Question 1

What should you actually do in the first 90 days of a new job?

Accepted Answer

**Learn before you change anything** — because the credibility you spend early cannot be earned back, and the most common failure of a new starter is arriving with answers before understanding the questions.

**The first two weeks: understand the system.**

**Meet people individually**, widely, including outside your immediate team. Ask what they do, what gets in the way, and what they wish someone would fix. **This single set of conversations produces more useful information than any handover document.**

**Learn how decisions actually get made**, which is rarely the org chart. Find out who is consulted, who has veto, and where things get stuck.

**Find out what the previous person did well**, which is politically important and frequently skipped — arriving as though nothing worked before is the fastest way to alienate a team.

**Understand what your manager is measured on**, since your job is partly to make that go well.

**Weeks three to six: establish competence.**

**Deliver something small and visible.** An early, unglamorous, completed thing buys permission for larger ones. **Early wins are about credibility rather than impact.**

**Ask the naive questions while you still can.** There is a window in which "why do we do it this way?" is curiosity, and after it the same question sounds like criticism. **Write down everything that seems odd in the first month**, because you will stop noticing.

**Weeks six to twelve: form a view.**

**Agree explicit expectations** with your manager — what success looks like at six months, in concrete terms.

**Now propose changes**, with evidence gathered rather than assumed, and having understood why the current arrangement exists. **Things that look stupid usually have a history**, and knowing it is the difference between a proposal that lands and one that does not.

**What the evidence on new starters suggests:** the strongest predictors of a successful transition are **relationship-building breadth** and clarity of expectations, rather than technical performance — which is not what most new starters prioritise.

**On probation:** understand the criteria and ask for interim feedback rather than waiting for the review.

Question 2

How do you onboard a new starter well?

Accepted Answer

By treating the first weeks as a deliberate process rather than an administrative one — because early experience predicts how long someone stays and how quickly they become effective, and most

Question 3

How do you manage people for the first time?

Accepted Answer

By accepting that it is a different job, not a promotion within the old one — which is the single adjustment new managers most often fail to make, and the reason so many are unhappy in the first

Question 4

What should a handover include when you leave?

Accepted Answer

Enough that a competent person unfamiliar with your work could continue it — which is a much higher bar than a list of tasks, and is where most handovers fail. What to include: A current picture of

Question 5

How do you manage upwards?

Accepted Answer

By making your manager's job easier and by taking responsibility for the information flow between you — which is not politics or flattery, but recognition that they cannot read your mind and are

Question 6

How do you actually prepare for a performance review?

Accepted Answer

By doing the work before the meeting — because a review is largely a negotiation over a narrative, and the person who arrives with evidence sets the narrative while the person who arrives to be told

Question 7

What do you do about a bad manager?

Accepted Answer

Work out which kind of bad you are dealing with, because the response to an overwhelmed manager, an incompetent one and a hostile one are completely different — and treating all three the same is why

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