation earlier, when there is still time for it to matter.

And expect to feel odd

The first few weeks of almost any new role are mildly disorienting, and it is not a sign you chose wrongly. Everyone is a bit strange in week one. It passes, and the people who enjoy it most are usually the ones who went through it anyway.

If you are in that stretch right now, the One-on-One Coaching sessions are a steady point outside the organisation — someone who has watched a few hundred of these go, and has no interest whatsoever in your internal politics.