By Carey Con, HR Leader & Career Coach
After working hard to land a new job, some people make the mistake of resting on their heels once they get into a new role. The first 90 days of a job are the proving ground for your entire future with your new employer. It’s critical to continue to focus your energy on making a positive impression with your new coworkers as you start your role, validating that they hired the right person to join their team.
When you were going for interviews, each company you interviewed with was trying to determine two things with each candidate:
As a new employee, you have a chance to prove them right for hiring you, thereby securing your role. Below are a few helpful tips on how you can demonstrate your competence and ability to fit in.
To illustrate this last point, several years ago I led the HR team for a multinational oilfield services firm which regularly rotated managers to various parts of the world to develop their leadership skills. During this time, the President went on a road trip with a new executive who had just transferred in to take on a senior leadership role.
A couple of days later I received an urgent letter from the field hotel where the executives were staying. The letter stated that due to considerable damage caused by one of our staff, the hotel would no longer do business with our company. I was shocked – I knew that it was critical to maintain the relationship with the hotel because we had several staff who regularly stayed at the hotel.
I called the manager to resolve the situation. She told me a bizarre story of how one of their hotel rooms was damaged. During the middle of the night, the front desk received an anonymous call informing them of damage to a room. Upon investigation, the flatscreen TV in the room was no longer working because the guest had smashed it with the lid of the toilet tank.
There was a popular prank circulating around the field crews at that time. Pranksters would wait until the middle of the night, call a hotel, and ask for a random room number. The prankster would scream at the person and tell them that they had to smash the TV because there was poisonous gas escaping from it. Our new executive was the unfortunate recipient of one of these prank calls. Half-asleep, he smashed the TV screen. Once he woke up enough to realize what he had done, he got dressed and went down to the lobby to pay for the damage. He assumed that if he paid for the damage personally, the incident would not get back to the company. Unfortunately, he did not anticipate that the hotel manager would contact us and ban both the employee as well as our company from the hotel because they “didn’t have enough TV sets.” In the end, after careful relationship rebuilding, we were able to come to an agreement to continue partnering with the hotel. This employee made a lasting impression, but not one that he’d intended.
The moral of the story is that if you screw up, don’t try to sweep it under the rug. You will make a much better impression by being honest and upfront.